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Your guide to ordinals, lightning minecraft servers, personas, a whole bunch of conferences and bitcoin job opportunities.

Moves by financial market and banking regulators over the past few weeks have had crypto industry participants on alert regarding a regulatory crackdown in the US. While we continue to believe that ongoing regulatory and legal clarity is beneficial for the industry, we understand that given the flurry of news, investors have questions about the state of crypto regulations, how it impacts businesses, and the path ahead. It is important to understand that while there has been a flurry of regulatory activity in this space, none of it is existential. Nothing we have seen so far nor foresee on the horizon portends the banning or outlawing of digital assets. Certainly, the business practices of some industry participants are being called into question as is the regulatory designation for certain assets. However, we ultimately feel that sensible guardrails and knowing the rules of the road allow investors to confidently deploy capital in the asset class, benefitting prices.

oundry Pool is nearing the 40% network hashrate mark–an uncomfortable margin for many Bitcoin enthusiasts. While an attestation to the Foundry team’s ability to bootstrap, grow and sustain a mining pool within three years, the percentage needs to come down for a few reasons. Chief among them being the type of clients Foundry services: public miners. There’s two threats worth paying attention to: confirmation times and feather forks.

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Interest earned on bank accounts, certificates of deposit and corporate bonds is subject to income tax in the year it’s generated, according to the Internal Revenue Service. Typically, that’s a fairly straightforward process: Banks and other institutions send out 1099 forms listing the taxpayer’s interest income, which is then used when determining overall obligations for tax season. But in a quirk of last year’s crypto collapse, investors are now receiving tax bills for money locked up on platforms like Celsius and Voyager Digital, which have frozen customer withdrawals as they undergo bankruptcy proceedings. It could hardly come at a worse time for crypto investors.

What’s the best solution for you? The best solution is the one that fits your personal needs best. Every wallet has different features, as well as up- and downsides. It is on you to figure out your needs and possibilities and then to find the optimal solution for those. Non-custodial Lightning wallets might be a little less convenient to use and come with an initial cost when setting up the channels, but you are in full control over your own funds. You are financially sovereign.

The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) has granted 2 billion satoshis, approximately $475,000, from the Bitcoin Development Fund to 10 global projects. The funding will support areas such as censorship-resistant communication, Bitcoin education in authoritarian regimes, core development and building local communities and education, with a focus on Africa and Southeast Asia. The grants include $100,000 to Qala, a fellowship program training the next generation of African Bitcoin and Lightning developers, allowing the program to continue their 13-week fellowship and sponsoring six Qala fellows to attend the Oslo Freedom Forum.

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We used to be organized into families and tribes. Nowadays, we're organized into companies, which are very debased versions. Companies are artificial and don't have anywhere near the level of history or close relationships that families do. You can feel it in the pointless meetings you're forced to attend. Yet companies are very much the way individuals are organized in a fiat economy and this is due to the incentives of fiat money. We used to depend on our families, our clans or our tribes for our security. Kin was who you depended on to help you in times of need. Fiat money has changed everything by providing all manner of safety nets for individuals through these companies. All of these functions have been subsumed and you are now free to replace your family with government goodies. Insurance and money are poor substitutes for human relationships, like seed oils for butter and just about as toxic. Social security and pensions have replaced children. A cold, impersonal company that will lay you off at the drop of a hat has replaced the traditional family trade. Is it any wonder that people are so depressed?

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Caitlin Long said that crypto is currently comparable to the mutual funds market in the 1930s when it was rife with bad actors and fraud. But instead of thwarting the market altogether, President Franklin D. Roosevelt came up with breakthrough regulations that helped weed out the bad actors without killing the potential of mutual funds. And the U.S. needs to do the same with crypto; the country and regulators need to sit down with credible people in the crypto industry to develop a regulatory approach that does not thwart the innovative potential of the industry, she said.

This article provides a look at the author's latest research, revealing how it came to be that a 2022 Cambridge Centre For Alternative Finance’s (CCAF) study on Bitcoin’s environmental impact underestimates the amount of sustainable Bitcoin mining going on. I also address why we can be very confident that the actual sustainable energy usage is at least 52.6% of Bitcoin mining’s total energy use.

