Good Morning, Bitcoin - Tuesday, January 7th, 2025

What's new

• AnchorWatch is now open for business in the United States. AnchorWatch offers insured self-custody services using its miniscript-based Trident Vault. It currently serves customers based in the United States who hold between $250K and $100M in bitcoin. You can learn more about its offerings here.

• Pierre Poilievre leads Polymarket odds to become Canada's next prime minister. The pro-bitcoin politician and leader of Canada's Conservative Party is the frontrunner in Polymarket odds to replace Justin Trudeau as prime minister following Trudeau's resignation announcement on Monday, reports The Block.
• MicroStrategy has acquired 1,070 BTC for about $101 million, at an average price of $94,004 per bitcoin. The company now owns a total of 447,470 BTC, valued at over $44 billion.
• Kurl Technology Group has purchased an additional 213.4 BTC for $21 million, bringing its total holdings to approximately 430.58 BTC, acquired for a total of $42 million.
• Bitcoin miner CleanSpark increased its bitcoin stash to 9,952 coins. The company said it mined 668 BTC in December and 7,024 BTC for the entire year. The company's hashrate increased by 287.9 year over year.
• Core Scientific liquidated 79 of 291 mined BTC in December. This move potentially signals the miner's return to a 'partial hodl' strategy following two years of full liquidation, reports The Miner Mag.
• Bitcoin prediction market Predyx is back online following an attack that took the platform offline for a day. A root cause analysis (RCA) and the mitigation report are expected to be published soon.

"Recently, we experienced an attack that targeted a security vulnerability in our system. Thanks to our quick response, we were able to mitigate the attack within minutes. Unfortunately, the attacker did manage to drain some liquidity from our markets," said the platform.

• Latest ransom kidnappings in France, Canada, and Pakistan:
  • France: Le Mans police rescued a man discovered tied up in a car trunk. His captors had demanded a ransom from his son, a 'crypto' influencer residing in Dubai.
  • Canada: a volunteer moderator of a 'crypto' forum has gone into hiding with his family after kidnappers reportedly tried to abduct him to coerce him into surrendering his bitcoin.
  • Pakistan: a 'crypto' trader was kidnapped from Manghopir on December 25 and regained his freedom only after paying a $340,000 ransom in digital assets through his Binance account.
• Telegram provided data on more than 2,200 users last year to U.S. authorities alone, reports 404 Media. This number does not account for data requests from other countries.
• Bitcoin Boma's exclusive course for learning Bitcoin in Malawi. Bitcoin Boma, a non-profit organization, has partnered with Mi Primer Bitcoin to launch a free Bitcoin education course in Malawi. Interested parties can apply here.
• Undermine 2025 - The Heatpunk Summit, a two-day conference dedicated to the emerging field of hashrate heating, is set to take place in Denver's Bitcoin hub on February 21 - February 22, 2025. Learn more about the event here.

Use the tools

• Blitz Wallet v0.3.7-beta allows on-chain payments from Lightning or Liquid balances, removes requirement for a Lightning node connection when Lightning is disabled, introduces weekly rotation of Liquid addresses for accounts and monthly for contacts, enables automatic recovery of unclaimed ecash transactions, includes bug fixes for stability, and enables manual channel rebalancing.
• BitBanana v0.8.9, a native Android app for Lightning node operators, brings Payment Path view for LND nodes, implements "Enable Offer" command for Core Lightning >=24.11, adds description and payer note for paid bolt12 offers in transaction history, enables offers without description, and more.

• Zaprite, a Bitcoin invoicing platform for businesses and entrepreneurs, has added a Speed Wallet integration using Lightning Address, and updated styling on Square credit card form payments.
• lnp2pbot v0.12.0, a peer-to-peer trading bot for the Lightning network on Telegram, has been released.
• ln-opr is a fast, scalable protocol for resolving Lightning payments.
• L404 middleware Ruby library is available here.
• Feeder v2.8.0, an RSS reader app on Android, added support for Nostr feeds (NIP-23 long-form articles).
• LumiLumi is a lightweight, web-based client for the Nostr protocol.

• Flotilla v0.2.1, a Discord/Slack-like Nostr client for relay-based communities, delivers multiple performance improvements and bug fixes.
• Tides v1.1.2, a Nostr messenger browser extension for Chromium-based browsers, adds previews for several Blossom servers and the ability to view both personal and other user profiles.
• Whereostr v1.3.3, a geo-social app built on the Nostr protocol, implements several bug fixes, resolves a file upload error, and increases geohash precision.
• Nos.social v1.1 implements compatibility with Nostr lists. "You can create a list in another app like listr.lol and then view the feed for that list in Nos," said the project.

• Citrine v0.7.0, a local Nostr relay for Android devices, updates dependencies, adds a back button in the events screen, and implements several bug fixes.
• Amber v3.1.0, a Nostr event signer for Android, has been released.
• Nostr-zap v1.2.0, a tool for zapping any Nostr npub or note from anywhere, updates the default zap receipt relays.
• Qoinstr, developed by pythcoiner, is a WIP GUI for rust-joinstr.
• Superbacked is a "secret management platform used to back up and pass on sensitive data from one generation to the next." Learn more about it here.

Other stuff

• César Rodas demonstrates how to embed an experimental Cashu wallet in a browser, effectively making it accessible from any website.

• Hashrate Index has published a list of the top 10 bitcoin mining countries.

• Susie Violet Ward discusses how the EU's implementation of The Travel Rule endangers digital asset users in Europe.
• The latest Nostr Biweekly Review report is available here.

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