By EZ in Weekly Digest — Sep 1, 2024

Block 859417: Important News of the Week

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

Here goes another week. No Bullshit Bitcoin raised a total of 479,438 sats (~$278) in August, which is below what we've seen in recent months. The project raised 878,991 sats (~$512) in June and 690,106 sats (~$402) in July. These were the best months this year so far.

Contributions (in sats) vs people who visited No Bullshit Bitcoin page on Geyser.

We've seen a notable uptick in our newsletter subscribers since the launch of GM Report, and Nostr has grown to be our biggest social media channel.

Our fundraising campaign that we launched in June with a goal of raising 1 BTC to become a fully-fledged news desk seems to have run out of steam, but we're not ready to hang up our sneakers just yet.

Remaining a publication operating solely on the Bitcoin standard is of critical importance to our reporting. No-strings-attached donations allow us to remain impartial and focus on serving the reader. Until the end of the year, we'll be looking into additional support for the project, as well as how to involve more people, including contributors. Onward!

We are 100% community-funded. Support our reporting.

Huge shoutout to our top supporters last week:

News

No vulnerabilities to disclose in Bitcoin Core this month. Developer Antoine Poinsot announced that there are no vulnerabilities affecting Bitcoin Core to disclose this month as per the previously published schedule.

"We will publish vulnerabilities fixed in Bitcoin Core version 24.0.1, if any, next month. Make sure to upgrade," he added.

OpenSats announces support for The Tor Project. This grant will expand The Tor Project's onion service team to enhance DDoS protection and ensure reliable, anonymous communication, crucial for Bitcoin and nostr users in censored regions.
OpenSats grants long-term support for Daniele. With this grant, Daniele will refine Gossip and Coracle's user experience, explore group and community applications, develop marketplace NIPs and support apps, and create a new onboarding tool.
OpenSats grants long-term support for Alex Gleason. Alex recently launched Ditto, a decentralized, self-hosted social media server with a built-in nostr client and relay, compatible with Mastodon apps. With this grant, Alex aims to introduce features like NIP-05 username purchases with Zaps, a profile customization shop, and better Mastodon app support.
BDK full-time open-source Rust maintainer grant. The BDK Foundation is seeking proposals for a full-time Rust maintainer to support the ongoing development and maintenance of the BDK suite of open source software. More details here.
OP_CAT Research Fund sponsored by StarkWare. StarkWare announced $1 million bounty for compelling arguments either in favor of or against the activation of OP_CAT. Apply here.
Semler Scientific buys additional 83 BTC. This latest purchase brings the medical device company's total bitcoin holdings to 1,012 BTC acquired for approximately $68 million.
Binance admits to freezing Palestinian accounts at Israel's Request. The company refutes claims that it seized funds from 'all Palestinians,' clarifying that only 'a small number of accounts' were restricted. The exact number of affected users remains unclear.

EU institutions work to discourage Bitcoin mining. European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) released a 421-page report proposing disclosure regulations for anyone surpassing 'proportionality threshold' of 500,000 kWh/year for Bitcoin mining. Per Daniel Batten, the proposed regulations appear designed to be maximally obtrusive to the maximum number of miners.

Telegram Founder Pavel Durov charged on 12 criminal counts in France. Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau announced that Telegram founder Pavel Durov faces 12 charges, including facilitating illegal online transactions, unauthorized cryptology services, enabling organized crime, and obstructing justice.
- Durov was also officially charged by the French court and is now out on €5 million bail, with a ban on leaving the country.
- The United Arab Emirates is closely monitoring the case of Pavel Durov. The UAE has requested that the French government urgently provide all necessary consular services. It is noted that Durov holds Emirati citizenship and resides in Dubai.
- EU wants to investigate Telegram under the Digital Services Act (DSA). EU legal and data experts suspect the app understated its EU presence to avoid regulations for platforms with over 45 million users. At the same time, France is investigating Telegram for alleged criminal activity, leading to founder Pavel Durov's arrest.
Tigran Gambaryan still in Nigerian prison. Binance compliance executive (and ex-IRS investigator) remains in a Nigerian prison after six months, with his health rapidly deteriorating. His wife has issued another urgent plea for his release. The U.S. State Department has yet to classify his case as "wrongfully imprisoned," which would trigger additional actions.

