Bitcoin Core 32.0 picks up fixes for private broadcast, a macOS timeout and a genesis hash
Victoria Shinder2 min readBitcoin Core merged pull request 36427, "[32.x] More Backports", into the 32.x release branch on 10 October. It carries eight changes already merged into master between 2 and 8 October, so that they ship with the coming 32.0 release rather than waiting for 33.0. Three of them change behaviour users can see.
Private broadcast always uses all three connections (#36277). Private broadcast — the option that sends your own transactions through short-lived connections instead of your regular peers, to make it harder to link a transaction to your node — now always completes all three initial connections, even if the transaction has already come back to the node's mempool or turned out to be invalid. Author Andrew Toth describes this as closing theoretical timing attacks: if a node stopped broadcasting as soon as it saw its transaction relayed back, an observer could learn something from when the broadcasts stopped. The change also tracks disconnects and grants retry connections explicitly, to avoid stale extra ones.
-rpcclienttimeout=0 works again on macOS (#36340). bitcoin-cli -rpcclienttimeout=0 is documented as "no timeout". Since an earlier change in the 32.0 cycle, it failed on macOS with "Could not connect to the server": the CLI turns 0 into five years, and macOS's select() rejects timeouts above 10^8 seconds — five years is about 1.58 × 10^8. On Linux the same value overflowed the int that poll() takes. The fix caps the wait inside Sock::WaitMany at INT_MAX milliseconds, about 24.8 days, which covers every caller. Contributor kriss39 reports testing on macOS against a running node.
bitcoin-util getchainparams prints the genesis hash the right way round (#36471). The command, new in 32.0, printed the genesis block hash byte-reversed compared with getblockhash 0. It now uses the same display order as the RPCs. The author argued for backporting before the final release precisely so the output format would not have to change after it.
The rest are test and infrastructure fixes: HTTP logging used to replace a flaky throttle test (#36303), a deterministic private-broadcast fuzz test (#36404), isolated CI container networks (#36435), a cleaner shutdown in a file-descriptor test (#36392), and an OpenRPC hex pattern that now accepts empty strings (#36462).
Release status. The branch moved to its fourth release candidate on 12 October. Release candidates are for testing; Bitcoin Core has not announced a date for 32.0 final.
Sources: Bitcoin Core PR 36427 — https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/36427 ; PR 36277 — https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/36277 ; PR 36340 — https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/36340 ; PR 36471 — https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/36471