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Informational 21 Bitcoin

ipc mining: remove deprecated methods (incompatible schema change)

Public commit record

What the developer wrote

Authored by Ryan Ofsky

85/100 · Strong
ipc mining: remove deprecated methods (incompatible schema change)

This change removes deprecated methods from the ipc mining interface.

Warning: This is an intermediate, review-only commit. Binaries built from it
should not be distributed or used to connect to other clients or servers. It
makes incompatible changes to the `mining.capnp` schema without updating the
`Init.makeMining` version, causing binaries to advertise support for a schema
they do not actually implement. Mixed versions may therefore exchange garbage
requests/responses instead of producing clear errors. The final commit in this
series bumps the mining interface number to ensure mismatches are detected.

git-bisect-skip: yes
✓ Specific, descriptive subject✓ Names a concrete action or component✓ Provides detailed explanatory context✓ Explains rationale or failure mode
The short version

What changed, and why it matters

This is a Bitcoin Core internal cleanup commit that removes old, deprecated methods from the inter-process communication (IPC) mining interface. The commit itself is explicitly marked as an incomplete, review-only change that should not be used in production. The main risk is that, because the interface version number was not bumped in this intermediate commit, two differently-versioned programs could talk to each other using mismatched method numbers and exchange meaningless data instead of getting a clean error. That mismatch is a protocol-handling bug, not a cryptographic or funds-theft vulnerability, and the commit message says the next commit in the series will fix it by bumping the version.

Recommended action

Do not build or deploy binaries from this intermediate commit. Ensure the final commit in the series that bumps the mining interface version (Init.makeMining) is included before any release or interop testing. Reviewers should verify that the version bump and any needed backward-compatibility or error-handling logic are present in the follow-up commit.

Security signals we found

01

Incompatible schema change without version bump

02

Renumbering of capnp interface methods

03

Removal of deprecated IPC methods

04

Commit explicitly labeled as intermediate/review-only and git-bisect-skip

05

Potential garbage request/response exchange between mismatched IPC peers

Risk score

Why this scored 21/100

Our methodology →
Potential impact 3/30
Exploitability 2/25
Stealth signal 2/15
Affected reach 2/15
Confidence 8/10
Evidence quality 4/5
Human-validated context

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