Good Morning, Bitcoin - Tuesday, January 28th, 2025

News

• DARPA to launch pre-crime AML program. DARPA has unveiled plans for a pre-crime Anti-Money Laundering (AML) program designed to prevent money laundering before it occurs, and is likely to be applied to digital assets. This initiative employs contentious predictive policing methods, which have been criticized for potentially exacerbating arbitrary discrimination.

"If successful, A3ML would make it prohibitively expensive for our adversaries to transfer illicit value through the global financial system. the technical hypothesis: illicit finance tactics, techniques, and procedures can be algorithmically extracted from diverse data sources and represented in a generic, sharable form," said 3ML program manager David Dewhurst.

• US Senate approves Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary. On Monday evening, the Senate voted 68-29 in favor of Bessent's nomination, and he will officially become a member of Trump's cabinet once he is sworn in to succeed Janet Yellen. A key focus of Trump's agenda is the continuation of tax cuts.
• Disclosure: replacement cycling attacks on bitcoin miners block templates. Antoine Riard reported a variant of replacement cycling attacks that allows an attacker to censor transaction traffic from miners' block templates. This method enables the attacker to gain a dominant strategy in the distribution of Bitcoin fee rewards for block generation within the longest valid chain, effectively undermining the efforts of honest mining nodes.

"While the practicality of replacement cycling attacks in the real-world is still an open question among the bitcoin protocol experts, in my personal and humble opinion this variant of replacement cycling attack is severe for the perennity of the bitcoin ecosystem at large, even more in a post-subsidy world," said the developer.

• Phemex exchange losses climb to $85 million following a recent hack. The Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange experienced a breach of its hot wallets on January 23rd. The initial estimate of stolen cryptocurrency was $29 million, but the figure was raised to $73 million on Friday. By Sunday, the estimates rose once more, with MetaMask's Taylor Monahan calculating the value of the stolen assets to be at least $85 million. The attack constitutes the largest centralized exchange hack of 2025 so far.
• NoOnes CEO Ray Youssef discloses $8 million exploit that occurred on January 2nd. Regulated peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading platform NoOnes experienced a security breach earlier this month, resulting in the loss of around $8 million in assets, as stated by CEO Ray Youssef in a recent post.
• KuCoin to pay over $297 million fine and exit the US market. The exchange has pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and will pay over $297 million in penalties. As part of the plea, KuCoin will exit the US market for at least two years, and founders Chun Gan and Ke Tang will depart the company.
• MicroStrategy buys another 10,107 BTC. The coins were purchased for approximately $1.1 billion, bringing the company's total holdings to 471,107 BTC.
• Kurl Technology Group buys $8M worth of bitcoin. The recent acquisition was completed at an average price of $101,695 per bitcoin, increasing the company's total reserves to 510 coins.
• Poland becomes the fifth largest Bitcoin ATM country. Recently, Poland expanded its Bitcoin ATM network by adding 10 new machines, bringing the total to 219 and surpassing El Salvador to become the fifth-largest ATM network globally, following the US, Canada, Australia, and Spain, per CoinATMRadar data.
• The European Squash Federation embraces Bitcoin, becoming the first major sports federation in Europe to integrate BTC into its operations. The organization will hold bitcoin as an asset on its balance sheet, accept bitcoin donations using BTCPay Server and Blink, and "will facilitate the use of Bitcoin for both incoming payments and outgoing transactions, wherever it is deemed appropriate." The move was executed with the assistance of the Norwegian Bitcoin consultancy firm SatoshiConsult.

"By adopting Bitcoin, we are not only modernizing our financial approach but also offering new opportunities for engagement and support within the squash community. We believe this will open doors for innovation and growth," said Otto Kalvø, Vice-President of the European Squash Federation.

Use the tools

• Blockstream Green Desktop v2.0.19 enables creating support tickets from the application.
• Zeus v0.9.5-beta1 is now available for testing. This version enables exports of ypriv/zpriv for embedded LND node seed, adds ability to use all funds for channel opening, and brings various performance and UX improvements.
• umbrelOS v1.4 beta 1 is now available for testing. It introduces a file manager for turning one's personal server into a full-fledged home cloud.

• Amber v3.2.0, a Nostr event signer for Android, fixes relay connection issues when starting the service, adds a profile picture feature in the incoming requests screen for large-screen devices, implements additional event kind translations, and more.
• KeyChat app v1.26.5, a chat app built on Bitcoin ecash, Nostr and Singal protocol, adds browser tab, NIP-07 login support for websites, and fixes a few bugs.
• GrapheneOS v2025012700 fixes a regression issue introduced in the previous release and improves the Play Integrity API description.

Other stuff

• Bitcoin Laws site is tracking the legislation of Bitcoin-related laws in the United States.
• Bitcoin mining map v2 provides a map of public Bitcoin miners in the United States and Canada.
• Expatriotic wrote a simple guide on how to acquire no-KYC bitcoin.

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