Bitcoin Core patched three older lines this week, and BIP 323 went into two of them
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readAlongside the 32.1 major release, Bitcoin Core published three maintenance releases the same week: 31.2, 30.4 and 29.5, the latter two announced on 28 October. Read together, their release notes show how the project decides what goes back into older lines.
One consensus-adjacent change was backported to two of them. Both 31.2 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/v31.2/doc/release-notes.md) and 30.4 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/v30.4/doc/release-notes.md) now ignore BIP 9 version bits 5 to 28 for soft-fork signalling, as BIP 323 specifies, reserving them as extra nonce space; nodes will no longer warn about unknown deployments when blocks set those bits. 29.5 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/v29.5/doc/release-notes.md) does not include it.
The rest of the backports are narrower and shared. 30.4 and 29.5 both carry the same set of network and utility fixes: removing one contributor's DNS seed, assuming v2 transport for addresses from seeds, aligning exception monitoring between the poll() and select() back ends, enforcing a timeout for paused send peers, and storing flat-file positions as 64-bit integers. 31.2 additionally caps the private-broadcast queue at 10,000 entries and backports validation fixes, including regular compaction of the chainstate.
The 32.1 release notes state that 29.x and older are now end of life, which makes 29.5 the last planned release of that series.
What it means
Miners use version bits as extra nonce space, and without BIP 323 nodes would keep raising warnings about deployments that do not exist. Backporting it to 31.x and 30.x but not 29.x keeps the warnings quiet on every supported line while leaving the retiring one minimal. For operators the advice is simple: 29.x has received its final update; move to a supported series.