Good Morning, Bitcoin - Thursday, August 1st, 2024

GM. It’s Thursday, August 1, a day to celebrate Bitcoin Independence Day. On this day in 2017, Bitcoin users ended the network’s Blocksize Wars with a user-activated soft fork (UASF), reclaiming control and concluding a years-long scaling conflict that culminated in the activation of SegWit. Additionally, today marks the 22nd anniversary of Adam Back's Hashcash whitepaper.

What's new

• U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis introduced the Boosting Innovation, Technology, and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide (BITCOIN) Act' in the Senate. The legislation aims to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, designed to manage the Federal Government's Bitcoin holdings transparently while safeguarding the private property rights of individuals and organizations.
• Leading stablecoin issuer Tether has released its Q2 2024 attestation report. The firm reported a net operating profit of $1.3 billion and has $5.33 billion in excess reserves. The company also claims to hold nearly 80,000 BTC (although neither the attestation report nor Tether's Bitcoin holdings address indicates any increase).
  • Notably, the company boasts over $97.5 billion in U.S. Treasuries (including both direct and indirect exposure), placing Tether's exposure to Treasuries higher than that of Germany, the United Arab Emirates, and Australia. According to CEO Paolo Ardoino, this positions Tether as the 18th largest entity in terms of U.S. debt ownership.
• The Bitcoin Core project has announced two new security advisories regarding vulnerabilities identified in Bitcoin Core v0.21.0 and earlier versions. A comprehensive breakdown of these issues is available here.

"We will follow up later in August to publicly disclose vulnerabilities fixed in version v23.0. And then in September to disclose those fixed in version v24.0, and so on until we run out of unmaintained versions to disclose vulnerabilities for. The announced policy will then start to be observed for new versions," added Niklas Goegge.

• Texas-based bitcoin miner Riot has raised its stake in Bitfarms to 15.9% as part of its hostile takeover attempt, acquiring $19.3 million in shares. This move follows Riot's success on July 25 in terminating Bitfarms' initial "poison pill" strategy, leading Bitfarms to implement a new strategy that increases the equity dilution threshold from 15% to 20%.
• TBD has announced the TBD Hackathon, set to take place at the Africa ₿itcoin Conference in December. You can sign up here.
• Bitcoin self-custody and spending startup Lava has announced a Seed Round, although the amounts have not been disclosed.
• Bitcoin Magazine revealed that the next edition of the Bitcoin Conference 2025 will be held in Las Vegas from May 27 to May 29, 2025.

Use the tools

• Parman has launched Parmanode4win v0.1.0. It is 'an easy AF Bitcoin Node' with automated installation for desktop computers, specifically for Windows users.
• Alby Hub v1.4.0 enhances mobile-friendliness and integrates fixes and improvements for existing features.
• Live Wallet v0.3.0, an application designed to estimate the impact of bitcoin transaction fees on individual UTXOs and transactions with multiple UTXOs, now comes with support for various (HWI) hardware wallets.

• Phoenix Android v2.3.6 addresses parsing issues with BIP-353 addresses and BIP-21 URIs.
• Phoenixd v0.3.2 introduces several new features and fixes.
• GDK v0.72.2 is a minor release of the Blockstream Green Development Kit, featuring a couple of smaller fixes.
• The Voltage Bitcoin Core Solution has been launched, offering a streamlined, developer-friendly Bitcoin Core solution aimed at simplifying and enhancing the deployment and management of Bitcoin nodes.
• Voyage v0.9.0, a lightweight nostr client for Android with a Reddit-like user interface, now automatically integrates with local Nostr relay (if installed).
• The peer-to-peer chat app Keet v3.7.0 has been released on both desktop and mobile, featuring UI improvements, the ability to delete reported messages, and various fixes.
• Arti-controller v0.1.0, a minimal Tor controller for Kubernetes, has been released. It requires only one pod to run the entire controller instead of one pod per Onion Service, significantly improving performance for smaller Kubernetes deployments, said the developers.

• Tor Browser 14.0a1 features important security updates based on the latest Firefox enhancements.
• GrapheneOS v2024080100 reverts the VPN DNS leak protection once again, as it remains partially incompatible with Proton VPN and certain other applications for yet unknown reasons.

Other stuff

• Nicolas Burtey posted an interesting table comparing bitcoin transactions across Bitcoin conferences.

• Eric Yakes has announced that his book 'The 7th Property: Bitcoin and the Monetary Revolution' is now available for free as a PDF.
• The latest issue of the Bitcoin Design Newsletter is here.

• What else did we miss? DM us on Nostr.
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