A flurry of activity at the Bitcoin Foundation in January, much of which has already been covered on Qntra, has lead up to a code freeze for the next release of the reference Bitcoin daemon. The address covers a number of developments relevant to the upcoming release including makefile contributions, Malleus Mikehearnificarum, a switch for toggling between enforcement of low-s or high-s signature creation, refinement of the programmable version strings mechanism, and further iteration of the V provenance management system.

One particularly interesting development which will miss this release, but likely play a key part in the future of the reference client was given a brief mention. In late January asciilifeform of No Such lAbs introduced Shiva, an experimental Lisp shell for interacting with bitcoind. Shiva's introduction introduces a number of possible development directions, all of which are far more interesting than various coups intending to impose governance upon Bitcoin through sloppy hard fork plans.