Good Morning, Bitcoin - Tuesday, January 21st, 2025

GM. A huge shoutout to Boog, a relentless supporter of freedom tech developers and reporting, who had the following custom message to share:

"Do you like Construction? 🚧 Engineering? 👷‍♀️ Come talk about both on the Stacker News construction and engineering territory and earn some sats! Get zapped ⚡️ for your ideas and commentary!"

What's new

• Tornado Cash sanctions reversal has no affect on the trial, says DOJ. Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm seeks to dismiss charges after a Fifth Circuit ruling reversed sanctions against the software. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors now claim that the sanctions reversal doesn't impact the criminal trial against Tornado Cash developers, adding that the case is about control over the Tornado Cash user interface, not the validity of the sanctions.

"The Government's opposition highlights the DOJ's continued willingness to leverage criminal enforcement as a tool to shape the law – in this case specifically to introduce FATF recommendation 66 on the classification of non-custodial UIs as a category of a "Virtual Asset Service Provider", which have not yet been adopted by the US," writes L0la L33tz for The Rage.

• Odds for Ross Ulbricht's pardon rise to 95% on Polymarket following Musk's confirmation. The chance that U.S. President Donald Trump will commute Ross Ulbricht's sentence within his first week in office soared to 95% on Polymarket after Elon Musk confirmed clemency on X, according to The Block.

• OpenSats announces three new grants for Bitcoin Core developers. The new grantees include contributors L0rinc, kevkevin, and Daniela Brozzoni.
• BTCPay Server Foundation receives $25,000 grant from Unbank. The BTCPay Server Foundation received a $25,000 grant, paid directly in bitcoin, from Unbank, a cash-focused Bitcoin exchange.

"Unbank's support is a testament to the growing recognition of open-source payment solutions in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This grant will help our efforts to enhance BTCPay Server's capabilities and reach," said BTCPay Server core contributor R0ckstar Dev.

• Gary Gensler resigns as the Chairman of the SEC. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued a statement announcing his resignation.
  • Mark Uyeda has replaced Gensler and will serve as interim Chairman of the SEC. President Trump plans to nominate former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins to lead the agency, though Atkins still requires Senate confirmation.
• Caroline Pham named acting chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). She is set to replace Democratic Chair Rostin Behnam, who took office in 2022 and will remain on the Commission until he steps down on February 7.
  • Pham has called for the agency to create a program to support the development of digital asset companies. She is expected to collaborate with 'White House A.I. & Crypto Czar' David Sacks and Paul Atkins on a new regulatory framework for the industry.
• El Salvador adds 11 more BTC to its reserves. The country's Bitcoin Office announced that it added another 11 BTC to its Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, bringing the country's total holdings to 6,044 coins.
• Utah joins the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve race. Utah State Representative Jordan Teuscher has introduced the 'Blockchain and Digital Innovation Amendments' (H.B. 230), which authorizes the state treasurer to invest a portion of public funds in bitcoin and other digital assets.

Use the tools

• Breez SDK - Nodeless v0.6.2 has been released. This version of the Liquid implementation brings real-time synchronization of payment metadata and swap information for a better multi-device experience, the ability to pay to BIP-353 addresses, and the capability to receive BTC without specifying an amount, among other things.
• Andry Schroder released a new and improved version of bitcoin-submittx, a stand-alone Bitcoin P2P transaction submission tool for submitting transactions more privately. It features TOR stream isolation, a switch to PySocks, auto-fetching of peers from DNS seeds, selectable logging levels, and general code cleanup and improvements.
• Kyoto v0.8.0, a simple, memory-conservative, and private Bitcoin client for developers to build wallet applications, added the ability to request the minimum fee rate from connected peers, along with other bug fixes and improvements.
• Fedimint v0.6.0-rc0 is now available for testing.
• Nak v0.10.1, a command line tool for doing all things Nostr, has been released.
• Cesar Dias has released Nosotros v0.1.0, a Nostr web client optimized for desktop and mobile platforms. Check it out here.

Other stuff

• The second edition of The Simplest Bitcoin Book by Keysa Luna is available here. Download a free PDF or order a paperback version.
• PubKey x HRF: Freedom Tech Series Bitcoin Basics Workshop is set to take place on Wednesday, January 22, 2025 at 8:00 PM EST in New York.
• Alex Black wrote a blog post titled Nostr: What Is It, And How It Could Change The World.
• StackStates.com is a site tracking the state-level adoption of Bitcoin in the United States.

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