Good Morning, Bitcoin - Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024

What's happening

• Bitcoin mining difficulty has reached a new all-time high. It increased by 3.9% to 95.67T at block height 866,880, amid a record seven-day moving average of approximately 724 EH/s.

• New Spiral grantee: Spacebear. Spacebear is working on the Payjoin Dev Kit (PDK). The goal of the library is to provide an easy-to-use SDK that other applications can use to implement Payjoin in a straightforward manner, enhancing privacy, fungibility, and scalability in Bitcoin.
• Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) invested $25M to support FOSS projects. STF announced it has invested nearly $25 million (€23 million) in 60 global open-source technologies over the past two years. During this time, it received over 500 submissions proposing more than €114 million in estimated work.
• Coinbase is investigating Operation Chokepoint 2.0. The exchange has submitted a new set of FOIA requests to the FDIC. The company seeks access to documents about an alleged 15% limit on cryptocurrency clients that supposedly came into effect in 2022. Coinbase already has FOIA requests being reviewed by the courts, but this latest batch is more targeted.

• Encrypted chat app Session leaves Australia. 404 Media reports that Session is moving operations out of Australia after federal agents questioned an employee at their home about the app and a user. "There was no warrant used or meeting organized; they just went into their apartment complex and knocked on their front door," said Alex Linton, president of the newly formed Session Technology Foundation (STF). The app will now be managed from Switzerland but will still function in Australia.

"Ultimately, we were given the choice between remaining in Australia or relocating to a more privacy-friendly jurisdiction, such as Switzerland. For the project to continue, it could not be centred in Australia."

• Bitcoin miner Ionic Digital holds 2102 BTC, revives IPO plan. The rebranded Bitcoin mining unit from bankrupt crypto lender Celsius plans to go public after securing a new auditor. Ionic Digital's recent update reported holding 2,102 BTC and producing 107 .54 BTC in September, after deducting hosting fees.
• Russian miner BitRiver to expand to BRICS countries. The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and BitRiver have formed a partnership to introduce AI projects and build Bitcoin mining data centers in BRICS countries. BitRiver operates 21 data centers in Russia.
• ZeroSync announces BitVM Alliance. "Excited to announce the formation of the BitVM Alliance! Together, we're joining forces to deliver the first BitVM Bridges by the end of the year. Stay tuned," said the project.

• Peter Todd forced to lay low following the HBO documentary claiming he's Satoshi Nakamoto. The developer told WIRED he expects that "continued harassment by crazy people" will become the indefinite status quo, and that the potential personal safety implications are his chief concern.

"Obviously, falsely claiming that ordinary people of ordinary wealth are extraordinarily rich exposes them to threats like robbery and kidnapping. Not only is the question dumb, it's dangerous. Satoshi obviously didn't want to be found, for good reasons, and no one should help people trying to find Satoshi," said Todd.

• 10101 reminds users to close positions. The Bitcoin-powered wallet and self -custodial trading app reminds users to close any remaining positions as the app is set to cease operations on November 3rd.
• Liquid Network undergoes a rebrand. The open -source federated Bitcoin sidechain and layer-2 solution announced a new logo and a user-friendly website with dedicated sections for Liquid developers, enterprises, users, and merchants.

• The Liquid Federation and Blockstream are hosting a three-day coding bootcamp in Viareggio, Italy, from October 28-30th. Learn more about it here.
• Bitcoin Ireland Conference 2025 to take place on May 24, 2025. The Early Bird tickets are available here.

Use the tools

• River launches Bitcoin Interest on Cash product. The firm has teamed up with Lead Bank to launch Bitcoin Interest on Cash product, allowing users to earn bitcoin or USD interest on their cash deposits.

• Musqet payment terminals now support Bolt card payments. "Congratulations to Musqet on being the first dual currency (BTC & GBP) payment terminal to support Bolt Card payments," said the Bolt Card project.
• Wavlake v1.1.0, a value-for-value music streaming app, introduces Top Up feature, allowing users to earn rewards for listening to promoted content.
• BraiinsOS v24.09 brings full support for Antminer S21 Pro and beta support for Antminer S21 XP. It also delivers refined power estimations, expanded underclocking capabilities, and optimized DPS removing unwanted tunings.
• Electrum wallet v4.5.7 implements Bitfinex and Bitstamp as new historical exchange rate providers, and a race condition fix for Lightning that may result in channel force-closure when sending a payment soon after reestablishing the channel.
• Nunchuk Desktop v1.9.39 comes with some bug fixes and improvements.
• FOSSA Bitcoin ATM v1.1 by LNbits features on-chain and Liquid withdrawals via trustless swaps, an easy web installer, and support for LNaddress and invoices.

• Boltz Client v2.1.11 release includes a hot fix for a crash on client startup.
• Openvibe v1.3.8, an app for connecting multiple open social media networks into a single timeline, adds network tags on timelines, Bluesky video support, and media multipick for new posts.
• Nostream v2.1.0 Nostr relay implementation has been released.
• Tor Browser v14.0 is here. It is the first stable release based on Firefox ESR 128, incorporating a year's worth of changes shipped upstream in Firefox. It also introduces New circuit for this site feature on Android, along with many other security and privacy enhancements.

Other stuff

• Openoms put together a quick guide on using an initialized Satochip smart card with Sparrow Wallet.
• Jesse Shrader has written an article about Lightning Network metrics that actually matter.

"Traditional metrics like node count, channel count, and capacity have been used to assess the Lightning Network, but they only tell part of the story. To truly understand the performance of this second-layer solution, we need to focus on flow—specifically, Max Flow, a metric with a long history of optimizing complex systems," writes the author.

• stacker.news user flat24 warns about a Lightning P2P bot scam that has affected several users.
• coinduition wrote a deep-dive into post-quantum hash-based signatures for post-quantum Bitcoin.
• Atlas21 published an easy-to-follow, cross-platform guide on how to verify software wallet signatures.
• Bitcoin Illustrated explains the benefits of BIP-114 MAST (Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees).

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