mod6 released the Foundation’s monthly State of Bitcoin Address on the Foundation’s mailing list. The Bitcoin Foundation accomplished a good amount throughout the month of February:

One obstacle defeated was remedying the cause of a wedge at block 168001. Verification of a transaction that took place in early 2012 included in block 168001 would fail to verify causing the client to “wedge” at that point. mod6 was able to fix this issue by upgrading to OpenSSL v1.0.1g from v0.9.8o. The Foundation nor volunteers could find the cause for this issue, as some testers were able to get past the wedge with the earlier version of OpenSSL. asciilifeform stated a possibility of replacing OpenSSL in his monthly engineering letter contained in the S.NSA monthly statement, with a "provably-correct implementation of ECDSA.”

They also managed to create static builds of the software. The initial versions of the reference implementation have been built with shared libraries, which forces the end user to depend on preinstalled possibly compromised libraries to run the program. A binary compiled with static libraries has all of the libraries self contained. mod6 was able to successfully modify asciilifeform’s build script of the portatronic build used in the Pogo, to statically build OpenSSL v1.0.1g, DBD 4.8.30 and Boost 1.52.0 into the bitcoind output binary. The patch will be released on The Foundation’s mailing list later this month.

Although great progress was made the foundation was unable to meet its February deadline for the milestone release, v0.5.3.1, announced in the January State of Bitcoin Address.

The address states the Foundation will focus this month on completing a patch and compile script, regression testing, the portatronic build, and eventual support for OpenBSD. The Foundation plans to distribute a release for 0.5.3.1 by the end of March on their mailing list.