BITCOIN CORE DROPS 32.0 BEFORE RELEASE — 32.1 TAGGED OCTOBER 26 OVER UNNAMED LAST-MINUTE ISSUES — THE TWO-WEEK CLOCK ON THREE BUGS FIXED IN 30.0 WAITS FOR 32.1

On October 21, 2026, this desk wrote that Bitcoin Core had tagged 32.0 final and that the release was still to come. It never came. At 18:04 UTC on October 26, maintainer fanquake signed a new tag, 32.1. Its release notes open: “Due to last-minute issues, 32.0, although tagged, was never fully announced or released.” They do not say what the issues were.

The code shows what changed. Twenty commits sit between the two tags. Three code fixes from Antoine Poinsot were opened and merged on October 26, all between 13:59 and 17:00 UTC. One drops a peer that will not read its data for 20 minutes, because “we really shouldn’t be wasting a connection slot on them.” One makes socket error checks the same on Linux and other systems. One widens a file position counter to 64 bits, which he says “does not change on-disk representation.” A fourth fix, merged 36 minutes after the 32.0 tag, caps connections at 2,000. Its pull request says “The orphanage can abort when more than 3,000 peers have orphan announcements.”

That moves a clock. The 32.1 notes carry the same line 32.0 did: in two weeks the project will disclose “Medium and high severity vulnerabilities fixed in 30.0. There are 3 of these.” The security policy says that notice “will coincide with the release.” 32.0 had no release, so its two weeks never started. They start when 32.1 is announced, which is also when 29.x and older reach “End of Life.” Our October 21 count put 10,259 of 21,813 reachable Core nodes, 47.0%, on 29 or older.

You do not have to trust any of this. The tags are signed and the diff is public. What is missing is the release itself. At 18:58 UTC on October 26 the notes said 32.1 “is now available” at bitcoincore.org, and that link returned not found. The 32.0 folder there still holds only test builds rc2 to rc4. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $79,906.