Good Morning, Bitcoin - Tuesday, February 4th, 2025

News

• Donald Trump signs an executive order to create a US Sovereign Wealth Fund. President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the Treasury and Commerce Departments to establish a U.S. sovereign wealth fund. He assigned Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick the task of developing the foundation for the fund, which will likely need congressional approval. Senator Cynthia Lummis suggested on X that this could be significant for Bitcoin.

• A press conference to outline the strategic planning for digital assets in the United States is set to take place today. David Sacks, President Donald Trump's AI and cryptocurrency czar, is scheduled to host the event at :30 p.m. ET. The conference will focus on discussing the administration's strategy for digital assets.
• Coinbase users lose over $300 million per year to social engineering scams. According to research by ZachXBT, scammers actively target Coinbase users using a combination of spoofed phone numbers and emails, leaked personal information, Coinbase wallet, cloned Coinbase sites, SIM swap attacks, old API keys, platform bugs, and other evolving social engineering techniques. He also documented at least $60 million stolen from Coinbase users in the last two months.

"Our number is likely much lower than the actual amount stolen as our data was limited to my DMs and thefts we discovered on-chain which does not account for Coinbase support tickets and police reports we do not have access to," said the researcher.

• Russia proposes a registry to track Bitcoin mining hardware. Russia's Deputy Energy Minister, Yevgeny Grabchak, has proposed establishing a centralized registry to help authorities more effectively identify mining activities and enforce bans in restricted regions more strictly.
• Bitcoin++ in Florianópolis, Brazil, is set to take place on February 19-22, 2025. Get your All Hack Pass here.

Use the tools

• Sparrow wallet v2.1.0 is now available. This release implements Lark for USB hardware wallets, supports loading of PSBTv2 files, adds multisig wallet registration save functionality for Ledger devices, includes Jade Plus USB support, and improves restore tables sorting and sizing on wallet load, among other enhancements.
• Envoy wallet v1.8.6 has been released. This version removes the buy button when the "Buy in Envoy" option is disabled, adds a link to Foundation's new community forum, and updates the Bitcoin ATM map to retrieve information from OpenStreetMaps, among other fixes and improvements.
• Bitcoin Safe wallet v1.0.5 brings fixes for UI bugs, CSV Drag & Drop in lists, and newly initialized Jade devices. It adds a "restore from seed" option for Bitbox02 devices without requiring the vendor software and implements stricter tests for clean wallet shutdowns.

• Blockstream Green Desktop v2.0.20 enables Liquid discounted fees for Confidential Transactions and disables transaction notes in watch-only mode.
  • Blockstream Green iOS v4.1.5 also enables Liquid discounted fees for Confidential Transactions.
• Blitz wallet v0.4.0-beta, a bug fix release, addresses a logic issue affecting balance checks and automatic channel openings, adds a QR code wrapper component to ensure all QR codes have a uniform appearance, fixes an issue where the max send amount check failed when the balance was 0, along with some other general bug fixes.
• Nutstash v2.0.3, a Cashu wallet with multi-mint and send-to-nostr-key functionality, has been released with several updates and improvements.
• Bisq v1.9.19 pre-release is now available for testing, delivering various bug fixes and improvements.
• Mempal v1.5.0, a Bitcoin mempool monitoring and notification app for Android, is now available. Users can now tap the Mempal logo to open a web browser to mempool.space or an equivalent custom mempool server. It also fixes a bug when the notification service is manually dismissed from the status bar, solves update issues with widget implementation, and optimizes the app's overall performance while also reducing its size.
• SwissBitcoinPay app v2.3.7, an easy-to-use solution for merchants to accept bitcoin payments, fixes expired invoice issues and optimizes point-of-sale layout for small screen devices.
• LND v0.18.5-beta.rc1 is now available for testing. This minor release includes a fix for a bug with AMP invoices, performance improvements for Postgres database backends, UX enhancements for custom channels, along with the usual bug fixes and stability improvements.
• Ditto, a decentralized, self-hosted social media server for community building across platforms, now comes with search filters for videos, media, and specific cross-protocol posts (Nostr, Fediverse, Mastodon, Bluesky, etc.). "You can also combine multiple filters to find, for example, videos only from Nostr," said the project.

• Unleashed.chat, an AI chatbot designed with privacy in mind, now includes the DeepSeek R1 32B model, allowing it to be used without sending data to the CCP.
• GrapheneOS v2025020300 is an early February security update release based on the February 2025 security patch backports.

Other stuff

• OrangeSurf has published a Block Size Report for Mempool Research, providing a data-driven analysis of Bitcoin block size, revealing how growth was partially constrained by miner policy and Bitcoin Core defaults over the years.
• Rizful has a detailed guide on becoming an advanced Nostr user with the power of Bitcoin and Lightning today.
• BTC Sessions has created a new tutorial for setting up an Umbrel node.

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