Good Morning, Bitcoin - Thursday, January 30th, 2025

Good morning! A huge shoutout to Plebeian App builder Chiefmonkey for a generous donation of 1.11 million sats (~$1137), which allowed us to meet our fundraising goal of 1 million sats for the month of January.

Thank you so much, Chief (and everyone else who contributed recently)! Your support allows us to stay focused and keeps us going.

News

• EFF joins the defense of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the largest digital civil liberties organization globally, has filed an amicus brief in support of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm's motion to reconsider the case dismissal, reports The Rage.

"The Government's arguments are "akin to claiming that Visa or MasterCard would be criminally liable based solely on receiving transaction fees whenever its customers transferred money as part of some underlying criminal activity," or "akin to the government claiming that it could prosecute FedEx for illegal drugs sent through FedEx from a corner store because FedEx set up and 'supports' a process for local pack and ship corner stores to let their customers ship via FedEx, with payment remitted to FedEx," said the organization.

• OpenSats issues its ninth wave of Bitcoin grants. The latest grantees are the Kibo, El Tor, Nutstash, and rust-bitcoin projects.
• Spiral renews grant to Fedimint developer Justin Moeller. "Sometimes, there's a dev, well, he's the dev for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's Justin Moeller (@m1sterc001guy), whose GitHub places him high in the runnin' for most prolific Fedimint dev on earth. But sometimes there's a dev; sometimes, there's a dev," announced the organization.
• X has partnered with Visa to launch 'X Money'. Visa has been announced as the first partner for the "X Money Account" service, which is slated to launch later this year. According to X CEO Linda Yaccarino, this service will include an in-platform digital wallet and support for peer-to-peer payments connected to users' debit cards and bank accounts.

• El Salvador passes a bill to revise its Bitcoin adoption strategy. The country’s Legislative Assembly has approved legislation to potentially reduce the country’s Bitcoin adoption strategy to satisfy the terms of a $1.4 billion loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The bill makes the private sector’s acceptance of bitcoin voluntary rather than mandatory.
• The Cboe BZX Exchange has proposed in-kind creations and redemptions for the ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF, filed with the US SEC on January 27th. If approved, it would allow Authorized Participants to engage in in-kind transactions. The filing follows Nasdaq's similar recent application for BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT).
• Bitcoin Strategic Reserve updates in the states:
  • Illinois State Representative John M. Cabello introduced HB1844, a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act" aimed at establishing a 'Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Fund' in the State Treasury.
  • Indiana State Representative Jake Teshka has brought forward HB1322, which would pave way for state-managed investments in bitcoin.
  • Arizona's Senate Finance Committee has approved SB1025, which now advances to the Senate Rules Committee before a full Senate vote.
  • Utah: The House Economic Development Committee has approved HB 230, advancing it to the House.
• Russia's largest grid operator, Rosseti, to utilize underused energy for Bitcoin mining. The state-owned company's strategy involves optimizing existing energy facilities that currently operate below their maximum capacity. Rosseti has confirmed that it already has the necessary technical infrastructure in place to effectively manage the loads of mining facilities, reports Atlas21.
• Digital Currency Group (DCG) has formed Fortitude Mining. This new entity comes from spinning off the proprietary Bitcoin mining division of its subsidiary, Foundry, confirming earlier reports by Blockspace.Media.
• Budapest Bitcoin conference to take place on August 8-9, 2025. For more information, check out the event's website.

Use the tools

• Lightning Dev Kit (LDK) v0.1.1 patches a duplicate HTLC force closing griefing vulnerability that causes all of the victim’s channels to be force closed. Users should update to LDK v0.1.1 to protect their channels.
• Iris Wallet Desktop v0.1.0 is the first experimental release of a wallet that integrates the RGB protocol on the Lightning Network. The initial version is available for Linux and macOS, with support for testnet and regtest environments. Join the project's Telegram group here.

• Nutshell v0.16.5, a Chaumian ecash wallet and mint for Bitcoin Lightning based on the Cashu protocol, is a maintenance release that includes various bug fixes for both the mint and the wallet.

"Most notably, overpaid Lightning fees are now issued to the user at the next restart of the mint in cases where the mint has crashed or turned off while an outgoing Lightning payment was still pending," was stated in the release notes.

• Blockstream Green Android v4.1.4 enables users to contact support directly from the app, adds payment_hash to Lightning exceptions, and implements several fixes.
  • Blockstream Green iOS v4.1.4 now also allows users to make support requests directly from the app.
• Blitz Wallet v0.3.9-beta is a maintenance release that addresses Android notification icon and push token issues, brings optimized styles, and more.
• Zeus wallet v0.9.5-beta2 is now available for testing.
• NerdQaxe+ v1.0.24 has been released, featuring new custom value displays on the settings page, 'PSU Error' alerts for power supply issues, a smoother hashgraph display, and more.
• Bitcoin prediction market Predyx has introduced transaction fees to maintain the health of markets.
• Clams v0.3, an accounting platform for Bitcoin and Lightning wallets, implements tag filtering, allowing users to filter transactions via custom or default tags, including the ability to filter by multiple accounts or tags at once.

• Flotilla v0.2.6, a Nostr relay-based communities app modeled after Discord, improves room and data loading, changes the reply UI, adds replies to the long-press menu, implements media server settings, and more.
• Keycast, a secure remote signing and permissions management tool for teams using the Nostr protocol, has made it easier to set up an instance for one's own domain, added a new config for 'allowed pubkeys', and more.
• Futr v0.2.0 by prolic is a Nostr client for Linux devices. The latest version brings a heap of new features, including comment support with threaded discussions, repost and quote post functionality, event deletion support, and much more.

• Haven relay v1.0.4 implements support for NIP-40 and replaceable events.
• Nostr-SDK-jvm v0.39.0-alpha by Yuki Kishimoto is now available.
• Mint Marketcap by Super Testnet provides insights into the capacity of public ecash mints.
• Mapple AI by OpenSecret is now available, allowing you to have private conversations with a general-purpose AI assistant.
• Block's Open Source Program Office has released Goose, an open-source non-commercial agentic framework that connects AI to real-world actions.

Other stuff

• Blockstream has published its 2024 Year-in-Review report.
• Coin Center has released a report on Principles for Crypto Legislation.
• Award Search is a federal government grant tracking tool that helps users explore which government grants fund specific non-profits.
• Derek Ross shared a simple video guide for the Damus Notedeck client.

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