Good Morning, Bitcoin - Thursday, September 19th, 2024

GM. Here are some of the latest updates we have for you. Have a fulfilling and productive Thursday.

"No, you can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough." - Aaron Swartz

What's happening

• Bitcoin-only exchange River has launched Proof of Reserves. This feature allows clients to verify that their bitcoin holdings on the platform are fully reserved. You can view River's reserves here.
  • "Our tool empowers all our clients to verify our reserves regardless of technical ability while providing more advanced users the tools they need to run in-depth local verification (see the code on Github here)," writes CEO Alexander Leishman in a blog post.

Here's a quick video on how it works:

• Louisiana State Government accepts first bitcoin payment. Louisiana residents can now pay for state services from their private bitcoin (on-chain and via Lightning) and USDC wallets, although the state will immediately convert all payments to USD via Bead Pay. The first payment via Lightning was made yesterday to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to acquire a hunting license.
• Geyser stops serving conflicting regions. Bitcoin crowdfunding platform Geyser announced it has stopped serving conflicting regions. The platform stated that "it wasn't an easy decision," adding that "the movement of funds is increasingly a point of scrutiny."

"We do not custody, administer, or control any funds contributed to the projects at any time. Additionally, we aim to avoid the possibility of these funds falling into the wrong hands. Accepting and listing such projects could necessitate implementing increasingly intrusive measures to verify the identities of creators, which we prefer to avoid," added the project.

• Affected regions include sanctioned countries such as Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Iran, Russia, as well as Palestine, Ukraine, and Yemen.
• US Bitcoin ETFs reported net outflows of $52.83 million on Wednesday. Ark & 21Shares’ ARKB experienced the largest net outflow at $43.41 million. Only Grayscale’s Bitcoin Mini Trust reported a net inflow of $2.66 million, while the remaining eight funds, including BlackRock’s IBIT, saw no daily flows, writes The Block.
• CleanSpark acquired two bitcoin mining sites in Mississippi. The miner announced that it has agreed to acquire two sites near Clinton, Mississippi, for $5.7 million. These sites have a combined capacity of 16.5 megawatts (MW).
• Merkle Standard is expanding to Memphis, Tennessee. The North American Bitcoin mining firm has secured a contract from the city-owned utility company Memphis Light, Gas & Water (MLGW) for a power supply of up to 45 MW. The contract took effect on August 1, 2024, reports The Miner Mag.

Use the tools

• Liana v7.0 is out. It focuses on enhancing the user experience, especially in wallet setup. It introduces Electrum support for self-sovereign use and Liana Connect for easy bootstrapping. Additionally, it now works with new signing devices, implements fee sniping protection, and delivers a variety of other user-requested features and fixes.
• Sparrow Wallet v2.0.0 introduces the ability to recover SLIP39 shares, support for Trezor Safe 5, Ledger Stax, and Ledger Flex, and an update to Java and JavaFX 22, among many other improvements.
• Coracle v0.4.10 is out. It's mostly a maintenance release with lots of performance and some visual improvements. It also includes a large refactor to use @welshman/app utilities, which may be helpful for aspiring Nostr client developers, said hodlbod.
• SimpleX Chat v6.1-beta0 is testing support for SOCKS proxies both in iOS (via TestFlight) and Android (via Github releases).

• GrapheneOS v2024091700 has been released with a number of updates and improvements.
• ngit v1.5.0, a command-line tool for code collaboration over Nostr, brings a new Nostr URL format that should work better for macOS users, status updates during clone, push, and fetch, and intelligent Git protocol selection during fallback, among other things.
• Keychat App v1.19.10 is a bugfix release for medium groups.
• Coop v0.2.0, a Nostr-based direct message client for desktop, is out with some UI, stability, and performance improvements.
• Voltz Swap Out service by Voltz Wallet has been launched. It lets you swap your sats in ecash or Lightning directly to your on-chain Bitcoin wallet.
  • "If you’re a node runner, you can use Voltz Swap Out to open inbound liquidity without needing to buy channels or to get on-chain funds to sell channels," said the developer.
• BoardWalk Cash v0.3.2 patches issues with cross-mint swaps.
• ShockWallet v0.0.11-beta delivers some fixes and improvements.
• SimLN v0.2.3, a payment activity generator for the Lightning Network developers, has been tagged.
• GDK v0.73.0 is the latest (pre)release version for the Blockstream Green Development Kit.
• Strike launched Smash Buy Target Orders and Outgoing Wires.

Other stuff

• waxwing wrote a blog post demonstrating proof of being a sats millionaire without revealing where the funds are on-chain, using privacy-preserving proof of Taproot assets.
• Parman announced BitVotr, a P2P protocol for running elections. "Voters can vote from the privacy and comfort of their homes with their computer, and can verify the total count is correct and their own vote has been counted," he said.
• Arjen Stens shared a quick update on his work with CI/CD on Nostr. Watch the video on Flare.pub.
• Nomad Network is a tool for off-grid, resilient mesh communications with strong encryption, forward secrecy, and extreme privacy.

• What did we miss? DM us on Nostr.
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