Good Morning, Bitcoin - Friday, August 30th, 2024

GM. It is Friday, August 30th, 2024, and the last weekend of summer 2024 is upon us. Enjoy it and make the best of your time.

What's new

• 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.
• A solo Bitcoin miner does 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Use the tools

• 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.

• COLDCARD launched a dedicated partners page for those seeking help setting up their secure cold storage. Check it out here.
• 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.
• 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.
• Alby Hub added subaccounts, enabling Alby Hub runners can easily run a custodial "Uncle Jim" service and provide instant NWC wallets to new Lightning and Nostr users.

Other stuff

• Tails, a portable operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship, released a report for July 2024, highlighting all the notable developments for the project.
• 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.
• 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.

• What did we miss? DM us on Nostr.
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