This is the last video we have from Tigran Gambaryan, 5 months ago.

Nigeria is torturing him to death. pic.twitter.com/7ds6aYKATf
— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) August 27, 2024

Prominent whistleblower (and Bitcoin user) is missing in Nigeria. Nigerian journalist David Hundeyin reports that whistleblower PIDOM NIGERIA is missing, and his online accounts have been compromised. PIDOM used BTC and USDT to evade censorship and is presumably targeted by the Nigerian regime. The reporter suspects the regime accessed PIDOM's information through Binance, which may have shared or been coerced into revealing PIDOM's Know-Your-Customer (KYC) details.
Important questions are being asked in the German Parliament. The German party Die Linke is questioning the government on the use of blockchain surveillance software and and crypto mixers to prevent "financial crime." The inquiry follows the takedown of various online portals, leading to the seizure of over €2 billion in bitcoin, reports The Rage.
The first Bitcoin ATM charge in the UK claims a small shop owner laundered ~$400K. Habibur Rahman, a UK phone shop owner, was charged with laundering ~$400K via a Bitcoin ATM. During his arrest in April 2023, police seized various ATMs from his shop located in Chatham, Kent, including one Bitcoin ATM on public display. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) banned unregistered crypto ATMs in 2022 and immediately launched a crackdown. Today, CoinATM Radar estimates that no Bitcoin ATMs remain in the UK.
Dutch Foundation requests human rights evaluation of AMLD5. Human Rights in Finance asks the European Commission to review the 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive for privacy and procedural issues. EU laws must respect basic rights, including privacy, as stated in the Charter of Fundamental Rights, reports The Rage.
Former China's second-richest man sentenced to six years in Singapore. Dutch national Yang Bin, 61, was sentenced by a Singapore court to six years in prison and fined S$16,000 for running a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme. His company, A&A Blockchain Innovation, falsely claimed to own 300,000 mining machines, promising a 0.5% daily return but used new investors' funds to pay earlier investors.
Rhodium filed chapter 11 for Bitcoin mining subsidiaries. Rhodium Enterprises has filed for voluntary bankruptcy protection for several of its Bitcoin mining subsidiaries, including Rhodium Encore, Jordan HPC, Rhodium JV, Rhodium 2.0, Rhodium 10MW, and Rhodium 30MW. Filings were submitted to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of Texas on Saturday.
A solo Bitcoin miner did it again. Someone successfully mined block number 858,978 on the Bitcoin blockchain, earning a reward of 3.275 BTC, valued close to ~$200,000.

Simply Bitcoin was banned and then reinstated on YouTube. A popular Bitcoin education channel, it was unavailable on the world's largest video content distribution platform following four years of building, hundreds of hours of work, and adherence to community guidelines. However, it has been reinstated a few days later.
Breez announced a partnership with Elysium. Elysium is 'a next-generation' multicoin wallet that generates and uses new keys dynamically for each transaction, enhancing security by minimizing key theft risks.
Lightspark introduced Lightspark Extend. Lightspark Extend, a compliant, low-cost, 24/7 integration, allows UMA and Lightning wallets, exchanges, or bank accounts to send bitcoin payments. The company says it is compatible with 99% of US banks accepting real-time payments, and enables seamless payments to eligible recipients.
CoinFlip's official Mexico expansion. The American Bitcoin ATM firm has announced an "official expansion to Mexico," launching 20 Bitcoin ATMs in various retail locations.
Free Samourai. The panel below is an essential viewing for every bitcoiner. Diverter NoKYC, Tor Ekeland, Zack Shapiro, and Econoalchemist talk about the arbitrary nature of developer prosecutions, the potential impact on non-custodial tools, and the importance of community support in the ongoing legal battle.

Updates and releases

Mempool v3.0.0 features integration with Mempool's new Mempool Accelerator™ service, adds Mempool Googles™, as well as RBF timeline visualizations, CPFP and Effective Fee calculations in block visualizations, a Liquid Network audit tool to verify holdings vs liabilities, a new Wallet Balance widget for embedding into external sites, and more.
The first release candidate for Bitcoin Core v28.0 is here. Check out the v28.0 release notes draft to see what's coming. A testing guide is being prepared.
Zeus v0.9.0 is here. It features new LSP service, hardware wallet and CLNRest backend support, layout improvements, a new camera, and more.

