Good Morning, Bitcoin - Wednesday, December 4th, 2024

What's new

• Coinbase advises its users against using VPNs. "PSA: Don't use a VPN to access Coinbase. Attackers always use VPN's, so our risk models take that as a negative sign even if you're legitimately using your own account. Same with ad blockers and other extensions," said Scott Shapiro, Product Director at Coinbase.
• IVPN has acquired Safing, the company behind the consumer firewall application Portmaster and the SPN network.

"After considering the development of a new application from scratch, we determined that Portmaster, with its maturity and reliability, stands as the best service currently on the market," the company said in a blog post.

• Volato Group integrates Bitcoin mining with aircraft operations. A Virginia-based private aviation company announced a new patent-pending technology that enables aircraft to generate revenue by repurposing unused resources for Bitcoin mining. The system uses excess electricity from normal flight operations, ensuring seamless integration without extra costs or resource demands.
• Virgin Voyages becomes the first cruise line to accept bitcoin. The decision aligns with the company's focus on millennial and Gen Z travelers, who are more likely to favor Bitcoin for its ease and accessibility, reports TFTC.
• Bitcoin Well adopts bitcoin as strategic reserve asset. The publicly traded Canadian Bitcoin company has purchased 7.5 BTC and intends to raise $2 million more for BTC purchases.
• Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky pleads guilty to two criminal counts. On Tuesday, Mashinsky agreed to plead guilty to two out of the seven charges: commodities fraud and a scheme to manipulate the price of Celsius's token, CEL.
• Hydra marketplace founder gets a life sentence. Russian authorities have sentenced Stanislav Moiseyev, the founder of the dark web drug platform Hydra, to life in prison for organizing a criminal drug enterprise.
  • In 2022, German authorities dismantled Hydra, seizing its servers, other infrastructure, and bitcoin worth millions. Since 2015, Hydra reportedly facilitated $5 billion in transactions for 17 million customers.

Use the tools

• Eclair v0.11.0, a Scala implementation of the Lightning Network developed by ACINQ, introduces official support for Bolt 12 offers and advances liquidity management capabilities, including splicing, liquidity ads, and on-the-fly funding. Additionally, it incorporates numerous performance enhancements, expanded configuration options, and resolves minor bugs.
• Saving Satoshi is a light-hearted, interactive science fiction story and a technical game for developers of all ages who want to learn how Bitcoin works.
• Alby Go v1.7.2, a simple Lightning mobile wallet interface that works with Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) wallet services, brings the ability to delete contacts in the address book, as well as enhanced QR code readability.
• Alby Extension v3.10.0 introduces the Alby Hub Connector and a notification banner for upgrading shared wallets to Alby Hub. It also replaces 'Citadel' with 'Nirvati' and includes multiple translation updates.
• kibo v0.5.0, a free and self-hostable alternative to Glassnode, brings more datasets and charts, updates website design, adds a library of PDFs, and much more.

• Dan Gould released Payjoin v0.21.0 (rust-payjoin). This version enables transaction cut-through by allowing the receiver to add an arbitrary number of inputs and outputs and permitting mixed input script types in Payjoin V2.
  • Besides, there are several changes to the Payjoin directory API and HPKE to stabilize the V2 protocol, resulting in many breaking changes.
• Fully Noded - Server v0.0.0.6-alpha, a one-click Bitcoin Core, Core Lightning, and Join Market server to connect to the Fully Noded app, has been released. It features various general improvements, including security enhancements for Quick Connect QR codes, tweaks to Joinmarket config default fee settings, an 'Obwatcher' button for troubleshooting failed coinjoins, and auto-refresh for Core Lightning.
• ESP-Miner v2.4.1, an open-source ESP32 firmware designed to run on BitAxe v2+ miners, comes with multiple fixes and improvements.

• Minibits v0.1.10-beta, an Android ecash wallet with a focus on performance and usability, now runs NWC commands via Android's foreground service, reducing interruptions and ensuring smoother transactions.

• Peerswap v4.0.0 rc1, an app enabling Lightning Network nodes to balance their channels by facilitating atomic swaps with direct peers, is now available for testing.
• Citrine v0.5.7, a local Nostr relay for Android, fixes several issues related to downloading notes.
• NostrDVM v1.0.3 is out with bug fixes and a new tutorial on deleting NIP-89 announcements.
• Nak v0.9.0, a command-line tool for doing all things Nostr, has been released.
• Cherry Tree by hzrd149 is an experiment with chunked files stored on Blossom servers.

"The experiment was to see how easy it was to split a large file into chunks, then upload those chunks to multiple blossom servers and reassemble then on another computer. The best part about this is the blossom server has no idea its storing a chunked file. it just sees a bunch of binary blobs uploaded from a random pubkey," said the developer.

• Cashu-ts v2.1.0 adds a MintInfo class that makes it easier to check whether a mint supports a certain optional NUT.
• The latest updates for Zaprite invoicing platform include view invoice page, new features discovery carousel, updated 'Help & Support' widget, and more.
• Arti v1.3.1, a next-generation Tor client in Rust, continues development on Arti Relay and the RPC subsystem, adds initial scaffolding for service-side proof-of-work support, and includes bug fixes, cleanups, and CI infrastructure improvements.
• GrapheneOS v2024120400 is an early December security update release.

Other stuff

• NUT-19: Cached responses has been merged into the Cashu specification.
• The Getting Started with Bitcoin for Merchants guide by DarthCoin has been updated.
• Atlas21 published a guide to Payjoin transactions.
• The Bitcoin Dev Kit Foundation's 2024 Q4 code audit of the current bdk 1.0.0-beta Rust codebase is available here.

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