Bitcoin Core 32.1 ships after 32.0 was tagged but never released; 29.x reaches end of life
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readBitcoin Core 32.1 was published on bitcoincore.org on 27 October. Its release notes open with an unusual line: because of last-minute issues, 32.0 was tagged but never fully announced or released, so 32.1 is the first release of the 32.x series. With it, versions 29.x and older reach end of life and will receive no further updates. Under the project's security policy, the notes say, it will disclose in two weeks three medium and high severity vulnerabilities fixed in 30.0, and no low-severity ones fixed in 32.1.
Among the network changes: Tor hidden services created automatically by Bitcoin Core now enable proof-of-work defences when the Tor daemon supports them. Outgoing transaction-relay rate limiting moves from per-peer to a global backlog to cut memory and CPU use during busy periods; the default stays at 14 transactions per second, boosted 2.5x for outbound peers and adjustable with -txsendrate, and a new bandwidth limit of 12 MB of transactions per 10 minutes is added. Both are visible through getnetworkinfo.
The release fixes a possible leak of a sender's IP address with -privatebroadcast=1: when a connection attempt using P2P protocol v2 failed, the v1 retry could bypass the forced Tor route and connect directly over IPv4 or IPv6. The notes list the conditions — a peer falsely advertised as v2-capable, Tor configured, and no proxy set for IPv4 or IPv6. The private-broadcast queue is also capped at 10,000 entries. Supported platforms are Linux kernel 3.17, macOS 14 and Windows 10 version 1903 or newer.
What it means
A skipped .0 is rare and the notes do not explain the last-minute issues, so operators should simply treat 32.1 as the starting point. The end-of-life line is the actionable part: anyone still on 29.x is now outside the support window. The private-broadcast fix matters to the small group using that experimental feature for privacy, because it failed in exactly the case they were relying on.