Bitcoin v0.8.6 was released yesterday, offering updates to existing restrictions on the size of free transactions and full blocks, as well as a series of fixes for bugs in certain node transmissions and OSX usage. The update follows the 0.8.5 release in September and precedes the much-anticipated 0.9 release. Free Transaction Limit Changes In an effort to make free transactions more commonly accessible, Bitcoin 0.8.6 lowers the maximum size of free transactions from 10,000 bytes to 1,000 bytes and eliminates the minimum 0.01 XBT output requirement. By lowering the maximum size of a free transaction to 1,000 bytes, there is theoretically room for more free transactions per block. The current default space per block for free transactions is 27,000 bytes, meaning before the latest update each block had room for as few as three free transactions if they were all at or near the existing maximum size.  With the change, each block would have room for a minimum of 27 free transactions. The previous minimum of 0.01 XBT output per...