By EZ in Weekly Digest — Aug 18, 2024

Block 857323: Important News of the Week

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

Here's what happened in Bitcoin last week, summarized in over 3,400 words. We appreciate each and every one of you who supports our free and independent reporting on a Bitcoin standard.

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News

UN Cybercrime Convention draft treaty finalized. The United Nations has finalized the draft of the UN Cybercrime Convention. The treaty establishes a global legal framework for cybercrime and data access, allowing authorities to obtain electronic evidence and request user data from internet service providers across nations. It also requires member states to identify, trace, confiscate, and seize crime-related assets and collect real-time data for requesting states. The convention will be voted on by the General Assembly in the fall, where it is expected to pass.
Public Data Company Breach. A class action lawsuit claims Jerico Pictures Inc. (National Public Data) was hacked earlier this year, exposing 2.9 billion confidential records, primarily of U.S. citizens, stolen by the hacker group USDoD. The exposed data for potentially hundreds of millions of people includes full names, Social Security numbers, current and past addresses, and information about relatives, including deceased family members.
OpenSats announced new round of grants focused on Bitcoin Core. The latest grantees include contributors @tdb3, @davidgumberg, @hodlinator, and the Bitcoin Core App project.
₿trust announced Q3 2024 grant recipients. Jay-Z and Jack Dorsey-funded bitcoin non-profit ₿trust, focused on nurturing Bitcoin developers from the Global South, announced the recipients of its Q3 Starter Grants and new members of its ₿trust Open-Source Cohort.

Nigerian bitcoiner James Otudor embarks on a major legal battle. Nigerian citizen has filed a landmark lawsuit against key Nigerian government entities, arguing that the ongoing targeting and persecution of Nigerians who own and use bitcoin and other digital assets constitute a clear violation of their fundamental human rights.
Nigeria freezes $37 million USDT. The Nigerian government has frozen over $37 million in USDT believed to belong to organizers of the #EndBadGovernance protests. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) classified the funds as proceeds of money laundering and terrorism financing.
El Salvador attracts $1.6 billion for port infrastructure. The country is set to receive a $1.62 billion investment from Turkish company Yilport to develop two seaports, supporting the construction of its ambitious "Bitcoin City." This marks the largest private investment in the country's history.
Mi Primer Bitcoin is raising 5 BTC. The non-profit focusing on open-source Bitcoin education plans to orange pill 100,000 students. Check out the project's latest Geyser campaign here.

