[Bitcoin-development] Electrum 1.9.8 release

[Thomas Voegtlin <thomasv1@gmx.de>]

I am happy to announce the release of Electrum 1.9.8.
This release includes some features initially planned for version 2.0.

Packages are available on https://electrum.org/download.html (signed by me)
Binaries for windows and mac will be available in the coming days

enjoy

Thomas
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RELEASE NOTES

# Release 1.9.8

(This release includes features initially planned for version 2.0)

* Electrum servers were upgraded to version 0.9. The new server stores
   a Patrica tree of all UTXOs, an idea proposed by Alan Reiner in the
   bitcointalk forum. This property allows the client to directly
   request the balance of any address. The new commands are:
      1. getaddressbalance <address>
      2. getaddressunspent <address>
      3. getutxoaddress <txid> <pos>

* In addition, two commands for message encryption were added:
      1. encrypt <pubkey> <message>
      2. decrypt <pubkey> <message>

   The encryption algorithm is ECIES, and code was was borrowed from
   https://github.com/jackjack-jj/jeeq.  In order to know the public
   key corresponding to a Bitcoin address in your wallet, you can use
   the 'getpubkeys' command. The 'decrypt' command assumes that the
   wallet has the private key corresponding to the public key passed as
   argument.

* The encrypt and decrypt functions are available in the Qt GUI (from
   the menubar, or right click on one of your addresses if you want to
   use its public key).

* Command-line commands that require a connection to the network spawn
   a daemon, that remains connected and handles subsequent
   commands. The daemon terminates itself if it remains unused for more
   than one minute. The purpose of this is to make scripting more
   efficient. For example, a bash script using many electrum commands
   will open only one connection.