🚀 Excited to share a preview of our new feature coming in @ZeusLN v0.9.0! 🎉

With the LSPS1 implementation, you'll soon be able to request channels in advance directly within the ZEUS app. Watch the demo below to see it in action. ⚡️ pic.twitter.com/z2qaLQnYeI
— Shubham Kumar (@shubhamkmr04) August 2, 2024

NymVPN is now publicly available for anyone to beta test for free and experience the first commercially available app to run on a decentralized mixnet. It anonymizes your identity and payments, and guards against metadata tracking, and surveillance.
Geyser v0.12.0 is a major update for the Bitcoin fundraising platform. New features include email notifications for creators and contributors, as well as notable updates to platform and project pages.
Bull Bitcoin Wallet v0.3.0 is now available for testing. It comes with BTC/LBTC swaps for moving funds between Instant Payment Wallet and Secure Bitcoin Wallet, and fixes related to coin selection and frozen addresses.
Cake Wallet v4.19.5 enables BIP-39 by default for wallet creation and passphrases. It also improves fee calculation for Bitcoin to protect against overpaying or underpaying.
Gifbuddy.lol by lemon is a companion GIF app for Nostr. Just search for the right GIF, copy the address, and paste it into your client. Every gif that gets copied is uploaded to nostr.build, and from there a NIP-94 request is made so that the content can be accessed by any client in the future. It can also be installed as a progressive web app (PWA).

"Now, anyone who searches for gifs using this tool is also helping to build the gif repository for NIP-94 and adding fallback URLs to nostr.build," said the developer.

Alby Hub v1.6.0 brings a major update to Alby Hub's transaction processing code. It now supports internal keysend payments and NIP-47 notifications for internal payments, aiming to improve Alby Hub's isolated apps feature and the ability to host subaccounts for friends, family, merchants, podcasters, and more.
Boltz Client v2.1.3 fixes a memory leak and a regression introduced in v2.1.2 release. This update comes with support for magic routing hints and two new commands for sending and receiving using the client's wallets.
- Boltz Client v2.1.4 fixes an issue with when creating a submarine swap with an invoice which has magic routing hints.
Amethyst v0.90.3 update introduces support for NIP-35 Torrent files (dtan.xyz), significantly prunes memory for encrypted payloads and large events (DMs, Notifications, Zaps, etc.), and restructures caching to enable immediate subscription updates using the outbox model on custom feeds with NIP-51 lists.
jb55 announced Notepush, a high-performance Nostr relay for sending out push notifications using the Apple Push Notification Service (APNS).

"We wrote this to power Damus push notifications! If you are building an iOS app that needs nostr push notifications, give it a spin and let us know what you think," added the developer.

Nix Bitcoin v0.0.112, a collection of Nix packages and NixOS modules for easily installing full-featured Bitcoin nodes with an emphasis on security, updates CLBOSS to v0.13.3.
SimpleX Chat v6.0.3 is the latest release for the security-focused messenger without user identifiers of any kind.
Keychat app v1.16.3 fixes a bug in the reset session and brings support for eCash issued by multiple Cashu mints (v1) as message stamps.
Envoy v1.8.2 refines the Envoy user experience, improving the new Buy Bitcoin feature and adding the ability to import a SeedQR seed as your Envoy mobile wallet seed.
Blitz Wallet v0.2.6-beta introduces a Point of Sale (POS) system, enabling merchants to accept Bitcoin and Liquid payments. It also upgrades the integrated ChatGPT model from version 3.5 to 4.0, decreases memory load of contacts, adds VPN configuration files, and includes encrypted messages in the database for better privacy and security. Furthermore, it improves the Liquid payments experience, implements better seed phrase handling, and more.

Blitz using ecash for micro payments any amount under 1k sats is ecash over it is liquid and after 100k sats you get your own lightning channel and become 100% non custodial.

