Bitcoin 0.8.6 Released, Updates to Block Size Limits, Free Transactions, OSX Bugs

Bitcoin v0.8.6 was released yesterday, offering updates to existing restrictions on the size of free transactions and full blocks, as well as a series of fixes for bugs in certain node transmissions and OSX usage. The update follows the 0.8.5 release in September and precedes the much-anticipated 0.9 release. Free Transaction Limit Changes In an effort to make free transactions more commonly accessible, Bitcoin 0.8.6 lowers the maximum size of free transactions from 10,000 bytes to 1,000 bytes and eliminates the minimum 0.01 XBT output requirement. By lowering the maximum size of a free transaction to 1,000 bytes, there is …