US Government wants a 30-year sentence for Roman Sterlingov. US prosecutors recommend a 30-year prison sentence and a $100,000 fine for Roman Sterlingov, a Swedish-Russian citizen convicted of money laundering and running an unlicensed money transmitter tied to the Bitcoin mixer Bitcoin Fog, reports The Rage.
Alexey Pertsev's defense is running out of funds. The Tornado Cash developer, who is facing up to 64 months in prison for writing and publishing open-source code, released a video calling for an additional $750k-1M to cover ongoing legal fees. Unfortunately, the campaign accepts ETH donations only.
Russia and Venezuela block Signal. Russia's telecommunications watchdog has restricted access to the Signal encrypted messaging service, citing violations of anti-terrorism and anti-extremism laws. The messenger was also blocked in Venezuela following the disputed presidential election results from late July.
- Signal acknowledged that its services are blocked in some countries and advised users to enable the censorship circumvention feature in the app settings (Signal Settings > Privacy > Advanced > Censorship circumvention).
SimpleX announced $1.3M investment. The privacy-centric, free, and open-source messaging platform raised a $1.3 million pre-seed round led by Jack Dorsey, with participation from the Asymmetric Capital Partners (ACP) VC fund. The funds will be used to expand its team and make significant product advancements.
Israeli's robbed of $700k worth of BTC in Costa Rica. Eleven Israeli tourists were attacked by eight men who overpowered their security and stole $700,000 in bitcoin. Analysis of surveillance footage suggests that the robbers may be current or former police officers, reports local media.
Massive kidnapping in Malaysia. According to a local news report, up to 18 individuals have been involved in the kidnapping of a Chinese national and a local woman for a $1.2 million ransom in unspecified cryptocurrency. Ten individuals have been arrested, four were shot dead, and four are still at large.
Thailand launches 'crypto' regulatory sandbox. The country's securities watchdog has launched a sandbox for businesses to study and navigate the balance between innovation Bitcoin and digital assets and regulatory restrictions.
IRS shares new crypto tax form. The IRS has released an updated draft of the 1099-DA tax form for crypto brokers and investors to report proceeds from transactions. Starting in 2026, investors using brokers and centralized exchanges will receive this form to report taxable events. The new version is more streamlined than the initial draft from April, and the public has 30 days to provide the IRS with comments, reports CoinDesk.
Coin Center has achieved a significant victory in an ongoing legal challenge against the 6050I reporting scheme, which would have required recipients of over $10,000 in cryptocurrency to collect and report personal information to the IRS without a warrant.
Metaplanet now holds 303 BTC. The publicly listed Japanese investment firm has acquired an additional $3.4 million worth of BTC, raising its total holdings to 303 coins acquired for ~$20 million.
Goldman Sachs Holds Over $400M in Spot Bitcoin ETFs. The banking giant revealed $418 million in Bitcoin ETF holdings, indicating growing institutional interest. Their largest position is $240 million in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust.
Norway is stacking bitcoin via MicroStrategy. Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, managed by Norges Bank Investment Management, has invested $217 million in MicroStrategy, giving it 0.89% ownership and 0.45% voting rights. The fund, which manages 18 trillion Krone ($1.7 trillion), has been purchasing MicroStrategy equity since 2008 and has more than tripled its investment in the past year, per Protos report.
Similarly, South Korea's National Pension Service (NPS) acquired $34 million worth of shares in MicroStrategy.
Bitcoin miner Argo repays $35M Galaxy bailout loan. Argo secured a $35 million loan from Galaxy Digital in December 2022 and sold its Helios mining site in Texas to Galaxy for $65 million. The proceeds were used to repay other liabilities during the bear market, reports The Miner Mag.
Bitdeer saw a 50% increase in Q2 2024 gross profits by doubling mining capacity from 3.8 to 7.3 EH/s, partly thanks to its SEALMINER hardware. However, the company still reported a net loss of $17.7 million.
Core Scientific to offer $350 million in convertible senior notes. The company announced that these unsecured notes will mature on September 1, 2029, with interest payable semi-annually. Terms like interest rate are still pending, and an option to buy an additional $52.5 million in notes may also be granted to initial buyers.
Leadership Overhaul at Bitfarms. Ben Gagnon, recently promoted to CEO of Bitfarms, has been appointed to the board of directors. Founder and former chairman Nicolas Bonta has stepped down from the board, effective immediately, and has been replaced with lead director Brian Howlett, who is now the independent chairman. Liam Wilson will be the new Chief Operating Officer of Bitfarms, effective August 26.
Riot Platforms Increases Ownership in Bitfarms to 18.9%. The company announced the purchase of an additional 1 million Bitfarms shares, bringing its total holdings to about 85.3 million shares.
Marathon buys 4144 BTC. The largest public bitcoin mining firm by realized hashrate increased its strategic holdings using proceeds from a $300 million convertible senior notes offering.
Bitdeer to expand operations with $150M convertible notes offering. Bitdeer Technologies Group, a Singapore-based crypto mining company, has announced plans for a $150 million public offering of convertible notes due in 2029 to expand its data center and develop ASIC-based mining rigs.
CleanSpark orders 7.8 EH/s of S21XP miners for $167M. The second-largest public Bitcoin mining firm by realized hashrate has announced an expansion of its mining capabilities with a preorder of 7.8 EH/s for $167.7 million, reports The Miner Mag.
Iran goes after 'unauthorized' bitcoin miners. According to local medi a, the country is offering $20 bounty to anyone who reports "every single unauthorized cryptocurrency mining equipment." Iran is reportedly facing a severe heatwave that's currently crippling its industrial production.
IMF 'experts' propose 85% electricity price hike for bitcoin miners. Using outdated and widely debunked data, IMF economists have concluded that a $0.089 per kilowatt hour tax would yield "$5.2 billion in annual revenue and cut carbon emissions by 100 million tons."
PlebLab's Startup Day in Mexico City. The event, set to explore the latest innovations in Bitcoin, will take place on September 19, 2024. Get your tickets here.

