Good Morning, Bitcoin - Wednesday, November 27th, 2024

GM. "It's a clown-eat-clown world out there." - Gigi

What's new

• U.S. Appeals Court overturns sanctions against Tornado Cash. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) exceeded its authority by adding Tornado Cash to its Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) List.

"We hold that Tornado Cash’s immutable smart contracts (the lines of privacy-enabling software code) are not the 'property' of a foreign national or entity, meaning (1) they cannot be blocked under IEEPA, and (2) OFAC overstepped its congressionally defined authority," ruled the three-judge panel at the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court.

• Samourai Wallet prosecutor Damian Williams to step down. Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash prosecutor Damian Williams will step down in December. Edward Y. Kim, the current Deputy United States Attorney, will take over as Acting United States Attorney upon his departure. President-elect Trump has announced his intention to nominate Jay Clayton, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to lead the office.
• Brazilian lawmaker proposes Bitcoin reserve bill. Congressman Eros Biondini has introduced the 'Reserva Estratégica Soberana de Bitcoins (RESBit)' bill. The proposal aims to allocate up to 5% of Brazil's approximately $372 billion in international reserves to Bitcoin through a phased acquisition strategy.
• Morocco prepares law to allow cryptocurrencies. A draft law regulating cryptocurrencies is currently being introduced in Morocco, announced by Central Bank Governor Abdellatif Jouahri. Despite the 2017 ban on Bitcoin and other digital assets, the public continues to use them covertly to bypass restrictions.
• Trump team may shift Bitcoin regulation to CFTC. According to Fox Business, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) may expand its role to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges and spot markets handling digital assets classified as commodities, such as bitcoin and ether.
• Blockstream Research verifies libsecp256k1’s modular inverse function. "Blockstream is the first to formally verify the safegcd algorithm, used in libsecp256k1, strengthening the security and reliability of Bitcoin and Liquid, and obtaining the highest possible software correctness guarantees," announced the company. This work provides further evidence that verification of C code is possible in practice.
• Swan customers charged up to $125 Fortress 'Admin Fee.' The company said it will cover up to $250 of user purchase fees in the first half of 2025 for the affected users.

Use the tools

• BlueWallet v7.0.5 is out. It comes with a variety of new goodies, including offline import support, CoinControl sorting, notification shortcuts, and more.
• LifPay introduces reusable payment QR codes with fixed amounts. It allows users to create a QR code with a fixed amount that can be scanned and reused multiple times. "From what we know, no other Lightning Wallet has introduced this functionality yet," said the project.

• Phoenix wallet Android v2.4.4 is a bug fix release addressing a crash when navigating to the Payment options menu.
  • Phoenix wallet iOS v2.4.3 introduces a redesigned UI for scanning and sending payments and adds a button to spend funds from the final wallets.
• BitBox Wallet app v4.46.3 is a patch release for Linux machines that fixes camera access issues.
• Stashpay wallet v0.1.5 has been released. The app's code is now open-source (GPL-3.0 license) and is available here.
• Torq v2.1.0, an advanced Lightning node management software, has been released. This release packages the bitcoind wallet as a node type, meaning that Torq now has on-chain wallet support for CLN, LND, and bitcoind. It also introduces UTXO locking management, improved transaction output visualizations, the Torq gRPC feature (beta), and more.
• Cashu TypeScript library v2.0.0 for building Cashu wallets is now available.

"This update brings a lot of new features, along with huge DX improvements for implementers. Please make sure to read the migration docs carefully when upgrading. Thanks to everyone that participated in this release," was stated in the release notes.

• Nos v1.0.2 is now available on TestFlight. It fixes several typos and a crash when tapping the Post button on macOS.
• Keychat app v1.21.6 brings support for large groups via OpenMLS Integration, enables ecash payments for ChatGPT-4o and ChatGPT-4o-mini interactions on a pay-per-message basis, and adopts NIP-17 "to send Signal hello messages and use new signature scheme."
• Money printer go brrrrr at brrr.gandlaf.com now lets users distribute ecash tokens over Nostr.

• Bullish Bulletin is a Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC)-powered bulletin board for posting all sorts of messages.
• Tor Browser v14.0.3 includes important security updates from Firefox.

Other stuff

• Luke Childs has written a proposal for a self-custodial credit system that sits in front of an existing ecash mint.
• The latest issue Bitcoin Design Newsletter (#68) is now available.
• PlebDevs Starter Course is a free introductory course for absolute beginners looking to pick up basic coding and web development skills.
• TABConf has published the first talk from TABConf 6 event, covering the production impact of FROST.

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