Good Morning, Bitcoin - Thursday, February 6th, 2025

News

• The FDIC has released 175 internal documents on "Operation Chokepoint 2.0," potentially hinting at a new direction taken by the agency to allow banking institutions to operate in the Bitcoin and digital assets sector without needing prior regulatory approval. The records include correspondence between the FDIC and banks, as well as other regulated entities, regarding 'crypto' activities.

"The documents that we are releasing today show that requests from these banks were almost universally met with resistance, ranging from repeated requests for further information, to multi-month periods of silence as institutions waited for responses, to directives from supervisors to pause, suspend, or refrain from expanding all crypto or blockchain-related activity," said Travis Hill, the Acting Chairman of the agency.

• MicroStrategy has rebranded to Strategy. The business intelligence firm and the largest corporate holder of bitcoin will now operate under the name 'Strategy' and has changed its logo to include a Bitcoin symbol. In the announcement, Strategy stated that "the brand’s primary color is now orange, representing energy, intelligence, and Bitcoin."

• France removed wealth tax provision that classified cryptocurrencies as 'unproductive' from the 2025 budget proposal. Initially, the 2025 budget included plans to introduce a "tax on unproductive wealth," which would have included cryptocurrency holdings along with various luxury goods and real estate.
• Pavel Durov's case in France won’t go to trial for 'a year or more.' Maylis de Roeck from the French prosecutor's office told WIRED that it is premature to talk about "any kind of settlement agreement." Over five months after his arrest, the founder of Telegram remains in France, leaving the company in uncertainty about potentially replacing its leader.
• The Strategy World 2025 Bitcoin event for corporations is set to take place on May 5-8, 2025 in Orlando, Florida. Check out the event's website here.

Use the tools

• BDK wallet v1.1.0 updates the transaction builder to use transaction version 2 by default and adds support for wallets using testnet4. This release includes significant updates to bdk_electrum, which now has an MSRV of v1.75.0 to ensure alignment with the latest security fixes. Additionally, bdk_bitcoind_rpc introduces a new compact block filter module alongside various bug fixes and improvements.
• Mempool.space now visualizes Merkle branches of Stratum jobs. The new Stratum Jobs section provides real-time visualization of Merkle branches sent by mining pools to miners, enabling users to monitor and identify similarities in mining activity across different pools.

• Other projects offering an overview of Stratum jobs by mining pools include stratum-observer (source code) and stratum.work (source code). Learn more about block template similarities between mining pools here.

• Bisq v2.1.4 pre-release is now available for testing, featuring the latest updates and enhancements.
• Bitcoin Safe v1.0.6 fixes an UI bug introduced in the previous release.
• Mempal v1.5.1 disables APK dependency metadata and fixes a minor color mismatch in the combined widget.
• Vertex is a fast, reliable, and open-source Web of Trust Data Vending Machine (DVM) service based on the Personalized Pagerank algorithm.

• Pokey v0.1.4-alpha, a 'pull-notification' client for Nostr events on Android, now separates permanent and note notifications into two groups managed by Android settings and displays the number of connected relays as part of the permanent notification.
• Amber v3.2.1, a Nostr event signer for Android devices, adds additional details when signing a contact list, refactors the check for logged-in accounts, and more.
• Nak v0.11.1, a command-line tool for managing Nostr activities, has been released. It now includes the Nak wallet with NIP-60 token support alongside a few other new features.
• Fedimint v0.6.0-rc2 is now available for testing.
• The latest stacker.news release enables email login on the iOS progressive web app (PWA) and includes several accessibility improvements along with minor fixes.

Other stuff

• Stacker.news user Satochip_ has put together a guide on building your own simple Bitcoin signing smartcard for under $25.
• Spiral has published a blog post recapping the progress on the development of Payjoin.

"Speaking of, looking ahead to Q1 2025, the team is prioritizing wider Payjoin adoption while working to stabilize their V2 API for a 1.0 release and upcoming audit. Several promising integrations are in progress, including work with Cake Wallet and hopefully with LDK Node for lightning-payjoin integration," said the project.

• The most recent blog post by BitBox explores how multisignature schemes built on Taproot can improve privacy and lower transaction fees.
• ValentinoZ has recorded a comprehensive tutorial for using the Liana wallet.

• A community Satraiser for SATS'N'HACKS Freedom Tech Hackathon is taking place currently. Learn more and contribute here.

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