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The Lugano Plan ₿ forum is set to take place on October 25-26 in the city of Lugano, Switzerland. Early bird tickets are still available here.
OP.NEXT is a technical and workshop-heavy conference exploring Bitcoin's next soft fork. It will take place at the Fidelity Center For Applied Technology in Boston, MA, on Saturday, November 9.
Santa Monica Open-Source Bitcoin Festival. The newly opened Bitcoin Office in Santa Monica has announced an open-source Bitcoin festival set for October 18, 2024.
The Mining Conference 2024 will take place on September 27-29 in Minnesota. Tickets are more information are available here.

Updates and releases

Cypher.space has released an initial version of its self-hosted, bitcoin-only platform for setting up a free Bitcoin blog or web shop with value-for-value donation and checkout tools. Learn how to set it up here.

Validating Lightning Signer v0.12 is out. The latest release includes enhanced security features, LSS support, logging improvements, various bug fixes, and policy updates.
ZEUS has launched two new Olympus integrations: one with Lightning.pub, and another with Mutiny Wallet.
Phoenix Wallet iOS v2.3.2 release brings BIP-353 LN addresses and contacts to Apple users.
Aqua Wallet v0.2.1 adds more accurate status updates to the Lightning Send completion screen, which now correctly indicates pending until the transaction is completed, along with multiple bug fixes.
Super Testnet introduced Bankify - a tool for turning any Cashu mint into a Lightning wallet with Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) support.
BitAxe firmware ESP Miner v2.1.10 has been released. It fixes some issues introduced in v2.1.9.
Clinch PvP Solitaire by THNDR Games is now available in the App Store. The app uses the Lightning Network to facilitate wager payments on-the-go.
Foundation launched its Vault Concierge service, designed to guide users through the process of securely setting up 2-of-3 multisig vaults. Users will receive 3 Passport devices along with expert guidance.
Theya 🤝The Bitcoin Adviser. A n ew partnership between the modular multisig startup and the Bitcoin advisory firm grants the latter's clients privileged access to Theya's collaborative Bitcoin security solution.
Boardwalk Cash v0.2.2 adds a new button to the home screen for notifications and an eTip button to user profile pages, allowing anyone with a Bitcoin Lightning wallet to tip Boardwalk users with eCash.
B2P Central, a site aggregating bitcoin peer-to-peer offers, now pulls and lists RoboSats offers from certain coordinators (Satsralia for now) in its search results.
Cake Wallet v4.19.3, a multicoin wallet with Bitcoin Silent Payments support, introduces wallet enhancements, improved backups, better error handling, and other enhancements and bug fixes.
Speed Wallet, a custodial Lightning wallet with mandatory KYC for users in the United States, added support for USDT-L payments using the Taproot Assets protocol developed by Lightning Labs.
- The company also recently launched Speed WordPress plugin for WooCommerce, enabling seamless on-chain and Lightning transactions for merchants.
Boltz Client v2.1.1 includes multiple fixes and smaller improvements, an updated version of gdk, support for lowball transactions (lower fees on Liquid), and preparations for the upcoming BTCPay plugin.
Blitz Wallet v0.2.5-beta includes a VPN app integration using LN VPN and updates to the settings interface.

