Good Morning, Bitcoin - Thursday, January 2nd, 2025

GM and Happy New Year, fellow freedom tech enjoyers and enthusiasts. Here’s to another bullish year of freedom!

What's new

• IRS delays bitcoin cost-basis reporting rules until 2026. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service announced that it has delayed new bitcoin tax reporting rules until early 2026. This extension provides brokers with additional time to adjust to the cost basis regulations for centralized platforms.
• Swiss proposal to include Bitcoin in national reserves. A recent proposal by local Bitcoin advocates aims to modify Article 99 of the Swiss Constitution, requiring the central bank to allocate part of its reserves to bitcoin in addition to gold. The initiative has 18 months to gather 100,000 signatures needed for a public referendum.
• Hong Kong lawmaker advocates for strategic Bitcoin reserve. Lawmaker Wu Jie is advocating for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to consider adding bitcoin to its fiscal reserves. He suggests using foreign exchange funds to acquire and hold digital assets long-term.
• Tether added 7,629 BTC to its reserves. Tether recently transferred 7,629 BTC (worth approximately $700 million) to its bitcoin reserve address on Monday, as reported by The Block.
• Genius Group now holds 319.4 BTC. The Nasdaq-listed AI-based education company announced an additional purchase of $10 million worth of bitcoin. CEO Roger Hamilton stated that their initial target is to accumulate 1,000 coins.
• U.S. Treasury hack on December 8th. According to a letter sent to leaders on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, "a threat actor had gained access to a key used by vendor to secure a cloud-based service used to remotely provide technical support for Treasury Departmental Offices end users." This access allowed the attacker to override the service’s security and access certain unclassified documents.
• At least 35 Chrome extensions compromised. A hacking campaign that began on December 5, 2024, has compromised at least 35 Chrome extensions, affecting approximately 2.6 million users. Cybersecurity experts advise those impacted to promptly change their passwords and tokens, clear sessions, and review logs for any suspicious activity.
  • A list of affected extensions is available here.
• Strike adopts the Travel Rule in the EU. Similar to other bitcoin and cryptocurrency service providers in the European Union, Strike users must now provide information about the source or destination of funds when sending or receiving €1,000 or more via external addresses or wallets.
• Casa to discontinue support for iOS 15 on February 1, 2025. "For Casa clients currently using iOS 15, we recommend you either upgrade to a newer version or, in some cases, upgrade to a newer device," said the company.

Use the tools

• Boltz Pro provides a non-custodial way to earn sats by making swaps in a specific direction based on the current liquidity status of Boltz wallets. You can try it here.
• Blockstream Satellite CLI v2.5.0 modifies the Telstar 11N signal frequencies for Africa and Europe, and introduces a new graphical user interface application named blocksat-gui for simpler receiver setup and Satellite API usage.
• OpenTimestamps client v0.7.2, a command-line tool for creating and validating timestamp proofs using the OpenTimestamps protocol, now works in git worktrees.
• Alby Go v1.8.1 has been released, featuring fixes and dependency updates.
• The Keeper Desktop application has been updated to version v0.1.5.
• An experimental Rust implementation of Joinstr, developed by pythcoiner, is now available here. The development of this project is sponsored by Bull Bitcoin.

• rust-nostr v0.38.0 update includes full NIP-42 support for the SDK and relay builder, along with negentropy support and read/write policy plugins for the relay builder. It also features NIP-35 support, improved logging and documentation, performance enhancements, bug fixes, and more.
• Dart / Flutter NDK v0.2.2 implements NIP-47 for Nostr Wallet Connect, along with support for NIP-44, NIP-57 zaps, NIP-42 Authentication of clients to relays, and NIP-44 Encrypted Payloads, among other features.
• Kanbanstr is a kanban board implementation built on the Nostr protocol.

• 0xChat app v1.4.5 and Desktop v1.0.1 now support NIP-46 login, adapt the user interface for tablet devices, introduce connection ping status, implement default reaction emojis, and other enhancements.
• Corny Chat v2024.12 initial scaffolding for a subscription/membership system. Besides, user profiles now support rendering image URLs in the about section.
• NostrDVM v1.0.5 implements requests with expiration tags and introduces an announce relay list.
• OpenLibrarian v0.1.6 extends testing for alternative APIs, including timeouts and progress event test cases, as well as adding "Currently Reading" progress tracking.
• GrapheneOS v2024123000 introduces support for adding a PIN as a second factor for fingerprint unlock. This allows users to enable a high-threat model configuration, utilizing a random diceware passphrase as the primary unlock method, and combining fingerprint with a random 4-6 digit PIN for the regularly used secondary unlock method.

Other stuff

• In its 2024 year in review, OpenSats reported receiving $23.6 million in funding throughout the year.

• OpenSats is a 501(c)(3) non-profit supporting open-source Bitcoin projects. Donations are tax-deductible. Consider donating or apply for funding if you're an educator, developer, or advocate aligned with their mission.

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