van der Laan requested assistance with the release notes for Bitcoin on Github. Another user submitted a pull request to resolve the issue, including a digitally signed signature. The context discusses the minimum storage quota of 550 MiB required for pruning nodes in Bitcoin. The reason for this minimum storage quota is to allow reorgs up to 288 blocks deep even when pruning. The PGP signature at the end of the message indicates that the message has not been tampered with and was signed by the sender using their private key.The concept of pruning in the Bitcoin ecosystem is often misunderstood. Satoshi's paper refers to UTXO pruning, while Pieter Wuille's "ultraprune" has been part of Bitcoin Core for more than three years. Block pruning is not mentioned in Satoshi's paper because nodes store historical blocks merely for administrative purposes. Pruning nodes don't serve block data at all unless there is a change to the P2P protocol. To enable block pruning, a number of megabytes "to allot for raw block & undo data" must be given, with any value being intended to be safe. Very low values could delete undo data that may be necessary in a reorganization, but this is prohibited by argument checks. It is important to note that the minimum storage quota of 550 MiB is necessary for pruning nodes even if the block data is not served to other nodes.The Bitcoin Core has already implemented the pruning feature, which stores the chainstate of about 2 GB regardless of what is set for prune. The minimum theoretical value of the prune target is zero, but in practice, it is 510, so small rescans and reorgs are still possible. Clients will not let you set below the minimum of 550 MB. Pruning deletes old transaction data that moves coins around and stores only the origin and current location of unspent transactions. There is a "natural" amount of megabytes for a fully pruned blockchain, which should be defined by the final amount of unspent coins. However, the number of megabytes to allot for raw block and undo data can be configured.In a discussion regarding block pruning in Bitcoin, Wladimir J. van der Laan suggested advertising the feature in the new release notes, which was added by Marco Falke. The RC2 changelog now includes instructions on enabling block pruning by setting prune= on the command line or in bitcoin.conf, with N representing the number of MiB allotted for raw block and undo data. A user expressed confusion over the need to specify a value for N, as they believed pruning should be a boolean on/off flag that automatically computes the natural size of the dataset based on the final amount of unspent coins. They requested further explanation in the release notes, including why N must be given, a "safe" value for N, and whether there is an "auto" setting for N.On January 18, 2016, Wladimir J. van der Laan announced the first binary release that contained block pruning functionality, which had been tested in git for almost half a year. He advised users to backup their wallets regardless. The previous v0.11.0 release notes stated that block pruning was incompatible with running a wallet because block data was used for rescanning the wallet and importing keys or addresses, but this limitation was expected to be lifted in the near future. A user inquired about whether the limitation had been lifted and if the feature was considered complete, stating that the disk space reduction was a significant benefit.A user on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list inquired about the status of pruning in the upcoming release of Bitcoin Core version 0.12. Wladimir J. van der Laan confirmed that pruning has been tested for almost half a year and will be included in this release. However, he also noted that users should still backup their wallets as there is always a possibility of issues with syncing between the wallet and blockchain.On January 17, 2016, a preliminary release note for Bitcoin Core version 0.12 was posted on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list. While the main part of the release notes did not mention the re-enabling of the wallet in autoprune feature, one of the pull requests noted that it had been re-enabled. A user on the mailing list asked if pruning was now finished and if it could be safely used as an end-user. They believed that this feature would be one of the most interesting ones for users since it could help fix the issue of taking up too much disk space. The user requested that if pruning was finished, the release notes should mention that and how to enable it.Bitcoin Core version 0.12.0rc1 binaries are now available on the official website of Bitcoin. This is a release candidate for a new major version release that brings new features, bug fixes, and other improvements. The preliminary