Good Morning, Bitcoin - Tuesday, December 17th, 2024

What's new

• Samourai Wallet pretrial hearing moved to March 12, trial set for November 3, 2025. The pretrial hearing was postponed due to an increased volume of discovery. According to the filing, an FBI team is reviewing a total of 45 devices seized from developers Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill for privileged material, aiming to release the remaining data by early 2025. To date, 17 TB of discovery—over half the total—has been shared, with additional data forthcoming before the trial.
  • Zack Cohen of The Bitcoin Policy Institute has also published a policy brief examining the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) alarming legal theory and its implications for Samourai Wallet and Bitcoin self-custody.

• OpenSats announces 9th Wave of Nostr grants. Projects included in this wave of funding are AlgoRelay, Pokey, Nostr Safebox, Persian NIPs, and LumiLumi.
• Foundation introduces Passport Prime personal security platform. The company has introduced its third-generation device, Passport Prime, which is a personal security platform and signing device aimed at both first-time and experienced users. It comes with a hardware wallet, a multi-factor authenticator, an encrypted flash drive, and a secure app platform.

• New FASB fair value accounting rules for Bitcoin are officially live. U.S.-based corporations are now permitted to value their bitcoin holdings at fair market price, allowing their balance sheets to accurately and promptly represent these assets and increasing trust and transparency for stakeholders.
• Greenpeace's Change The Code campaign has been suspended. Daniel Batten reports that there have been no related actions, posts, or media releases for six months, and the Change The Code campaign handle on X has been inactive since January 2024. The hostile Bitcoin mining misinformation campaign was launched on March 29, 2022, following a $5 million donation by Ripple's co-founder Chris Larsen. It resulted in some of the most 'metal' Bitcoin artwork to date.

• Weak randomness vulnerability in early preview version of Proton Wallet's mobile app. Zellic disclosed an encryption vulnerability in Proton Wallet that affected its wallet and backup mnemonic security. The bug only affected users who used the preview version of the Proton Wallet application, had early access to the Wallet application, and created their recovery phrases through that application.
• MicroStrategy acquires additional 15,350 BTC. The company bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin at ~$100,386 per coin and now lays claim to a total of 439,000 BTC.
• Semler Scientific added 211 BTC to its balance sheet. The healthcare technology firm acquired $21.5 million worth of coins at an average price of $101,890 per bitcoin and increased its holdings to 2,084 BTC.
• Riot Platforms buys 667 BTC, increases net holdings to 17,429 BTC. The Bitcoin mining infrastructure developer used $67.5 million for the latest purchase, paying an average price of $101,135 per coin.
• CleanSpark announced plans to raise $550 million through convertible notes. Unlike competing Bitcoin miners MARA and Riot, CleanSpark has not announced any intentions to use its proceeds to buy additional bitcoin. In November, the company sold 4.2% of its mined BTC after maintaining ownership of over 99% of its monthly bitcoin production since January, reports The Miner Mag.
• e4pool is shutting down due to mining regulations in Russia. "To be a legitimate mining pool in Russia, you must register yourself in a special government list of 'mining operators.'" The team added, "Also, you must send all data about your 'clients' to the tax office. Our cypherpunk views can't match all this."

• Electric Capital released 2024 Crypto Developer report. According to the report, approximately 1,200 monthly active developers work in the Bitcoin ecosystem, with 501 (42%) of them focusing on Bitcoin scaling solutions. It also states that over 120 new developers explore the Bitcoin ecosystem every month and highlights significantly higher developer numbers in the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems.

• The report also finds that the number of established Bitcoin developers is steadily increasing over time.

Use the tools

• ESP-miner v2.4.2, an open-source firmware for Bitaxe miners, has been released. The update adds uptime information to the home screen, changes the handling of Stratum URLs to host and Stratum fallback URLs, improves HTTP and system stability, and includes a variety of other goodies.

• Zapstore v0.1.8 fixes an issue with blocking relays, as well as an issue with unnecessary relay initialization.
• Cashu.me wallet (also available as a progressive web app) now supports NFC on Android devices. It has also added a new navigation menu for quick access to features like NFC, payment requests, P2PK locks, and others, as well as a built-in numeric keyboard, which should come in handy for iOS users.
• OpenVibe v1.5.0, a single client for browsing multiple open social networks, now allows adding multiple accounts from the same network and organizing them into sets.
• Nostr-zap view v1.3.0, a tool for viewing Nostr zaps 'from anywhere,' has been released with a faster initial display and fixed flickering of icons.
• Nutjar-ui enables users easily integrate Lightning tips on their websites, utilizing Nostr and Cashu.
• Myriad is a simple personal Blossom server for managing your own files.
• Nokakoi v0.6.2 is a grid-style live Nostr client for Windows.
• Proton Wallet has implemented Moonpay integration.

Hello, @moonpay is now available on Proton Wallet. pic.twitter.com/6GWkHm6bEw

— Proton Wallet (@ProtonWallet) December 9, 2024

• Sideband v1.2.0, a LXMF client for Android, Linux, and macOS that allows you to communicate with people or LXMF-compatible systems over Reticulum networks, includes a host of new functionalities, usability updates, and helpful tweaks.

Other stuff

• OpenCash Foundation has launched a redesigned website. Check it out here.
• Entropy by D++ is a collection of open-source Bitcoin workshops, projects, hackathons, and software.
• Awesome Liquid offers a curated list of Liquid Network resources, libraries, tools, and applications.
• Alpen Labs introduced the Strata bridge—a programmable layer that ensures 1:1 parity with bitcoin.

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