Hey shibes,

after a long wait (sorry for that) we finally pushed Dogecoin Core 1.8.1 :)

Without much rambling I'll jump to a short version of the release notes:

Dogecoin Core 1.8.1 is primarily a bugfix release, bringing Dogecoin Core in line with Bitcoin 0.9.3. Dogecoin Core 1.8.1 also adds in support for printing paper wallets, and disables connections to pre-1.8 clients. This is a RECOMMENDED upgrade due to the large number of bug fixes, but is not a required one.

Paper wallet support has been developed by AndyMeows (IRC username), and can be accessed via the "File" menu. It's intended for two purposes; to generate small value paper wallets to hand out, and more permanent deposit paper wallets for keeping balances offline.

IMPORTANT: If you are producing offline paper wallets, you should do so on a computer that's disconnected from the Internet. While the wallet generator does not save the keys it generates, this ensures there is no risk of a virus or similar capturing the key from memory or interfering with its generation.

And a list of changes:

• Translation improvements and corrections
• Disable Transifex based translation process (not used by Dogecoin Core)
• Add checkpoints around AuxPoW switchover block (371,337)
• Disable connections from pre-1.8 Dogecoin Core clients
• Use HTTPS with dogechain.info
• Remove unreachable code introduced with AuxPoW support
• "blocknotify" option now supports %i as a format parameter, which is replaced by block height
• New option "maxoutconnections" to set the maximum number of outbound peer connections. Defaults to 8, minimum is 2, maximum is whatever "maxconnections" is set to (default 125).
  

As always, you can get the download at http://dogecoin.com or right here: https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/releases/tag/v1.8.1

There you'll also find the full release notes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed, in whatever way it was and is :)

Keep in mind the core devs do an AMA on the 26th: https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/2pwj1s/dogecoin_core_dev_ama_on_dec_26th/

-The Dogecoin core devs