Good Morning, Bitcoin - Monday, July 15, 2024

Your GM report comes a bit later than usual today, so it may not even be July 15th everywhere anymore (looking at you, Australian Bitcoiners living in the future). Nevertheless, the golden rule of thumb is that it’s never too late to say GM, so we're just going to follow the protocol and act like nothing happened. If you still feel like someone should take responsibility for this, you can also blame the Bitcoin devs who just won't stop shipping. GM.

What's happening

• United States District Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York granted a defense request to delay the criminal trial of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm. The trial, originally scheduled for September of this year, will now be delayed until early December.
  • Meanwhile, the Court of Appeal of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands denied the release of fellow Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev, who was convicted of money laundering in May, and is currently preparing for his appeal.

"The court says that continuing his detention does not obstruct his possibility to prepare his defense," Pertsev's defense lawyers said, adding that they need Pertsev and "this kind of preparation cannot be done by a lawyer."

• KuCoin, a cryptocurrency exchange in Nigeria, has implemented a 7.5% value-added tax (VAT) on user transaction fees. Although there has been no official announcement yet, the Human Rights Foundation's contacts in Nigeria say this move could signal new regulations from the Nigerian government.
• Bitcoin miner Bitfarms has scheduled a special shareholders' meeting on October 29, following a requisition submitted by Riot Platforms. At this meeting, Bitfarms’ shareholders will vote on reconstituting the board of directors, marking the latest step in Riot Platforms attempted takeover of its bitcoin mining rival.
• Tether has hired Philip Gradwell, the chief economist from surveillance firm Chainalysis, to serve as Head of Economics at the stablecoin giant. He will be responsible for quantifying the Tether economy and communicating the ways Tether is used to regulators and stakeholders.
• BIP-46: Address Scheme for Timelocked Fidelity Bonds has been merged. It defines the derivation scheme for HD wallets which create timelocked addresses used for creating fidelity bonds.
• Nubank, the largest fintech bank in Latin America, joined forces with Lightspark to integrate the Lightning Network and Universal Money Addresses (UMA) into its platform.
• Distributed Denial of Secrets, the de facto heir to Wikileaks, published copies of data from Wikileaks’ website onto their own site on Sunday. This move follows a plea agreement by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, which required him to delete any unpublished classified information Wikileaks hadn't publicized and to sign an affidavit confirming its deletion.
• Texas-headquartered Cipher Mining has revised its Bitcoin miner purchase option with Bitmain, reports The Miner Mag. The company now has the option to purchase an additional 8.7 EH/s of the more efficient Antminer S21XPs at approximately $21.4/TH/s. Bitmain has extended the deadline for Cipher to exercise this revised option to June 30, 2025.

Use the tools

• Zeus Wallet v0.8.5 and Zeus v0.9.0-beta have been released. Stable release v0.8.5 comes with BOLT 12 offers, Twelve.cash BIP-353 lightning addresses, and embedded node performance enhancements.
  • Zeus v0.9.0-beta1 features new Olympus purchase channels in advance LSP service, hardware wallet/external signer support, watch-only support, batch channel opens and transactions, a new layout and camera, and other improvements.
• Krux v24.07.0, an open-source firmware that enables anyone to build their own Bitcoin signing device via off-the-shelf parts, comes with Maix Cube support, significant performance improvements, new features and customization options.
• Lava launched Smart Key, which aims to eliminate the risk of losing funds due to a single mistake. It enables users to create a 2-of-2 backup for their vault, with one part of the seed encrypted and stored in secure storage on iCloud or Google Drive, and the other part tied to an encryption key stored on a private key server. This key server can only be authenticated via a user-defined 4-digit Lava recovery PIN and enforces rate-limiting to protect against brute-force attacks.
  • Available now on iOS and Android with Lava Vault.
• Fully Noded v1.1.4 fixes BBQr and UR bugs and adds rpcauth to node credentials.
• Tor Connect v1.1.0, a tool that embeds Tor and configures hidden services for Bitcoin Core's default rpcports, updates Tor to v408.11.2.
• ThunderTip is a Telegram bot that lets you send tips via Telegram using Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC).
• Public Pool project has started testing its Windows and MacOS ARM (M series) apps for self-hosting. Check it out here.
• Hodladi published mobile UI for Phoenixd Server. "Anyone can use it as frontend for Phoenixd Server. The app is a PWA application and saves your server url and server password in local storage of your device," said the developer.

Other stuff

• The money is in the Nostr. Prolific other stuff enthusiast PabloF7z shared a demonstration on using eCash and Nostr for sending and receiving verifiable zaps that can be accessed from any client and on any device.

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