bitcoinj 0.17 release candidate 1

[Andreas Schildbach]

I'm even more pleased to announce the first (and maybe only?) release
candidate of bitcoinj 0.17, the next big update to the Java
implementation of the Bitcoin protocol.

For a thorough list of changes, have a look at the pre-release notes [1]
and the git log [2].

Please give it a spin in your projects! There are a couple of mandatory
package and class renamings, and various other new requirements, as
described in the pre-release notes. If you encounter problems, feel free
to ask in our Matrix space [5]. If nothing serious crops up, I plan to
release 0.17 early in January 2025.

As always, the v0.17-rc1 release tag is signed with my's GPG key [3].
The pre-built jars can be fetched from the Maven Central repository [4].
Those artifacts are signed with my key as well.

[1] https://bitcoinj.org/pre-release-notes
[2] https://github.com/bitcoinj/bitcoinj/commits/release-0.17
[3] https://bitcoin.org/andreas_schildbach.asc
[4] https://bitcoinj.org/using-maven
https://bitcoinj.org/using-gradle
[5] https://bitcoinj.org/#community