Ressurection Wallet v.0.5.0, a desktop frontend for Phoenix Server (phoenixd) on Linux machines, packages several fixes and improvements.
Fedimint v0.4.1 is a patch release that fixes a bug for users of the Esplora Bitcoin backend.
Bob McElrath has been working on a CPUNet - a new Bitcoin testnet for Braidpool testing and development, intended to be CPU-mined.
Alby announced two new Bitcoin Connect bounties. The first one is focused on implementing a currency selector in Bitcoin Connect, while the second aims to increase accessibility to allow usage of Bitcoin Connect with just a keyboard.
Bitcoin Connect v3.6.2 is a small bugfix release that uses canvas QR instead of data URL to prevent CSP errors.
Damus v1.9.1 is a hotfix release for the most popular Nostr client on iOS. It addresses a crash experienced when accessing certain notes on the platform.
Amethyst v0.89.10 is the latest update for the Nostr client on Android, improving notification filtering and reducing memory usage.
Amber v1.3.0 features a redesign of the login and signup flow, support for seed words, sign policy settings, and an improved view of permissions when the application is open.
Citrine v0.4.0, a local Nostr relay for Android devices, added a settings page.
Dustin Dannenhauer launched DVMDash v0.1. It is a monitoring and debugging tool for all Data Vending Machine (DVM) activity on Nostr. The project's website is now live at dvmdash.live and the code is available on GitHub.
Openvibe v1.3.0 is now available. It is an open social media app that offers unified access to Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, and Nostr networks.
Nos.social v0.1.24 is now available on TestFlight. It adds push notifications for zaps, improves app performance, and fixes several bugs.
Coop v0.1.6, a nostr-based chat app, comes with native notifications and bug fixes.
Team Relay is a specialized nostr relay for teams, written in Go.

Been working on this small Rust library that implements BIP-322. It's still very much pre-alpha stage and in constant flux. I'm looking to get some feedback on the API interface and some review on the cryptography. Check it out!https://t.co/2aNkA5QWkM
— raph (@raphjaph) August 11, 2024

Alby Hub v1.5.3 is the latest patch release that fixes a bug with new channel order invoice QR codes not showing and addresses some issues in the migrate and restore node feature.
Zaprite has announced OpenNode integration for a seamless Bitcoin and Lightning payments.
Voltage Tipper is a simple, free Lightning tipping page with a built-in Lightning Address that works with Voltage and any LND node.
Nix Bitcoin v0.0.111 upgrades LND to v0.18.2 and Trustedcoin to v0.8.2, and it changes how JoinMarket settings are specified.
Yuki Kishimoto released rust-nostr v0.34.0, which adds embedded Tor client support, allows for databases with limited capacity, and includes many new features, improvements, and bug fixes.
YakiHonne, a Nostr platform for long-form content, has introduced Smart Widgets for custom and enhanced user experience.
Brostr is an experimental native browser for the content on Nostr. You can try it here.
Check out the improved version of ZapThreads by codonaft. ZapThreads is a threaded web commenting system built on Nostr. "It’s still experimental, but you can integrate it into your website as well," said the developer.
lnp2pbot developers issued a bunch of new bounties. Check them out here.
uxto shared nostr-slack, a simple application for sending Nostr events directly to Slack channels.
OpenAgents, an AI productivity dashboard, has released its v2 beta with a new chat and auto-coding interface. The platform plans to integrate Lightning payments later this week.

