v0.8.1: Channel to the Moon

We're pleased to announce 0.8.1, named by @vasild (who last release was a new committer!)

Despite the holiday break and Rusty's month off, commit numbers are only down 20%!

Highlights for Users

• We now support gifting msat to the peer when opening a channel, via push_msat, providing a brand new way to lose money!
• Invoice routehints can be overridden using exposeprivatechannels: try setting to [] to eliminate all of them to fit your invoice in twitter messages!
• Wallet withdraw transactions now set nLocktime, making them blend in more with other wallets.
• Preliminary support for plugins hooks which can replace the default bitcoin-cli with other blockchain querying methods (API may change in future releases though!).
• listforwards now records the outgoing short_channel_id, even if it wasn't possible to start forwarding.

Highlights for the Network

• Plugins can set additional feature bits, for more experimentation.
• More than one plugin can register for the htlc_accepted hook: others will become multi-user in future releases.
• Documentation updates, which had lagged recent changes.
• Prevent a case where grossly unbalanced channels could become unusable.

More details can be found in https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/v0.8.1/CHANGELOG.md

Thanks to everyone for their contributions and bug reports; please keep them coming!

Since 0.8.0 we've had 257 commits from 17 different authors, with 5 first-time contributors!

• Niklas Claesson @NickeZ
• @minidisk1147
• Ken Sedgwick @ksedgwic
• Zoe Faltibà @zoedberg
• Glen Cooper @GlenCooper

Cheers,
Rusty, Lisa, Christian, and ZmnSCPxj.