Good Morning, Bitcoin - Thursday, November 28th, 2024

GM and Happy Thanksgiving! Here's what you might have missed lately.

What's new

• New Spiral grantee: Bob McElrath. The grant will aid his work on Braidpool, a decentralized mining pool that aims to address issues such as transaction selection, variance reduction, device monitoring, and mining payouts to enhance profitability and censorship resistance.
• Bitcoin Dev Kit Foundation Q4 grantee updates. Wei Chen is the new BDK's full-time Rust maintainer, Evan Lin continues as part-time Rust maintainer, and Nymius is a new project grantee working on Silent Payments and project maintenance. You can find all of the current BDK grantees here. Apply for 2025 at grants@bitcoindevkit.org.
• Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim proposes bitcoin as a city reserve asset. At a November 26 city council meeting, the mayor introduced a motion titled "Preserving the city’s purchasing power through diversification of financial resources: Becoming a Bitcoin-friendly city," which is set to be formally presented on December 11.
• Mara Holdings buys additional 703 BTC. The firm has acquired 6,474 bitcoin this month following the closing of its $1 billion offering of convertible notes, bringing its total holdings to 34,794 BTC, valued at ~$3.3 billion.

• Tether discontinues EURT stablecoin. The decision comes as the European Union's MiCA regulations come into effect by year-end. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has been a vocal critic of the new rules, and the company refused to obtain the necessary Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license to operate in the EU. Instead, Tether will focus on supporting new stablecoin initiatives, including recent investments in Quantoz and its tokenization platform, Hadron.

• BitBox partners with BTC Direct. The companies are working to introduce Private Trading services for high-net-worth individuals.
• The Tor Project calls for more WebTunnel bridges for users in Russia. Recent reports from Tor users in Russia reveal intensified online censorship efforts aimed at blocking access to Tor and other circumvention tools. In response, the Tor Project is calling the network users to deploy 200 new WebTunnel bridges by the end of December to ensure secure and reliable access for users in the region.
• Mining for Samourai. OCEAN Pool now allows miners to support Samourai Wallet's legal defense by donating rewards directly to the P2PRights fund. This initiative enables miners to contribute to the protection of digital rights and the ongoing legal efforts supporting privacy-focused tools.

Use the tools

• Amethyst v0.93.0 introduces support for displaying NIP-63 interactive stories, adds support for Blossom media servers and Olas' image feeds, and introduces Around Me feed, which is populated with location-based user posts.
• Rust Nostr v0.37.0 (Nostr SDK) is now available, featuring support for the NIP-17 relay list (when the gossip option is enabled). This release also adds support for NIP-22 and NIP-73, fixes issues with the Swift Package, and includes numerous performance improvements and bug fixes.
• Nostr PHP v1.5.1, a PHP helper library for Nostr, has been released.
• Blockstream Green iOS v4.1.0 introduces an option to buy bitcoin via meld.io.
• Envoy Wallet v1.8.5 fixes a couple of rare issues on iOS: 1) some users weren't able to see or select any fiat currencies after enabling the fiat toggle; 2) an issue where some iOS users might get stuck in the splash screen.
• Apollo OS v2.0.6 for Apollo BTC and Apollo II miners by FutureBit, has been released. d. This major bug-fix update addresses most outstanding and known issues. It also introduces a redesigned Solo Miner Page, making it easier to keep track of multiple miners and wallets mining on the solo pool, along with other improvements.

• BitAxe Mining Dashboard project brings all your BitAxe miners and Satoshi Radio pool statistics together in one clean, informative interface.
• kibo.money, a free and open-source alternative to Glassnode, has added a 'Save in Bitcoin' DCA simulation tool. Check it out here.
• Macadamia Wallet v0.2.0, a native iOS client for Cashu, is a complete rewrite of the implementation. This update segregates Cashu logic into its own library and implements a database model using SwiftData.
• Boltz Web App v1.5.2 adds Submarine Swap preimage copy button, along with a few other improvements.
• Boltz Backend v3.8.1 is a patch release with bug fixes and minor features.
• Boltz Client v2.2.2 fixes an issue related to GDK.
• GDK v0.74.0 has been released with multiple PSBT fixes and improvements.
• Rewind Bitcoin v1.1.3 (beta), a 'Bitcoin wallet that allows users to reverse theft,' is now available for testing. The latest version brings numerous UX tweaks and improvements, including pre-filled default emergency addresses with contextual help, increased robustness to network errors, and much more.

• zapstore v0.1.6 improves background loading, fixes themed icons, allows sending error reports, and more.
• OpenLibrarian v0.1.4 updates requirements.txt for testing and markdown packages.
• Mempal v1.2.3, a Bitcoin mempool monitoring and notification app for Android, fixes issues with the app crashing when enabling Tor.
• GrapheneOS v2024112700 has been released.

Other stuff

• Radpool is a syndicated mining pool proposal aimed at decentralizing mining while alleviating the scalability challenges. The detailed design is available here.

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