SimpleX Chat v6.0.1 brings UX and stability improvements. Private message routing is now enabled for all users by default, and the app's improved messaging protocol results in faster connections, less traffic usage, and quicker message sending.
TempleOfSats introduced Robosats Alert Bot for SimpleX. This bot allows users to receive notifications when an order meeting specific criteria (currency, premium, payment method, and/or amount) is posted on RoboSats.
Tails v6.6 is out, featuring updated firmware to work on newer hardware, fixes for several robustness issues on Persistent Storage, and more.
Dan Gould released payjoin v0.20.0 and payjoin-cli v0.0.9-alpha. Both releases include improved checking logic and backwards-compatible sends for PayJoin v2 users.
Blockstream Jade firmware v1.0.31 is here. This release includes automatic validation of change outputs when signing with Green Wallet's 'Multisig Shield' PSBTs, a new CLI tool for simple interaction and testing, and many other UX and security improvements.
Blockstream Green Desktop v2.0.9 adds phone field with country selector, updates GDK to v0.72.2, and implements fixes for Bitcoin sending with Ledger devices, verify address function with Jade, watch-only login without password, and more.
Blockstream Green Android v4.0.32 now supports custom gap limits on personal Electrum servers and comments on LNURL payments.
Clams Remote v2.3.0 adds a plugins dashboard, a UI for the CLBOSS plugin, fixes on-chain validation issues, and more.
The latest Nunchuk wallet updates (iOS v 1.9.50, Android v1.9.49, and desktop v1.9.37) introduce a new Byzantine role ('Facilitator Admin') that can help clients set up wallets but is blinded to the wallet balance and transaction history. The updates also include improved Portal signing device integration, syncing performance optimizations, bug fixes, and other enhancements.
Ginger Wallet v2.0.10, a fork of privacy-focused Wasabi Wallet with a hardcoded default coordinator that sends all coinjoin input transactions to a chain surveillance partner, added one-click transaction viewing on mempool.space, client-side checks for coinjoin parameters, and several bug fixes and improvements.
lontivero released a C# library for SLIP-0039, SatoshiLabs' Shamir's Secret-Sharing for Mnemonic Codes.
CLBOSS v0.13.3 fixes an important bug by restoring the earned fee
information.
Boltz Backend v3.7.3 addresses performance issues by adding OpenTelemetry tracing, more Prometheus metrics, and introduces the sidecar, which runs as a child process of the Node.js application. It also adds webhooks for swap status updates, custom description hashes for Reverse Swaps invoices, custom Bitcoin Core and Elements wallet names, and more.
Stacker.news integrated support for P2P non-custodial zaps, LNBits receiving, and sats filter.
Voltz Wallet (not to be confused with Volt Wallet) is a new custodial Lightning Network wallet that supports on-chain Bitcoin transactions, Lightning Network payments, and eCash.
Blink Wallet v0.20.213 has been released with several improvements.
The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute has added Satoshi's emails from the P2P Research List.
Users of 10101 self-custodial Bitcoin derivatives trading platform are urged to update to v3.0 as the platform's coordinator has a new public IP address.
Core Lightning (CLN) v24.08 release candidate 2 is now available for testing. Fire up your testing environment and help polish the final release.

Research and guides

Bitcoin Optech #316 describes a new time warp in testnet4, proposed mitigations for onion message denial-of-service concerns, a proposal to allow LN payers to optionally identify themselves, and a major change to Bitcoin Core’s build system that could affect downstream developers and integrators.
The Lendasat team published a whitepaper on its innovative Escrow-Less Bitcoin-Collateralized Lending protocol. This pioneering system leverages Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs) and Hash Time Lock Contracts (HTLCs) to create a trustless, peer-to-peer lending environment that aligns with the ethos of decentralization and user empowerment.
Robin Linus publicized a paper on BitVM bridges - a novel and trust-minimized protocol to bridge bitcoins to second layers.
Lava published the whitepaper for Lava Loans Protocol v2.
Jameson Lopp published an educational piece exploring how many Bitcoin seed phrases consist of only one repeated word.
Awesome-L402 is a curated list of awesome things related to L402.

Mining stats

Bitcoin mining difficulty eased by 4.19%. It adjusted down to 86.87T after reaching a new high two weeks ago.
The average network's hashrate (7-day SMA) is currently at ~629 EH/s.