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The LATAM region records a high interest in unbacked crypto assets and stablecoins and its authorities’ policy responses have varied substantially, ranging from the introduction of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador to their prohibition in many other countries worried about their impact on financial stability, currency/asset substitution, tax evasion, corruption, and money laundering. This paper also describes briefly the results of a survey on CBDCs’ introduction plans and crypto assets regulation. Finally, this paper presents some general lessons and policy recommendations for the region on the regulation of crypto assets, digital currencies and cross-border payments, and on the potential introduction of CBDCs.

On the same day that the Federal Reserve denied Custodia's membership application, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (the "FRBKC") also denied Custodia's "master account" application. We summarize below the recent actions by the Federal Reserve, FRBKC, and other regulators and discuss their implications for banking institutions looking to commence or expand their crypto-asset banking services and activities.

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One of the biggest challenges of the Bitcoin network is having a low latency, highly secure and private way of exchanging messages between peers. The censorship resistance requirement of the system is determined by the ability to propagate messages without risk of interception by third parties like ISPs. Implementing solutions that enhance privacy among network participants is one way of ensuring that the censorship resistance requirement is satisfied. In this post, we dive into the need for bitcoin’s transport protocol to encrypt messages exchanged between peers. Since all data relayed in the Bitcoin P2P network is inherently public, and the protocol lacks a notion of cryptographic identities, peers talk to each other over unencrypted and unauthenticated connections. This is a risk to the Bitcoin network’s security in the presence of attackers.

The U.S. state of Wyoming has passed a bill that protects its citizens from having to disclose their private keys, with a singular exception. Having now been approved by the state Senate and House of Representatives, it now simply needs to be signed by the Governor in order to take effect.

Custodia Bank filed an amended complaint against the Federal Reserve Friday, weeks after the Fed rejected the bank's effort to secure a "master account" and become a member of the Federal Reserve System. The Wyoming Special Purpose Depository Institution claimed the denial of its application was unlawful, alleged the Federal Reserve Board and Biden administration coordinated a series of public statements to accompany the rejection of Custodia's application and said the Federal Reserve Board – not the Kansas City Fed – was "pulling the strings." The Federal Reserve denied Custodia's application to be a member of the Federal Reserve System at the end of January, and Custodia's master account application was rejected "immediately after," the suit said. "Defendants had a non-discretionary duty to grant Custodia’s master account application and not to discriminate against Custodia in its ability to access all bank services using that account. Any other outcome eviscerates the dual-banking system that has served our nation since its founding," the filing said.

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Bitcoin enthusiasts often make the mistake of concluding that Bitcoin’s potential valuation is infinite. This is true in dollar terms, since there is no limit to the amount of dollar debasement that can occur into the future (see Weimar Germany or recent Zimbabwe). But it is unrealistic in real terms, relative to other assets. The truth is that Bitcoin stands in relative competition with other store-of-value assets, all of which have unique value propositions. A wealthy individual is not very likely to sell their mansion or their prized Rembrandt to buy Bitcoin, but is instead more likely to sell some of their bond portfolio, because they believe Bitcoin better fulfills the intended purpose of holding bonds (propagating value into the future and earning a modest nominal return to offset inflation).

In Bitcoin, a UTXO is considered dust when the fee required to spend it is greater than the amount on the UTXO. Bitcoin Core considers a UTXO as dust if it's value is lower than the cost of spending it at the dustrelayfee. In Bitcoin Core, this dustrelayfee can be set by a commandline argument -dustrelayfee. Additionally, Bitcoin Core default dustrelayfee is 3000 sat/kB. In this article, we explore the bug while trying to open a channel from an LDK node to an LND node. This bug made us explore an important concept in Bitcoin and Lightning called dust limit. We also see how payments under the dust limit don't create HTLC output as transaction with outputs under the dust limit are not viable on-chain as they will not be relayed by nodes.

Just five days after reaching 50,000 inscriptions, Bitcoiners using the Ordinals protocol have now inscribed more than 100,000 pieces of data onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Since the project’s launch in January 2023, a seemingly endless stream of pictures, audio files and PDFs have been uploaded. Prominent projects on Ordinals include Bitcoin Shrooms, Astral Babes and Bitcoin Punks, which are Bitcoin-based uploads of the original Ethereum CryptoPunks. One of these has now sold for as much as 9.5 BTC, or approximately $215,000 at the time of writing.

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