The bitcoin community’s favorite social networking protocol, Nostr, now has millions of users worldwide and is quickly becoming an integral part of the digital economy. Primal, an emerging player in the Nostr industry, has secured $1 million in funding from Ten31, Hivemind Ventures, and others, making it the first venture capital-backed startup solely dedicated to developing bitcoin-infused Nostr applications.

Google Cloud is the latest company to show interest in Bitcoin Lightning. The $225-billion cloud and data service recently partnered with Voltage, an infrastructure provider specializing in the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

The partnership will allow one of the world’s largest cloud computing providers to roll out Bitcoin-based services worldwide while assisting the expansion of Voltage’s operations.

The new third-party payment service claims to be independent of the Damus iPhone app that Apple has tried to restrict, and lets users tip one another on any app that runs on the Nostr protocol.

TL; DR: Splicing changes the game. Phoenix now manages a single dynamic channel, no more 1% fee on inbound liquidity, better predictability and control, trustless swaps.

Bitcoin developer Entero Positivo launched “BIP39Colors” last month, an open-source tool that can convert one’s BIP39 mnemonic phrase into a series of colors, and vice versa.

“With this method, you can convert your 12-word phrase to 8 colors (or your 24-word phrase to 16 colors),” explained Positivo to Decrypt via DM. “Then you can convert your colors back to your original seed.”

By Tomer Strolight June 22, 2023

If you were to ask the question “What is man?” you might get a joking reply like “mostly water.” Such an answer wouldn’t be incorrect, but it would hardly be useful. It wouldn’t even tell you the difference between a man and a watermelon, or a cup of tea, both of which are also mostly water.

To be useful, you would need to go deeper and ask the question “What is the essence of man?” That’s a discussion that has been ongoing for thousands of years. I’ve personally thought about and discussed this topic a great deal, in large part because I want to understand what it is I am.

I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about the question of “What is the essence of Bitcoin?”. I’ve been asking this because I am fascinated by Bitcoin. However, I also think Bitcoin is a reflection of some very particular things about man and his essence, so asking questions about Bitcoin actually provides answers about the essence of man and mankind as well.

Luxor Technologies, a Bitcoin mining software and services company, has announced the expansion of its Bitcoin mining derivatives contracts. According to a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine, the new offering from Luxor's Derivatives Desk includes six-month duration contracts and daily settlement rates, providing market participants with extended contract periods and swift access to liquidity. The press release stated that the addition of these features enhances hedging efficiency and reduces the cost of capital in the Bitcoin mining derivatives space.

Bitcoin mining may soon be reducing more emissions than its energy sources produce according to Daniel Batten, cofounder of CH4Capital. Batten is a partner in a fund raising $400 million to fund projects mitigating vented methane from landfills by using the gas to mine bitcoin.

“Once fully deployed, we will have enough capital to take the entire Bitcoin Network carbon negative,” Batten told me in our interview, a claim that flies in the face of recent high profile bitcoin critics.

Archive link due to paywall

Crypto enthusiasts are hopeful that a once-in-four-years event which rewrites the underlying code of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency will extend the current market rally. But the milestone also risks sounding the death knell for certain Bitcoin miners.

[…]

“Nearly half of the miners will suffer given they have less efficient mining operations with higher costs,” predicts Jaran Mellerud, crypto-mining analyst at Hashrate Index.

He points to the break-even electricity price of the most common mining machine, which is expected to drop to six cents per kilowatt-hour from 12 cents/kWh after the halving. Around 40% of miners still have higher operating costs per kWh than that, Mellerud said. Miners with operating costs above 8 cents per kilowatt-hour will struggle to stay afloat, as will smaller miners that don’t run their own mining rigs but outsource them instead, he said.

By Matt Odell.

For many years there has been a common misconception that bitcoin is private by default. The reality is that many bitcoin users are extremely easy to track. Every transaction is recorded forever in the block chain; publicly visible to all participants. If personal information is linked to a specific transaction - name, email, IP address, mailing address, phone number, twitter account, etc. - that information can then be used to track past and future transactions using publicly available data. As bitcoin has matured, so have the tools used by surveillance companies. Bitcoiners should assume these companies have large datasets which combine information from many disparate sources including public on-chain metadata and private off-chain information used to improve their transaction tracking capabilities across the network as a whole.

OpenSats is pleased to announce a new long-term support (LTS) program for Bitcoin Core developers and similar Load-Bearing Internet People. This grant program is designed to provide financial support for developers who are working on critical infrastructure for the bitcoin network.

[…]

The first recipient of an OpenSats LTS Grant is Marco Falke, a long-term maintainer and contributor of Bitcoin Core with thousands of contributions over many years. Marco will continue to focus on testing and quality assurance, as well as maintenance and review, helping to make sure that the Bitcoin Core software is as solid as it can be.

There's a significant divide in the Bitcoin community at present, revolving around the adoption narrative. How does Bitcoin achieve widespread adoption? What conditions must be met for it to be globally recognized as a reserve currency? Two key narratives dominate the discourse.

[Archive link due to soft paywall]

BlackRock Inc. has refiled paperwork with US regulators through Nasdaq to add new details to its proposal for a exchange-traded fund that invests directly in Bitcoin.

The exchange on Monday submitted new documents with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to indicate that Coinbase Global Inc. will provide market surveillance in support of the proposed ETF from the world’s largest asset manager. The move came after the regulatory agency had said that initial filings by issuers were deemed to be insufficient and lacked necessary information.

Today, I’m pleased to announce we’ve entered into an agreement to be acquired by Loadpipe. We chose Loadpipe because they are e-commerce veterans focused on mainstream adoption. As an industry, we’re still on Day One in terms of developing real world crypto use cases for the masses, and we feel confident in the e-commerce veteran team at Loadpipe to continue stewarding our evolved vision to make crypto useful.

By Andrew Lee, Co-founder of Purse

Bitcoin can alleviate many of the most common issues world travelers face, giving them more time to enjoy their journeys.

This is an opinion editorial by HodlingCarla, an avid traveler and Bitcoin advocate.

A new event in London is dedicated to bitcoin adoption by inviting bitcoin activists to gather for an evening of e-sport activities, sim race challenge, discussions and lectures and open networking.

Bitcoin enthusiasts and motorsport fans are in for an electrifying evening of high-speed esports racing and immersive entertainment at the Sam Brooks Brewery in London. The ultimate fusion of speed, technology, and Bitcoin, The Bitcoin Racing Challenge – #RaceForAdoption, aims to fuel the race for Bitcoin adoption in style.

Event Details:

– Date: Thursday, July 27, 2023

– Time: 5:00 PM – 10:00 PM BST

– Location: Sam Brooks Brewery, 1 Bellweather Lane, The Ram Quarter, London, SW18 1UR, United Kingdom

– Ticket Information: Early bird tickets available for £10, or £21 including 10 minutes of simulator time.

A description of known problems in Satoshi Nakamoto's paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", as well as notes on terminology changes and how Bitcoin's implementation differs from that described in the paper.

[This is a few years old, but I found it recently and thought it was interesting]

Full link, but soft-paywalled: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-30/kraken-ordered-to-turn-over-its-users-information-to-the-irs

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken was ordered by a judge to provide a wide swath of information about its users to the Internal Revenue Service for the agency’s investigation of underreported tax liability.

The IRS has said it wants information on Kraken accounts that did at least $20,000 of cryptocurrency trading in any single year, from 2016 to 2020. Kraken had called the agency’s summons an “unjustified treasure hunt,” arguing it went well beyond the boundaries set in a similar fight with Coinbase about six years ago.