By EZ in Weekly Digest — Jul 7, 2024

Block 851078: Important News of the Week

News. Updates. Research. Stats. Everything Important You Need to Know.

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News

OpenSats announced its 5th wave of Bitcoin grants for 10 more Bitcoin projects. The non-profit also granted long-term support to rust-nostr maintainer Yuki Kishimoto and launched the OpenSats Education Initiative focused on supporting Bitcoin education and outreach worldwide.
The US Government has agreed to release Samourai Wallet founder William Lonergan Hill (TDev) on bail, according to a letter filed on July 3rd. Hill is expected to appear in the Southern District of New York on July 9th or 10th, 2024.
The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) continued its seized bitcoin sell-off this week, mirroring similar actions by the U.S. government recently.
Mt. Gox has finally begun its bitcoin repayments to creditors, ending a decade-long wait for some users.
Coinbase has officially partnered with the U.S. Marshals Service, a part of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) that is responsible for managing seized and forfeited assets.
Bitcoin Core announced a new security disclosure policy for publicizing security-critical bugs in Core versions that are End of Life (EOL) and no longer receive maintenance updates.
The Danish Financial Supervisory Authority (DFSA) has denied reports suggesting that the regulator plans to ban personal (non-custodial) bitcoin wallets.
Australia-based Bitcoin miner Iris Energy announced raising $413.4 million through stock offerings since mid-May to fund its 2024 expansion plan.
Bitcoin mining and energy technology firm CleanSpark has acquired GRIID Infrastructure in an all-stock deal valued at $155 million.
The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) has discovered a remote unauthenticated code execution vulnerability in OpenSSH’s server (sshd) on glibc-based Linux systems. Bitcoiners running lightning nodes with remote SSH access are urged to update to v9.8p1 as soon as possible.
The United States Supreme Court decisively overturned the Chevron deference last week.
AU10TIX, an Israel-based ID verification and compliance platform hired to verify user identities at X since last September, reportedly left a set of administrative credentials exposed for over 18 months. These provided access to a logging platform containing links to identity documents, including user names, dates of birth, nationalities, ID numbers, and images of uploaded documents.
A federal jury in Greensboro, North Carolina, convicted a 24-year-old Florida man for leading a conspiracy to attack and kidnap U.S. residents in their homes to steal their bitcoin and other digital assets.
The two-factor authentication (2FA) app Authy leaked the phone numbers of 33 million users.
ZapConf, a virtual conference focusing on the Lightning Network and Nostr, will take place on September 21-22, 2024.
The next edition of the Bitcoin Atlantis conference is set to take place in 2028. The event organizers decided to align Bitcoin Atlantis with the Bitcoin halving cycle, making it a unique event every four years.
BTCPay Server announced BTCPay Day Riga, which will happen right after the Baltic Honeybadger and Nostriga conferences on August 26, 2024.

