Good Morning, Bitcoin - Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024

What's happening

• Senior leadership changes at Coin Center. Executive Director Jerry Brito and Senior Policy Counsel Robin Weisman will step down by year-end but will remain on the board. Peter Van Valkenburgh will be the new Executive Director starting January 1, with Landon Zinda as the new Policy Director.
• Musqet secures £750k in funding round led by Axiom. Musqet, a UK Bitcoin payments business, raised £750k led by Axiom and UK-based angel investors to expand Bitcoin payments via the Lightning Network.
• Concerns over Australian misinformation bill. The Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee will review the bill until November 25. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland previously stated that censoring misinformation is necessary to protect democracy.

"This Bill threatens to create a dangerous precedent where any critical discourse, especially on Bitcoin and the financial sector, could be labeled as disinformation, resulting in unjustified censorship," said Bayani Mills, Secretary & Acting-CEO of Australian Bitcoin Industry Body.

• Metaplanet buys 107.9 bitcoin. The latest purchase brings the company's total bitcoin holdings to 506.7 BTC, worth approximately $30 million.
• Ohio senator introduces bill to legalize bitcoin for state taxes. Senator Niraj Antani has introduced a bill to legalize Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency payments for taxes and fees in Ohio, promoting wider adoption of Bitcoin in state and local government transactions.
• The Netherlands say No to Chat Control. The Dutch government, after consulting its Intelligence & Security Agency, believes the cyber resilience risks of the EU CSAM proposal are too high (English translation available here).

• Colombia implicates Financial Intelligence Unit in Pegasus scandal. The Egmont Group, an international network for financial intelligence sharing, has suspended Colombia from its platform amid an investigation into whether information on the alleged purchase of Pegasus Spyware was shared with the country's FIU, reports The Rage.
• Gemini to close operations in Canada. The exchange's decision follows new Canadian regulations for crypto exchanges. As of February 22, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) require platforms to sign a pre-registration undertaking (PRU) and restrict exchanges from allowing Canadians to buy or deposit stablecoins without CSA approval.
• Value-for-value music. Frank Corva writes that artists earn more in bitcoin by sharing their songs on platforms like Wavlake and Fountain than through traditional currencies on slave tech platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.

Use the tools

• Volt Wallet v0.4.5-beta.1, a mobile descriptor-based 'Financial Freedom Wallet' that focuses on self-custody, privacy and sleek UI/UX, has been released with numerous fixes and updates.
• Blitz Wallet v0.2.9-beta introduces the ability to purchase gift cards with Bitcoin directly in the app. It also includes theme updates, an improved camera, and general stability enhancements.
• Zeus v0.9.1-beta1 is now available for testing. Be among the first to check out BOLT 11 blinded paths, the ability to spend full UTXOs, and more.
• Blockstream Green Wallet Desktop v2.0.12 comes with improved address verification using Jade on redeposits.
  • Blockstream Green Wallet Android v4.0.35 introduces the ability to verify addresses with a hardware wallet during 2FA reactivation.
• Alby Hub is now available for node runners on both StartOS and UmbrelOS.
• Minibits v0.1.9-beta, a mobile ecash wallet focused on performance and usability, includes significant performance improvements for cryptographic operations, a redesigned main wallet screen, theme support, ecash storage reliability and stability improvements, and various bug fixes.
• bullishNuts v0.0.80 comes with refactored Lightning send flow. Try it out here.

• Nunchuk Desktop v1.9.38 delivers refactored sign-in flow, HWI v3.1.0, and various bug fixes and improvements.
• BitBox Wallet App v4.44.1 is a patch release that fixes a few minor UI issues found in v4.44.0. This latter adds the ability to sell Bitcoin via Pocket in the BitBox App and includes automatic detection of microSD cards.

• Fedimint Observer, a Fedimint Federation Explorer, aims to become the "mempool.space for Fedimint." Due to the privacy properties of Fedimint, it won't be able to show concrete transaction flows, but transfers in and out of single federations are visible.
• Ginger Wallet v2.0.12 update introduces label recovery, client-side remix checks, and expanded support for a wider range of compatible hardware wallets.
  • Ginger Wallet is a fork of Wasabi Wallet with a hardcoded coordinator that sends all coinjoin input transactions to a chain surveillance partner.
• Kyoto v0.3.0, a simple, memory-conservative, and private Bitcoin client for developers to build wallet applications, has been released.
• Sphinx-Tribes Backend v0.1.54 has been released.
• Search Relay is a NIP-50 full text search relay using Elasticsearch as backend.
• 0xchat v1.3.4-beta brings the message jump feature for replies, search, and paginated message loading. It also introduces encryption for audio and videos in DMs/private groups before uploading, support for custom Blossom servers, and the ability to preload group messages before joining.
• Coracle v0.4.11 is a minor release that introduces NIP-55 (Amber) support for the Android client.
• Amber v2.0.4, a Nostr event signer for Android, is now available.
  • NOTE: If you are updating from version 1.3.7 or lower you will need to first backup your accounts, uninstall the old version and install the new version.
• ONOSENDAI is an experimental Nostr client that visualizes the protocol in 3D space. It aims to be the reference implementation of a cyberspace protocol, powered by Bitcoin and Nostr.
  • Try it at: https://www.onosendai.tech/.
• Nostrmo v2.9.1, a Flutter Nostr client for Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, Web, and Linux, comes with a bunch of fixes and improvements.
• Nostur v1.16.0, a Nostr client for Apple devices, brings Nostr Nest integration, live streams, and many more improvements.
• Dart Nostr Development Kit v0.1.1 has been released.
• Yana v0.15.2 is a minor bugfix release that fixes crashing caused by a missing background_service.
• Arti v1.2.8 adds numerous new features for onion service key management and continues backend development for memory quota support, relay support, and the RPC subsystem.
• Invincible Privacy Group, a project dedicated to funding Bitcoin privacy development, removed pools feature.

Other stuff

• The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute published an update on what has been added to the website in August and September.
• In case you haven't seen the PACE hearing on Julian Assange's detention and conviction, you can watch it here.

• Waxwing shared a 4-minute long demo video on how to verify a 'private proof of assets' using a desktop app.

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