Good Morning, Bitcoin - Wednesday, August 28th, 2024

GM. Today is Wednesday, August 28th, 2024 - a day to remember Hal Finney, who passed away on this day in 2014. So here's the latest about the greatest. We know your time is scarce, and we're here to help you maximize it.

What's happening

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

• Simply Bitcoin is back on YouTube. The popular Bitcoin channel was reinstated following an appeal, as the platform decided it does not violate Community Guidelines. "Thank you to everyone that supported us and tagged YouTube to get us back," said the media company.
• 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.

• 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.

Use the tools

• The first release candidate for Bitcoin Core v28.0 is here. Check out the v28.0 release notes draft to see what's coming.
• 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.

• 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.

• 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.
• Boltz Client v2.1.4 fixes an issue with when creating a submarine swap with an invoice which has magic routing hints.
• 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.
• SimpleX Chat v6.0.3 fixes a rare delivery bug.
• Lightning Bounties project (still in beta) automatically pays code contributors in bitcoin for their valuable contributions to open-source projects.

Other stuff

• Legendary social network architect Rabble delivered an insightful speech on the past, present, and future of the Nostr protocol.

• What did we miss? DM us on Nostr.
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