Perth BitDevs
Obscura VPN Now Available
Obscura VPN is from Carl Dong, former Bitcoin Core developer who was responsible for reproducible builds. Obscura is designed to never see user traffic, making tracking impossible. It blends with regular internet traffic to avoid network filters, ensuring unrestricted access.
Proton Wallet Now Available to All
Anyone can sign up for Proton Wallet for free to securely buy, send, receive, and hold BTC. It’s a self-custody wallet - Proton never has access to your private keys - from the highly regarded Proton team (Protonmail, SimpleLogin etc).
Argentina’s Milei Promotes LIBRA Memecoin
The coin’s market cap surged to $4.4 billion but then dropped over 95%. Milei’s deleted tweet claimed Libra was aimed at boosting Argentina’s economy and included a Solana contract address for the token.
ByBit Hack
Major exchange security incident at ByBit.
UK Orders Apple to Create Backdoor for Encrypted iCloud
UK orders Apple to create backdoor for encrypted iCloud accounts worldwide. Apple might withdraw support for Advanced Data Protection for iCloud in the UK instead of installing a backdoor. But even doing this might not satisfy the UK’s demand for worldwide backdoor access.
LNbits "Almost Out of Beta"
After 5 years and 8.5k commits, LNbits is almost out of beta. LNbits is a free and open-source Lightning wallet and accounts system.
Bitcoin Inquisition v28.1 Released
Bitcoin Inquisition is a signet full node designed for experimenting with proposed soft forks and other major protocol changes. This version has support for ephemeral dust, which is part of the ephemeral anchors idea that would allow Lightning on-chain transactions to have fees set at spend time. Any participant can use the ephemeral anchor output as the input to a child transaction which adds fees at the time the transaction is broadcast.
Kagi Implements Privacy Pass
Kagi implements Privacy Pass, an authentication protocol that allows clients to authenticate to Kagi servers in a way that verifies the client has the right to access its services but does not reveal the identity of the connecting client.
Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) Seeing Increased Adoption
NWC allows for sustained interaction between Bitcoin Lightning wallets and apps. Once an app connection is created, the app can request payments through a Nostr relay. Now available in Primal 2.1 and Zeus v0.10.0-alpha2.
Hashpool
Hashpool - a new mining pool concept. Covered by @humansinstitute.
BIP 3 Has Been Merged
BIPs are Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. BIP 3 introduced new guidelines and policies for the preparation and publication of BIPs, and reduces the set of BIP statuses.
Tracking Bitcoin Laws in the US
It’s probably worth examining the state-of-play each month as a lot is happening in the space. In the last month: Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Wyoming all rejected Strategic Bitcoin Reserve-like laws. The Texas Senate Business and Commerce Committee unanimously approved the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SB 21) bill with a 9-0 vote. Oklahoma’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act (HB 1203) moves to the House floor.