Good Morning, Bitcoin - Monday, February 17th, 2025

News

• Argentina's Milei is facing fraud charges, impeachment calls following a failed memecoin launch. Opposition lawmakers in Argentina are pushing for impeachment, claiming the scandal has embarrassed the country on the international stage. The country's fintech chamber suggested that the incident might be a 'rug pull.' Milei's administration announced yesterday that it would initiate its own investigation into the token project.
• Abu Dhabi has invested $437M in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin ETF. The Mubadala Investment Company, a sovereign wealth fund from Abu Dhabi, purchased over 8.2 million shares of BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT). This purchase was confirmed through a 13F filing with the U.S. SEC, reportedly making Abu Dhabi the first government-backed institution to invest in a Bitcoin ETF.
• The Bitcoin mining industry has created over 31,000 jobs in the United States. A new report by the Perryman Group highlights that the U.S. bitcoin mining industry and related utility activities contribute over $4.1 billion annually to the gross product when multiplier effects are included. The industry also supports over 31,000 jobs, factoring in these multiplier effects.
  • The state of Texas leads in U.S. bitcoin mining, contributing $1.7 billion in gross product and over 12,200 jobs. Georgia follows with $316.8 million and 2,300 jobs, and New York with $225.9 million and 1,600 jobs annually.

• Metaplanet has purchased an additional 269.43 bitcoin for $26.4 million, bringing its total holdings to more than 2,031 BTC.
• The Swiss Bitcoin Conference is a Bitcoin-only event taking place in Kreuzlingen on Lake Constance from April 24-27, 2025. Get your tickets here.

Use the tools

• Bitcoin Seed Tool v2.2.0, a tool designed to help understand how Bitcoin wallets are generated using different sources of entropy, is now available. This update adds support for BIP-85 passwords and improves the functionality of pasting a mnemonic phrase into the tool. Additionally, it switches the URL from paynym.is to paynym.rs, along with a few other fixes and improvements.
• Nix Bitcoin v0.0.119, a collection of Nix packages and NixOS modules for easily installing full-featured Bitcoin nodes with a focus on security, has been released. This update includes upgrading LND to v0.18.5-beta, Electrs to v0.10.9, and NBXplorer to v2.5.17.
• Bitcoin Safe v1.0.7, a bitcoin savings wallet for families, adds support for Burmese and Korean languages, along with some bug fixes.
• Alby Hub v1.14.2 is now available. It introduces new widgets to the home screen, some new apps in the app store, a new health check indicator, NIP-44 encryption, basic swap functionality for easier liquidity management, and more.
• Dana Wallet v0.4.0, an Android wallet using the Silent Payments protocol, implements Spend flow designs and adds gzip compression to the blindbit client.
• ZEUS Wallet v0.10.0-alpha3 is now available for testing.
• RBG v0.12.0-beta.5 is now available for testing.
• Bitcoin Is Data, a website for "beautiful visualizations of challenging Bitcoin metrics", has been redesigned and now comes fully functional API, modernized charts and buttons, new Data tab, and more.
• Stacker.news added the ability to set base comment fees for territories, auto-retry of failed payments, referral sources, and several bug fixes.
• Coop v0.1.1-alpha, a Nostr client for DMs on desktop devices, is a hotfix release addressing some critical issues introduced in the first alpha version of Coop.
• Amber v3.2.2, a Nostr event signer for Android, is now available.
• KeyChat v1.27.2 has been released with support for logging in or importing accounts via the Amber app, along with browser support for sharing URLs to rooms.
• Mynymbox launched a privacy focused standards-oriented email hosting solution with POP3, IMAP and SMTP and webmail client that offers powerful GPG features and Tor support.
• SimpleX Chat v6.2.5 adds the ability to change media filenames when forwarding, introduces important fixes, and shows app storage usage in dev tools on iOS.

Other stuff

• DeFi Education Fund published a report on how the U.S. Department of Justice is directly targeting software developers who build non-custodial and privacy-enhancing tools.
• BitcoinDevs.xyz made a post explaining Segwit addresses.
• BTC Sessions published a tutorial on how to safely set up and secure the Trezor Safe 5 Bitcoin-only edition device.

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