Good Morning, Bitcoin - Tuesday, September 3rd, 2024

GM. Hoping you're having a great Tuesday. Here are some of the latest items and talking points that have been making headlines and circulating on socials.

What's new

• Re-launch of the Bitcoin Product Community. "After a year hiatus, we are excited to re-launch our community activities with a series of interviews focused on Bitcoin product contributors whom we connected to Bitcoin projects last year," announced the project.

• The project also announced a regular learning club around product-related materials. The first session will discuss Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. It will take place on September 19th from 13:30-14:30 UTC on Discord.
• August was the worst month of 2024 in terms of profitability for bitcoin miners, reports Atlas21. In August, miners' revenue hit $827.56 million—a 10.5% drop from July’s $927.35 million but 5% higher than August 2023. Compared to $1.93 billion in March 2024, it's a 57% decline. Miners produced 13,843 BTC in August, down from 14,725 BTC in July, mostly due to lower transaction volumes and increased mining difficulty. Transaction fees accounted for just about 2% of the block reward last month.

• Nine bitcoin miners stop operating in Paraguay following power fee hikes. The National Electricity Administration (ANDE) suspended multiple mining operations due to non-payment of their invoices following new financial policies raising miner energy costs by 9-16%. Fernando Arriola of the Paraguayan Fintech Chamber warned this could render the country irrelevant in the industry. Some companies are already considering relocating to Brazil.
  • The country has managed to attract over 60 bitcoin mining sites in the last three years. ANDE generates some ~$12 million a month from mining activities.
• Galaxy Digital to aid bankrupt bitcoin miner Rhodium. Rhodium Enterprises, a distressed bitcoin miner with 5.6 EH/s under management, received court approval for a loan of up to $30 million in cash or 500 BTC from Galaxy Digital. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on August 25th and sought debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing. The DIP loan carries a 14.5% interest rate for cash or 9.5% for a bitcoin loan, a novel approach in bankruptcy cases.
• WazirX customers to lose at least 43% of funds held at the exchange. The Indian exchange users may lose over 40% of their funds after a $234 million hack in July. George Gwee of restructuring firm Kroll informed journalists that the best-case scenario is a return of 55% to 57% of the funds.
• Telegram holds $400m worth of cryptocurrency. A Financial Times report shows the messaging platform earned $342.5 million in 2023 but had a $108 million operating loss. About 40% of revenue came from digital assets, with $130 million from the integrated wallet and $17.8 million from collectible sales. Telegram holds nearly $400 million in digital assets on its balance sheet, over half of its $774.2 million in total assets.

• Qatar has released a regulatory framework for digital assets. The Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) in Doha has introduced a regulatory framework for digital assets amid rising cryptocurrency activities in the region.

"The QFC Digital Assets Framework 2024 establishes the legal and regulatory foundation for digital assets, including the process of tokenization, legal recognition of property rights in tokens and their underlying assets, custody arrangements, transfer, and exchange.  The framework also provides for the legal recognition of smart contracts," QFC said on Sunday.

• Binance's Head of Compliance detained in Nigeria seeks bail on health grounds. Detained Binance executive Tigran Gambaryan appeared limping in an Abuja courtroom, denied a wheelchair by prison authorities. He sought bail on medical grounds, but the request was opposed. Gambaryan, along with Nadeem Anjarwalla and Binance, faces charges of laundering $35 million and separate tax evasion accusations.

“Nigerian Prison Official Abandons Binance Executive To Struggle In Pains In Court Premises As He Begs for Help ” pic.twitter.com/q8GhvIluNq

— Oyindamola🙄 (@dammiedammie35) September 2, 2024

"My husband was unlawfully detained by the Nigerian government after being invited under false pretenses for a meeting in their country. During this prolonged imprisonment, his health continues to deteriorate, and now, he is in so much pain that he can barely walk. The U.S. Government must do more to help Tigran," Gambaryan’s wife Yuki said.

• Swan customers targeted in a phishing campaign. Some users reported receiving fake 'Data Breach Notice' emails. The company's CEO Cory Klippsten said that it is likely a result from the 2022 Klaviyo/HubSpot hacks.

Use the tools

• Core Lightning (CLN) v24.08 has been officially announced. BOLT12 offers now support self-payments and blinded paths. The pay plugin has enhanced capacity checks, error handling, and logging. Renepay plugin updates include a probability cost function and exclude option for better routing control. The update also brings improvements in I/O optimization, documentation, gossipd, and reckless.
• noStrudel v0.40.0 is here. It brings NIP-49 encrypted nsec support, blindspot feeds that show what others are seeing in their timeline, NIP-42 relay authentication, WASM relay and event verification, threaded tabs, support for Wiki articles, Blossom uploads, task manager, and finishes the platform's launchpad.

• Amethyst v0.90.6 implements a zap amount fix on profile zaps, along with a few other improvements.
• BlueWallet v7.0.3 adds a camera flip image feature, the ability to hide balance and delete wallets from the Manage Screen, and several fixes.
• Nuts.Cash is an experimental ecash web wallet that saves your proofs in the Nostr protocol, meaning that if you have a Nostr account, you can use it to login to Nuts.Cash and access your nuts.
• Tankred Hase introduced StashPay, a personal Bitcoin wallet for freelancers and digital nomads built on Lightning and Liquid with Liquid SDK by Breez. It integrates with Zaprite, and is available for testing on iOS TestFlight.
• Bitkey App now lets you view the current Bitcoin price and historical performance in the app. Firmware updates now include a link to view the release notes.
• Citrine v0.4.3, a local Nostr relay for Android, now allows changing NIP-11 information in the settings.
• 0xchat v1.3.2 fixes several issues and adds a "remove photo" feature for profile settings.
• Angor is a crowdfunding platform built on Bitcoin and Nostr. You can test it here.
• Bee Evolved announced M.O.E.M. (Mining Operation Environmental Monitor), a device that provides comprehensive monitoring for mining operations' environments.

• shinigami is a Bitcoin Script library for generic Script VM execution in Cairo, enabling the generation of STARK proofs for Bitcoin Script computation and Bitcoin transaction execution.

Other stuff

• Peter Todd compiled a comprehensive overview of soft-fork and covenant-dependent layer 2 proposals, including Ark, LN-Symmetry, Validity Rollups, BitVM, CTV, SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT, LNHANCE, OP_TXHASH, OP_CAT, Consensus Cleanup, and others.

• Reticulum MeshChat is a simple mesh network communications app powered by the Reticulum Network Stack.
• Greg Walker wrote a basic introduction to Schnorr Signatures in Bitcoin.

• What did we miss? DM us on Nostr.
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