Good Morning, Bitcoin - Thursday, August 15th, 2024

GM! It's Thursday, August 15th, and everything is gradually coming together. On this day in 2010, Bitcoin experienced its first network downtime event due to the Value Overflow Incident (CVE-2010-5139). The bug occurred because there was no check to prevent sending excessively large values. Bitcoin's founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, posted a code update to fix the issue about five hours after it was discovered.

What's happening

• Bitcoin mining difficulty drops 4.19%. Bitcoin mining difficulty adjusted down to 86.87T after reaching a new high two weeks ago.

• OpenSats announced new round of grants focused on Bitcoin Core. The latest grantees include contributors @tdb3, @davidgumberg, @hodlinator, and the Bitcoin Core App project.
  • Start contributing to Bitcoin Core by exploring the good first issue list or available changes. For newcomers, the "Contributing to Bitcoin Core" readme is a good entry point. Join PR Review Club sessions, or apply for Summer of Bitcoin or a Chaincode Program to get started.
• 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.
• 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.
• Coin Cointer shared a couple of legal victories for bitcoin users in the United States:

1. 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.
2. Additionally, the IRS has released a new draft tax reporting form for cryptocurrency brokers, which no longer includes the "unhosted wallet provider" designation. This change follows Coin Center's protest in their regulatory comment last fall.

• 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.

• 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.

Use the tools

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Stacker.news integrated support for P2P non-custodial zaps, LNBits receiving, and sats filter.
• 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.
• Alby Hub v1.5.3 is a 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.
• Clams Remote v2.3.0 adds a plugins dashboard, a UI for the CLBOSS plugin, fixes on-chain validation issues, and more.
• Citrine v0.4.0, a local Nostr relay for Android devices, added a settings page.
• lontivero released a C# library for SLIP-0039, SatoshiLabs' Shamir's Secret-Sharing for Mnemonic Codes.

Other stuff

• 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.
• Lightning Labs shared the latest edition of its newsletter, filled with Lightning Network updates, community coverage, and, most importantly, memes.
• Robin Linus publicized a paper on BitVM bridges - a novel and trust-minimized protocol to bridge bitcoins to second layers.

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