Good Morning, Bitcoin - Monday, January 27th, 2025

"GM." January 27th, known as Silk Road Day, commemorates the launch of the darknet market Silk Road. This market was an early use case for bitcoin, facilitating the trade between various individuals.

What's new

• Bitcoin mining difficulty has adjusted down to 108.11T (-2.12%). This change follows eight consecutive increases in mining difficulty.

• France moves forward to classify bitcoin and digital assets as 'unproductive assets.' French Senator Sylvie Vermeillet recently proposed a bill to classify bitcoin and other digital assets as "unproductive," suggesting they should be taxed similarly to luxury items and vacant properties. Under this proposal, which is aimed at the 2025 budget, holders who hold more than €800,000 worth of 'unproductive assets', would incur an annual tax on their total value.
• Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev to be released under house arrest, pending appeal. Pertsev was sentenced to 64 months in the Netherlands for writing open-source privacy code on Ethereum last year. His defense has filed an appeal and is currently preparing his case. According to his wife, he will be released under house arrest with an electronic bracelet in the next two weeks.

• Stolen IDs spark $1.9m losses in Malaysia. Forty-five homeowners and business operators in Malaysia have been confronted with power bills amounting to $1.9 million after some tenants illegally mined bitcoin using stolen identities of these property owners, reports The Miner Mag.
• Nasdaq files for in-kind redemptions for BlackRock's iShares spot bitcoin ETF. Nasdaq has submitted a proposal for a rule change to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), seeking permission for the in-kind creation and redemption of shares for the BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT). Initially, when the SEC approved spot Bitcoin ETFs, including IBIT, last January, it allowed these funds to be launched with cash redemption rather than with bitcoin.
• Bitcoin strategic reserve efforts in the US derailed by Ripple. The company has reportedly achieved 'significant success' with its pro-altcoin lobbying, leading efforts to remove the term "bitcoin" from all executive orders and actions signed by Donald Trump and halted two initiatives aimed at creating a national Bitcoin reserve.
• THORChain halts withdrawals amid $200M insolvency. The interblockchain settlements protocol has paused bitcoin and ether withdrawals from its lending and savers programs for 90 days to mitigate a potential insolvency risk. The protocol currently holds around $200 million in BTC and ETH liabilities that it cannot cover without risking a significant drop in the value of its native shitcoin, RUNE. THORChain's primary service, cross-chain swaps, is reportedly unaffected.
• Disclosure: Invalid Claims Liquidity Griefing in LDK v0.0.125 & earlier. Bitcoin developer and security researcher Matt Morehouse has put together a disclosure for an Invalid Claims Liquidity Griefing vulnerability present in Lightning Dev Kit (LDK) versions 0.0125 and earlier. Affected users can release their locked funds by upgrading to LDK v0.1 and replaying the series of commitment and HTLC transactions that resulted in the lock-up.
• US Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) remains blocked despite the Supreme Court decision. The Supreme Court overturned a lower court order that had been blocking the enforcement of the CTA, which requires millions of companies to disclose the personally identifiable information of their owners. However, a separate national injunction issued earlier this month by a federal judge remains in place and continues to block the law’s implementation. Therefore, for now, registration with FinCEN remains voluntary.
• UTXO Management, Sora Ventures and others, acquired HK Asia Holdings Limited. The public company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKSE) now plans to rebrand as Moon Inc. and signals its intention to explore cryptocurrency investments and 'Web 3.0 innovation,' reports Bitcoin Magazine.
• Windows BitLocker vulnerability exploited in randomization attack. Identified as CVE-2025-21210, a critical vulnerability in Windows BitLocker exposes the AES-XTS encryption mode to a new randomization attack, enabling attackers with physical access to alter ciphertext blocks and cause sensitive data to be stored in plaintext, highlighting the increasing sophistication of attacks on full-disk encryption systems.

Use the tools

• Ark Wallet SDK is a TypeScript library for building Bitcoin wallets with support for both on-chain and off-chain transactions via Ark protocol. The SDK offers JavaScript developers a secure, portable solution for integrating Bitcoin functionality. Utilizing noble cryptography's minimal-dependency approach, the wallet library supports Bitcoin and Ark transactions in web applications and mobile wallets, all without the overhead of WebAssembly.
• Zaprite launches BTCPay Server integration. "BTCPay Integration is now available. Connect your BTCPay Server to Zaprite and accept bitcoin and lightning payments, side-by-side with fiat, using your own self-hosted bitcoin infrastructure," announced the project.

• BlueWallet v7.0.8 fixes a typo in payment codes, resolves an error with importing wallets from the same seed in different accounts, and includes other minor updates.
• Bitcoin Safe v1.0.4 is now available. This version fixes connection issues in Sync & Chat, adds Tor support through a proxy, improves Dark Mode, and adds a context menu option for setting address categories.
• Alby Extension v3.11.0 introduces a dedicated card for importing Nostr keys, adds Sinhalese, Tamil, and Russian locales, and allows users to view pending and failed transactions for Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC).
• The Zcash Foundation released FROST v2.1.0. It Includes the frost-secp256k1-tr crate for Bitcoin Taproot (BIP340/BIP341) compatible signatures, enhances the distributed key generation (DKG) protocol, and supports asynchronous key generation.
• Kernel-Node is an experimental Bitcoin node in Rust that validates blocks but does not serve them to the network, demonstrating the initial limited API of the libbitcoinkernel library.
• Bitcoin Prediction Market is a simple bitcoin-powered prediction market platform.
• BitVid by PR0M3TH3AN is a WebTorrent-based video client that uses Nostr to share webRTC magnets. It is meant to be a decentralized video sharing platform where content is shared directly between users. Learn more about the project here.
• YakiHonne Web v4.3.0 and Mobile v1.6.4 brings wallet name customization for newly created wallets and many other quality of life improvements.
• Shopstr is now accessible as Tor Hidden Service.
• OpenVibe v1.7.0, a single app for Nostr, Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads, delivers larger media previews for posts, smarter replies with better thread view and sorting, as well as profile-specific notifications.
• Nostr.net has been updated with a new look and added a search functionality.

• GrapheneOS v2025012600 has been released, providing the latest software updates, fixes, and improvements.

Other stuff

• Peter Todd explains that the ability to route over fake channels in the Lightning Network simplifies the implementation of Lightning on top of client-side validated tokens like RGB.
• Foundation has released a blog post detailing its Quantum Link protocol.
• Christoph Ono has published a new page about Human-Readable Addresses (BIP 353 and Lightning Address) in the Bitcoin.Design guide.

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