In other words you can now use blitz to zap people on nostr instantly and not wait to open a channel 👀 pic.twitter.com/evN2NEVIQL
— Oliver Koblížek | LNHANCE 🍩 (@Stromens) August 23, 2024

Blitz wallet also announced a 3 million sats bounty for the conversion of Liquid Wallet Kit (LWK) to a React Native package, which will be used to finalize their app for release on iOS.
COLDCARD launched a dedicated partners page for those seeking help setting up their secure cold storage. Check it out here.
Clams Accounting app v0.2 now supports XPub and Descriptor wallet connections, and comes with performance boosts, a new fiat widget, and UI/UX enhancements.
CashuSwift library for ecash has been released. It provides basic functionality and model representation for using the Cashu protocol.
BitBanana v0.8.6 now supports BIP353 e-mail like addresses. An address of this type can be created using twelve.cash.
Blockstream Green Android v4.0.33 adds a fix for GDK build for F-Droid.

Voyage v0.13.1, a lightweight nostr client for Android, brings several improvements and bug fixes.
brugeman updated Nostr-Login widget with support for nostrconnect- NIP-46 connection strings. Bonus: quick access to Amber app!
Amber v1.3.4 brings UI changes when receiving multiple events and support for permissions when using NostrConnect URI.
Keet v3.9.0 is now out on all mobile stores and desktop. The peer-to-peer chat app includes the ability to reply with quotes, improves the loading of lobby and rooms, supports the generation of random names during profile setup, and offers many more fixes and improvements.
Nostr Web Services (NWS) v0.1, a resilient connectivity solution that leverages NOSTR as a transport for TCP, brings support for exit node internet relays, .nostr domain support, and reverse TCP connect mode.

LN-Term is a simple terminal interface dashboard for Core Lightning node operators to view channels, statuses, balances, earnings, messages, logs, and more. According to the developer, it was inspired by the CLN summary.py plugin, and is just a simple Bash script in less than 100 lines of code.
Anonostr is a privacy-focused Nostr note sender that lets users send anonymous notes to the Nostr network without revealing their identity. For each submission, it generates a new key pair, sends the note through select relays, and then burns the key pair. It supports tagging, threading, quoting, and replying to existing notes.
nostr-filter-relay v0.4.0, a nostr relay docker image package for filtering events by content type, implements an important change with NIP-32 compatibility.
Lume v4.1.0, a desktop client for Nostr, is here. Major changes include dropping the Linux version due to development issues, meaning that it will be available on macOS and Windows for now. Other notable changes include improved Nostr Connect support, saving private keys in ncryptsec format, added search, notifications, hashtag, and stories columns, new settings screen, and more.
- Lume v4.1.1 fixes an issue preventing the import of ncryptsec keys.
NLightning.Bolt11 v0.1.0. Developers of NLightning, a C# implementation of the Lightning Network protocol, completed BOLT11 encoding and decoding and published a package on NuGet. Now C# .NET developers can decode BOLT11 invoices without relying on RPC calls to the node.
Fonta1n3 shared a work-in-progress (WIP) implementation of Fully Noded - Server. It is a one click tool for running Bitcoin Core, Core Lightning and Join Market.
Phoenix Server v0.3.4 (phoenixd) adds an optional expiry for BOLT11 invoices and a best-effort method for estimating liquidity fees.
Stacker.news now supports phoenixd as an attached wallet for sending and receiving payments, as well as the ability to attach LNbits instances hosted at onion addresses. Other changes include the removal of free posting, with the exception of comments, and a variety of bug fixes.
Live Wallet v0.5.0, a tool for estimating the effect of Bitcoin transaction fees on individual UTXOs and transactions containing multiple UTXOs, now comes with transaction output count selection, batch vs single transaction UI, and the ability to remove fee rate colors.
Check out Layer3.news - a powerful Nostr-based AI news summary tool by perspective.
Lightning Bounties project (still in beta) automatically pays code contributors in bitcoin for their valuable contributions to open-source projects.

Research and guides

Katzenpost is a free and open source software project dedicated to researching and developing mix network protocols.
Rabble delivered an insightful speech on the past, present, and future of the Nostr protocol.
Bitcoin Optech #318 announces a new mailing list to discuss Bitcoin mining.
Jonas Nick, Kiara Bickers, and Tim Ruffing wrote a blog post on advance FROST in a Bitcoin production environment through a BIP draft for the ChillDKG distributed key generation protocol.
Alex Gleason delivered an excellent keynote at Nostriga 2024 on how to bootstrap communities on the actual global town square.