Weekly Digest
Block 753176: Weekly Digest
Important news of the week without the bullshit.
1 min read
News
Coinbase is Funding a Lawsuit Challenging the U.S. Treasury Department’s Sanctions of Tornado Cash
* Tornado Cash is an open source piece of software running on the Ethereum blockchain that preserves privacy by allowing users to deposit assets from one crypto address and withdraw them using a different crypto address. * The problem here is twofold: (1) there are legitimate applications for this type of technology
1 min read
News
How Jay-Z and Jack Dorsey's Bitcoin Academy Provides Financial Inclusion and Breaks Down Barriers of Inequity
* Insider profiled Jay-Z and Jack Dorsey's Bitcoin Academy at the conclusion of its program for Marcy Houses in Brooklyn. * At the end of the courses on Wednesday, Marcy residents who enrolled in the Academy and opted into a grant each received around $1,000 in bitcoin. https://www.
1 min read
Releases
Fountain Podcasts v0.4.8 Released: New Charts, Faster Boosts, Faster Clipping, Referral Update
* iOS and Android * Hot on Fountain: Discover the most supported shows and episodes, as well as the biggest boosts. * New Lightning Podcasts: Discover shows that have recently been added to the Lightning Network. * Faster boosts. * Faster timestamp clipping. * Tweaked the way that referrals work on Fountain so that when your
1 min read
News
Doctor Bitcoin, Jailed For Selling Bitcoin P2P, Warns Others
* On September 5, Hopkins announced via his Twitter account that he would be reporting to the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institute “for the crime of selling #Bitcoin a few years ago.” * In 2019, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a federal bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, published
2 min read
Research
Arthur Hayes: For The War
* When war is waged, the State takes priority. Regardless of whatever the pre-war legal norms were, during wartime, whatever the State needs, the State takes. And because the State must have what it needs to wage war, the private sector is typically crowded out of a wide range of goods
2 min read
News
The State of Lightning One Year After El Salvador’s Bitcoin Adoption
* Michael Peterson, the founder of Bitcoin Beach, the circular Bitcoin economy that inspired El Salvador President Nayib Bukele to adopt bitcoin nationally, told Bitcoin Magazine that this is “all about perspective.” * “Most negative stories claim [Bitcoin payments adoption] is about 20% and paint that as failure. If a country outside
1 min read
Releases
Bitcoin Optech #216
* Bitcoin Core #25717 adds a “Headers Presync” step during Initial Block Download (IBD) to help prevent Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and step towards removing checkpoints. Nodes use the pre-sync phase to verify that a peer’s headers chain has sufficient work before storing them permanently. * Bitcoin Core #25355 adds
1 min read
Research
Research - Pikachu: Securing PoS Blockchains from Long-Range Attacks by Checkpointing into Bitcoin PoW using Taproot
* Blockchain systems based on a reusable resource, such as proof-of-stake (PoS), provide weaker security guarantees than those based on proof-of-work. Specifically, they are vulnerable to long-range attacks, where an adversary can corrupt prior participants in order to rewrite the full history of the chain. To prevent this attack on a
1 min read
News
Human Rights Foundation Donates $325K to Bitcoin Development: Eight Donations in Total
* Largest contribution of $100,000 goes to BTCPay Server, an open-source bitcoin payments processor. * Two donations of $50,000 each will be allocated to Jon Atak and Josh Kitman. Atak is a core developer continuously reviewing and working to improve Bitcoin, while Kitman is working on Fedimint, a Chaumian e-cash
1 min read
News
Major Bitcoin Mining Pool With 10% of Hash Rate, 'Poolin', Appears to be Insolvent: Withdrawals Have Been Frozen
* Poolin' operators have announced zero fees for all users from September 8th to December 7th and a change from FPPS to PPLNS for bitcoin payout calculation. * They also plan to extend the zero fee period to a full year for miners who choose to hold a larger balance (more
1 min read
News
Australian Federal Police Forms Cryptocurrency Unit Focused on Tracking and Seizing Funds
* “It’s targeting assets, but it’s also providing that valuable, investigative tracing capability and lens for all of our commands across all of our businesses, whether they’re national security-related, child protection, cyber – or the ability to trace cryptocurrency transactions across the relevant blockchains is really, really important.” * AFP
1 min read