# 43.6% of Peers Advertising Bitcoin Core Versions Ran End-of-Life Releases By Simon Yoon Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/40061 Published: 2026-10-24T14:59:02.000Z Updated: 2026-10-24T14:59:02.000Z Section: Technology > An Oct. 18 snapshot counted 3,671 of 8,422 reachable peers on end-of-life releases. A policy change merged Oct. 22 calls for faster fixes to easily rediscovered flaws. Bitcoin Core merged a faster security-patch policy Oct. 22 after an Oct. 18 snapshot showed 43.6% of reachable peers advertising end-of-life versions, highlighting the scale of unsupported software. The snapshot counted 3,671 of 8,422 peers advertising Bitcoin Core versions on release lines that had reached end of life. It covers peers reached by one monitor, not every Bitcoin node, and does not show whether any peer was compromised or exposed to a specific flaw. The policy calls for developers to backport fixes for vulnerabilities they judge easy to rediscover to every maintained major release line, issue point releases as soon as possible and publish security advisories with the updates. The change was covered in [an earlier report on Bitcoin Core's security policy](). Developers can classify a flaw as easily discoverable during triage. A bug can qualify if it is easy to find—for example, with a simple question to a large language model—but the category also covers flaws found without AI. Other vulnerabilities remain on a severity-based disclosure schedule. Details of low-severity flaws are disclosed two weeks after a major release containing a fix. For medium- and high-severity vulnerabilities, disclosure comes two weeks after the last affected release reaches end of life, roughly a year after the fixed version first ships in a major release. Critical bugs fall outside the standard schedule. Bitcoin Core maintains its three newest major release lines; end-of-life versions generally do not receive security fixes. Contributor Antoine Poinsot, who proposed the change, argued that a long delay does little while holding back fixes: “The embargo period achieves little but it delays the availability of a fixed release.” He also warned that faster releases could leave mitigations with less time for testing in development branches. The Oct. 22 change applies to maintained releases and does not extend support for end-of-life software. Operators using older versions must move to a maintained release to receive future patches. ## Links in this article - [an earlier report on Bitcoin Core's security policy](https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/39456)