(note: this is a temporary file, to be added-to by anybody, and moved to
release-notes at release time)

Notable changes
===============

Random-cookie RPC authentication
---------------------------------

When no `-rpcpassword` is specified, the daemon now uses a special 'cookie'
file for authentication. This file is generated with random content when the
daemon starts, and deleted when it exits. Its contents are used as
authentication token. Read access to this file controls who can access through
RPC. By default it is stored in the data directory but its location can be
overridden with the option `-rpccookiefile`.

This is similar to Tor's CookieAuthentication: see
https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en

This allows running bitcoind without having to do any manual configuration.

Low-level RPC API changes
--------------------------

- Monetary amounts can be provided as strings. This means that for example the
  argument to sendtoaddress can be "0.0001" instead of 0.0001. This can be an
  advantage if a JSON library insists on using a lossy floating point type for
  numbers, which would be dangerous for monetary amounts.

Option parsing behavior
-----------------------

Command line options are now parsed strictly in the order in which they are
specified. It used to be the case that `-X -noX` ends up, unintuitively, with X
set, as `-X` had precedence over `-noX`. This is no longer the case. Like for
other software, the last specified value for an option will hold.

0.12.0 Change log
=================

Detailed release notes follow. This overview includes changes that affect
behavior, not code moves, refactors and string updates. For convenience in locating
the code changes and accompanying discussion, both the pull request and
git merge commit are mentioned.

### RPC and REST

### Configuration and command-line options

### Block and transaction handling

### P2P protocol and network code

### Validation

### Build system

### Wallet

### GUI

### Tests

### Miscellaneous

- Removed bitrpc.py from contrib