Good Morning, Bitcoin - Thursday, September 5th, 2024

GM, 58K gang. Today is Thursday, September 5th, 2024, and here's your daily Bitcoin news roundup.

What's new

• Business adoption of Bitcoin grew 30% in a year. A report by River finds that businesses hold 3.3% of Bitcoinʼs total supply, or 683,332 BTC, as of August 18, 2024. It has grown by 587% since June 30th, 2020, and by 30% in the last twelve months.

• The report finds that five companies—MicroStrategy, Block.one, Tether, BitMEX, and Xapo—hold a total of 559,000 BTC, which accounts for 82% of all corporate holdings. Based on publicly available information, private companies hold at least 23,000 BTC more than public ones.
• The number of publicly traded companies with Bitcoin holdings grew by 40% from September 2023 to August 2024.
• River estimates that "business bitcoin holdings will grow at a rate of between 204 and 519 BTC per day until the year 2026, equivalent to a range of $12.2 million and $31.1 million per day at a $60,000 bitcoin price."

• Japan mulls tax cuts for digital assets. Japan's Financial Services Agency is considering taxing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as financial assets. Currently, crypto profits are taxed as income, with high earners facing up to 45%, while financial securities have a flat 20% capital gains tax.
• Nigerian court postpones decision on Gambaryan bail application. A Nigerian court deferred bail for Binance's Head of Compliance, Tigran Gambaryan, whose health has worsened since his jailing earlier this year, a family spokesperson told CoinDesk. The next hearing is set for October 9.
• Robinhood fined $3.9 million for not allowing cryptocurrency withdrawals. Between 2018 and 2022, Robinhood restricted cryptocurrency operations to buying and selling, without permitting customers to withdraw their digital assets. The California Department of Justice claims that this practice violated state commodity laws by allowing purchases but blocking direct ownership transfers.

• Actual Nostr billboard in the Netherlands. In what may a first, Nostr user Sebastix put up a real Nostr ad besides the A58 highway in The Netherlands. It will be displayed from September 2 to September 16, 2024. The campaign was inspired by Spiral's hypothetical 2024 hack week billboard project, and materials used are available here.
• Turkey's oldest exchange BtcTurk integrates Lightning Network. The exchange now supports both Lightning deposits and withdrawals. Withdrawals are currently free of charge, said the platform.
• Switzerland‘s fourth-largest bank launched Bitcoin trading. Zürcher Kantonalbank (ZKB) has launched bitcoin trading and custody services. The bank has partnered with Crypto Finance AG for trading and is developing an in-house solution for custody, reports Atlas21.
• Analyzing the relationship of Bitcoin price and hashrate. A report by Blockware Intelligence dives into the dynamic relationship between price and hashrate throughout the market cycle.

Use the tools

• Blixt Wallet v7.0.0 has been released. It updates LND to v0.18.2, fixes syncing issues in Neutrino SPV, adds new syncing nodes in different regions around the world, makes Lightning Box payable via <pubkey>@blixtwallet.com, adds a dropdown menu to Lightning channels screen and ability to hide amounts in the Overview screen. It also introduces support for fee bumping on channel openings, and Speedloader is now enabled by default for all new wallets.
• Fedi App v1.19.0 adds Tagalog language support, improves eCash UX when joined to multiple communities, and includes several bug fixes.
• Breez SDK Liquid v0.3.0 is here. This new release includes LNURL-Pay support, Go & C# bindings, background receive via mobile notifications, new API features, optimizations, and fixes.
• LNDK v0.2.0 now allows paying BOLT 12 offers with blinded paths. Users need to run the LNDK binary alongside LND to make payments. Instructions for the sending part can be found here.

• Arti v1.2.7, a next-generation Tor client in Rust, adds support for restricted discovery mode in Arti's hidden service implementation, and contains a number of bug fixes, cleanups, improvements, behind the scenes work on the RPC subsystem, DoS resistance, and relay infrastructure.
• Stacker.news issued a small release for detecting and displaying video links in a player, along with a few other fixes.
• Boltz Client v2.1.5, a tool for fully unattended channel rebalancing via Boltz API, is another patch release with some minor fixes and improvements.
• Amber v1.3.7, a nostr event signer for Android, fixes connection to the push notification server and adds more event descriptions.
• Alby Go - a simple mobile Lightning wallet interface and a companion app for Alby Hub users is now available for testing.
• GrapheneOS v2024090400 is a September security patch update for the privacy and security-focused mobile operating system.

Other stuff

• The Lightning Dev Kit team published a case study on how Alby Hub uses LDK to provide a self-custodial Lightning experience.
• Jameson Lopp his thoughts on why duress wallets are an unreliable defense against attackers.
• How to make Bitcoin more private with CISA? Check out this panel from Bitcoin 2024 here.

• What did we miss? DM us on Nostr.
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