Good Morning, Bitcoin - Friday, September 6th, 2024

GM and happy Friday. Grateful for all the support and kind words we've received lately. Use freedom protocols and tools. Support the developers. Mind your security. Live free.

What's new

• Only three examples of 'illicit Tornado Cash use' were cited by the US Treasury. In an appeal hearing on Tuesday, U.S. Circuit Judge Kurt Engelhardt noted that, out of millions of transactions, the agency found only three instances of money laundering using Tornado Cash, questioning why the existing designations for North Korea were insufficient to achieve the agency's purpose, reports Law360. U.S. Circuit Judge Edith Jones also expressed skepticism about the Treasury's categorization of Tornado Cash as sanctionable entity, noting that North Korea could still use the protocol, regardless of whether the sanctions were in place or not.
  • In fact, just earlier this week, there were reports that the hacker entity which stole over $230 million in user assets from the Indian crypto exchange WazirX started to move funds through Tornado Cash in an attempt to obfuscate the trail of funds.
• Telegram changes private group rules as Durov comes out with a public statement. On Thursday night, Telegram expanded its moderation to private chats. Users can now "flag illegal content" for review in these chats, as stated on its updated FAQ page. Previously, Telegram treated private groups as off-limits.

• At the same time, Telegram founder Pavel Durov made his first public statement following his arrest in France. He referred to the arrest as surprising, noting that French authorities had "numerous ways to reach [him] to request assistance." He also announced a personal goal to improve moderation on the platform.

"We are prepared to leave markets that aren’t compatible with our principles, because we are not doing this for money. We are driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated. But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports. We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster. However, we hear voices saying that it’s not enough. That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon," Durov said.

• Mercuryo launches a Bitcoin debit Mastercard for payments from personal wallets. The euro-denominated Spend card, issued by Quicko, bridges personal use wallets and traditional payment rails and comes with additional KYC and AML verification. Spend supports spending with over 40 cryptocurrencies at over 100 million merchants in the Mastercard network, converting funds to fiat automatically.
  • "At Mastercard, we are working closely with partners to innovate and enhance the self-custody wallet experience," said Christian Rau, senior vice president of Mastercard’s crypto and fintech division. According to a recent blog post, Mastercard works facilitate self-custody experiences because many users want to avoid centralized exchanges in the first place.
• The UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) approved 47 out of 359 'cryptoasset businesses' in the last four years. "We have rejected submissions that didn’t include key components necessary for us to carry out an assessment, or the poor quality of key components meant the submission was invalid," said the agency.

• Blockstream Mining is raising third round for its hashrate token. The hashrate-backed note lets investors lock in the hashprice for up to four years. Priced at $31,000, it gives investors a share of the bitcoin produced by the mining company. The first two rounds of the BMN notes raised a total of around $7 million, reports CoinDesk.
• bitcoin++ news. The eCash edition is set to take place in Berlin on October 11-13 at w3 hub. The event date has been moved back one day. The Hack + Beach edition will take place in Florianopolis, Feb 19-22, 2025 (no venue yet). The Mempools edition is set to happen in Austin, Texas May 7 - 9, 2025 at the Palmer Event Center. Secure your tickets here.

Use the tools

• Lipa Wallet iOS v0.6.29 is here. Lipa is a user-friendly, self-custodial Lightning wallet designed for simplicity and ease of use. The latest release adds support for telephone numbers (allowing you to send Bitcoin to your contacts via phone numbers), the ability to connect to a local address book, improved customer feedback, as well as bug fixes and other improvements.
  • The Lipa Wallet is currently available in Europe, with a global rollout planned. An Android app release is also in the making.

• Fountain v1.1.2 is now live on iOS and Android. It comes with a many bug fixes and improvements around the project's recent Nostr integration.
• RGB v0.11 beta 8 marks the start of the pre-release code freeze for the project. The new beta comes with a several bug fixes and completion of previous epics related to the data persistence and better eltoo support. You can read all about it here.
• DLC Dev Kit in an application tool kit that makes it easier to build DLC apps with rust-dlc and BDK. Application developers just need to plug in their own components for communication, contract storage, and oracle clients, and DLC Dev Kit handles the rest, writes the developer.

• Orqestra is a regulated tool for bitcoin business operators that allows them to convert a portion of their sales revenue to bitcoin.
• strfry v0.9.7 and v1.0.0-beta2 have been released. The former brings bug fixes and other changes that accumulated in master branch, including a "strfry export --fried" feature that can be used to create DB exports that can be rapidly imported in the v1.0.0 series releases. The latter is a release candidate for  strfry v1.0.0. Help is needed with testing, said the developer.
• Ginger Wallet v2.0.11, a fork of Wasabi Wallet that screens CoinJoin input transactions via a chain surveillance company, added 2FA functionality with an option to apply local encryption to wallet files when 2FA is enabled.
• lnwCash is a free and open-source Cashu wallet (and progressive web app) over Nostr, utilizing NIP-60 and nutzaps (NIP-61). Support the project's development here.
• Coinos.io, a custodial yet free and open-source Bitcoin, Lightning and Liquid web wallet with Nostr integration, added eCash support via the Cashu protocol.

• Yeghro.site provides a simple tool for unfollowing inactive npubs on Nostr.
• SimpleX Chat v6.0.4 aims to reduce traffic and battery usage on unstable networks.
• CalyxOS, a privacy-friendly mobile OS for Android devices, released a September security update.

Other stuff

• Bitcoin Optech #319 covers a proposal for allowing Stratum v2 pool miners to receive compensation for the transaction fees contained in the block templates they turn into shares, a research fund investigating OP_CAT, and a discussion about mitigating Merkle tree vulnerabilities with or without a soft fork.
• Bitvocation published a Bitcoin Job Market update for August 2024. Get the latest insights here.

• The Human Rights Foundation published its Weekly Financial Freedom report #39.
• Bitcoin Magazine published an exclusive interview with Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, where she discusses Bitcoin as a lifeline for Venezuelans.

• What did we miss? DM us on Nostr.
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