Updates and releases

COLDCARD Mk4 firmware v5.3.2 and Q firmware v1.2.2 have been released. It comes with NFC Push Tx, which enables the transmission of signed transactions to the blockchain via NFC and a web service.
Bitcoin and Lightning Network node provider Nodl announced nodl One Mark 2 with a 2 TB SSD.
Bitcoin Knots v27.1 has been released. It introduces several new features, various bug fixes, and performance improvements.
Labelbase v2.2.2 is out. It comes with the ability to scan addresses from your favorite hardware wallet, QR codes from your mobile device, or even from a SATSCARD.
LND v0.18.1-beta is a minor hot fix release that resolves an issue that arises when handling an error after attempting to broadcast transactions if a btcd backend with an older version (pre-v0.24.2) is used.
Bitcoin Keeper v1.2.9 has been released with cached transactions, health check for all keys, timeline view, ability to backup wallet configurations in a PDF file, and other improvements.
Lampo v24.06 is the latest release for an experimental, fast and modular Lightning Network implementation written in Rust.
Burak announced Brollup v2, an improved version of Brollups. The developer says he has found a way to eliminate the need for a trusted setup.
Ride The Lightning (RTL) v0.15.2-beta is a minor release addressing several technical issues occurring in installations on Umbrel.
SeedHammer v1.3.1 has been released. This release removes support for the SH01 plate, the protective plate and switches to the SeedQR format.
Lume, a cross-platform desktop client for the Nostr protocol, has released v4.0.13, which improves its performance, stability, search function, and adds several fixes.
Nos.social, a nostr client with advanced user safety and moderation features, has released v0.1.19 to its TestFlight users.
Phoenix Wallet and Server received a major upgrade with Bolt12 offers. New features include reusable, non-expiring payment requests, a contact list (Android only), and the ability to attach messages to payments.
btcd v0.24.2: released with important security fixes. Full details will be disclosed in 90 days.
OLYMPUS by ZEUS: Lightning node runners can now purchase channels directly from the OLYMPUS Lightning Service Provider (LSP).
BTCPay Server is now compatible with Invoice Ninja for invoicing and billing. A detailed integration guide is available here.
Boltz backend v3.7.1: now supports cooperative refunds for failed CLN transactions, labels for addresses and transactions, provides failure details in swap status, and more. The project's license has changed to AGPLv3.
Stack Duo Wallet v1.2.0: bitcoin users of Stack Duo can now use Tor support (.onion addresses), Replace-By-Fee (RBF), and Child Pays For Parent (CPFP) functionalities.
Breez SDK Core v0.5.0 has been released with the Greenlight signer upgrade and several other improvements.
Amber v1.0.9: The latest version of Nostr event signer for Android comes with notification improvements.
zap.store v0.1.3 ships with multiple fixes and improvements.
PyBLØCK v2.6 - a Bitcoin dashboard with a cypherpunk aesthetic, now includes bug fixes and Bolt 12, building on the latest Phoenixd release.
BlueWallet v6.6.8 now allows sending and receiving transactions using BIP47 Reusable Payment Codes (PayNyms) and can also send funds to Silent Payment addresses.
LNbits announced two development bounties for Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC).
Satonomics is a new, free and open-source, Bitcoin-only, self-hostable suite of tools that computes, distributes, and displays on-chain data for free use.
Braiins OS v24.04.2 comes with support for BHB68701-, BHB68703, and BHB68606 hashboards, and improvements in mining efficiency, model detection, and UX.
BitBox02 firmware v9.19.0 now supports Bitcoin payment requests, multisig accounts at arbitrary keypaths, and spending UTXOs at high BIP-44 address indices.
LDK Node v0.3.0 is the third minor release adds support for BOLT12 payments, Anchor channels, and sourcing inbound liquidity via LSPS2 just-in-time channels.
Npub.pro has been launched. It let's users create personal websites from their Nostr content. It's free, open-source, and self-hostable.
Stacker.news implemented the first stage of its wallet plans. The changes bring noticeable improvement to stackers using attached wallets.
BitKit Wallet v1.0.2 is a maintenance release with a number of improvements and bug fixes.
Payto is a Core Lightning (CLN) companion app that can pay to lightning address, LNURL, BIP353 (DNS Payment Instructions), and BOLT12 offers.
Strike announced the BOLT 12 Playground, a hands-on testing environment for those interested in exploring BOLT 12.
B2P Central is an aggregator of Bitcoin peer-to-peer buy and sell offers from Hodl Hodl, Paxful, Peach Bitcoin, LNp2pBot, and LocalCoinSwap.
Fewsats is now open for business. It is a monetization platform for deploying digital content behind paywalls using L402 protocol.

Research and guides

Bitcoin Optech issue #310 summarizes the disclosure of 10 vulnerabilities affecting old versions of Bitcoin Core and describes a proposal to allow BOLT11 invoices to include blinded paths.

Mining stats

Bitcoin mining difficulty experienced another downward adjustment, decreasing by 5% to 79.5T. This brings the total decline in difficulty to 7.98%.
The network's hashrate (7-day SMA) is currently at ~568 EH/s.