Good Morning, Bitcoin - Friday, December 6th, 2024

GM! Here's the pulse on what's happening in and around Bitcoin and freedom tech today. If you enjoy our work, show your support here. Every sat counts!

What's new

• Jerome Powell: Bitcoin is a competitor to gold. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, speaking at the New York Times DealBook Summit, reiterated his view of Bitcoin as a competitor to gold, labeling it "digital gold" due to its "speculative nature and volatility." He also dismissed the notion that bitcoin competes with the US dollar.

🏴 BREAKING: Fed Chair Powell says "Bitcoin is just like Gold, but digital." pic.twitter.com/1BxaKFzwQn

— Bankless (@BanklessHQ) December 4, 2024

• David Sacks appointed as White House AI & Crypto Czar. 'The crypto czar' will be tasked with reshaping U.S. policy on digital currency along with a newly created crypto advisory council.
• Florida Bitcoin Strategic Reserve may be launched in Q1 2025. Samuel Armes, President of the Florida Blockchain Business Association, announced on X that Florida could establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve as early as the first quarter of the 2025 legislative session.
• Semler Scientific acquires additional 303 BTC. The latest purchase brings the company's total Bitcoin holdings to 1873 BTC, bought at an average price of $78,553 per coin.
• Riot added 495 BTC to its balance sheet in November. "Riot mined 495 Bitcoin in November, demonstrating consistent month-over-month production despite a 7% increase in network difficulty during the month," said Jason Les, CEO of Riot.

November production and operations updates ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/obu3WNZX3v

— Riot Platforms, Inc. (@RiotPlatforms) December 6, 2024

• Foundry lays off 16% of U.S.-based employees. The Digital Currency Group's KYC mining pool has laid off 16% of its U.S. employees and a small team in India to reduce costs, reports CoinDesk. Foundry's mining pool accounts for approximately 30% of Bitcoin's total hashrate.
• Countries' AML frameworks are more technically compliant but less effective in practice, states Basel AML Index 2024. "In contrast to the modest progress in technical compliance with the FATF Recommendations, the average effectiveness of AML measures globally as measured by the FATF remains at the low level of 28 percent, down from 30 percent in 2021," was stated in the report.

• New Spiral grantee: Rachel Rybarczyk. The organization announced Rachel Rybarczyk as a new grantee. She is a core developer at Stratum v2 project.

• Bitcoin Medellin conference 2025 to take place on January 17-18, 2025 in Colombia. Learn all about it and secure your tickets here.

Use the tools

• Ark v0.4.0, an implementation of the Ark protocol by Ark Labs, comes with new address encoding, Ark notes, groundwork for Market Hours, server improvements, and more.
• Bitkit wallet v1.0.7 introduces the Quick Pay feature for faster Lightning payments.
• Strike launched Bill Pay for U.S. customers. It is an automatic way to pay your bills directly from your Strike account with bitcoin or cash.

• Machankura launched a mobile app for Android. It allows users to send and receive sats to your phone or phone number via USSD, Whatsapp, web, or mobile. The service is available in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
• Olas v0.1.5 is now available on Android and iOS TestFlight. The latest update includes Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) zaps and introduces a swipe-to-zap feature. It also enables reposts and incorporates various performance optimizations.
• Amethyst v0.93.1 is a bug fix release resolving a multitude of issues, including Satellite's Blossom uploads, image upload tests, badge crashes, and more. It also introduces NIP-22 replies to interactive stories and adds amount and personalization labels to DVM feeds.
• Snort v0.3.0 removes NIP-04 DM support and notifications chart, redesigns relay management pages, adds NIP-55 Amber signer support, implements Web-of-Trust filter for replies, and more.
• Pokey v0.1.2-alpha, a Nostr 'pull-notification' client for Android, introduces multi-accounts.
• Bitcoin Core v28.1 release candidate 1 is now available for testing.
• Stacker.news added the ability to receive payments directly to attached wallets and introduced send fallbacks if a user has multiple wallets attached.
• Boltz Client v2.3.2 fixes an issue with wallet balance checks before swap creation.
• Breez Mobile issued the latest update with bug fixes.
• CLBOSS v0.14.1, codenamed Hand at the Grindstone, has been released. It comes with contrib script enhancements, stack unwinding, and configurable exception backtrace support.
• Ginger Wallet v2.0.15, a fork of Wasabi Wallet which filters out 'blacklisted' coinjoin round input transactions, added simplified coinjoin settings, random coinjoin skip feature, and a tunable coin selector for coinjoins.
• Stack Duo wallet v1.2.4 fixes FROST errors, adds the ability to set Tor/Clearnet options for individual nodes, temporarily disables paynym support, and introduces watch-only wallets.
• The Tor Project introduced Rdsys - the next-generation bridge distribution system, designed from the ground up for a more flexible, maintainable, and user-friendly approach to bridge distribution. Learn all about it here.

Other stuff

• Bitcoin Optech newsletter #332 announces the disclosure of a transaction censorship vulnerability and summarizes discussion about the consensus cleanup soft fork proposal.
• HRF's Weekly Financial Freedom Report #52 is available here.
• Bitvocation published Bitcoin Job Market update for November. Check it out here.
• Buckets of blind signatures is the latest post on Cashu Blog.
• Covenants support list on Bitcoin Wiki documents Bitcoin developers' preferences for various Covenants support proposals.

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