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Australia’s central bank is set to launch a “live pilot” of a central bank digital currency “in the coming months,” according to a joint statement from the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre, an Australian financial research institute. The RBA said on March 2 that it was collaborating with the DFCRC on a research project to “explore potential use cases and economic benefits of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in Australia.” The RBA said the initial stage of the research project involves the selection of several financial industry participants to demonstrate potential use cases of the CBDC.

For the first time since 2001, investors can make more money holding cash than a traditional stock-bond portfolio. Returns for the classic portfolio of stocks and bonds are taking hits as traders react to the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes and speculate on the US central bank's next move. Meanwhile, returns on short-term Treasury bills are also sensitive to increases in the fed funds rate and climb alongside the benchmark. The shift in the 60/40 portfolio's performance versus short-term T-bills comes as the Fed continues its fight against stubbornly high inflation.

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Mi Primer Bitcoin, a Bitcoin education program based in El Salvador, has announced a new and improved diploma program in English. According to Dalia Platt, head of curriculum for Mi Primer Bitcoin, the “aim is to change the way people learn about Bitcoin. The goal is to make the course interactive, fun, creative, accessible and easy to understand for all, using examples that can reach and impact every corner of the world.” Bitcoin education is an essential part of adoption throughout the world. Without proper knowledge both in relation to the current workings of the monetary systems of the world, and the new protocol that Bitcoin offers, one cannot properly make the decision to adopt Bitcoin. Only after learning about money as it is, and money as it could be, is the full potential of Bitcoin unveiled. Programs like Mi Primer Bitcoin offer this education and learning in order to unlock that potential.

Bitcoin is an open-source project that is permissionless, meaning anyone can join the network and become part of the network. While Running a bitcoin node can help secure the network for all users, ensure faster transactions, and contribute to a decentralised economy that exists without a centralized server, it does require some operational and security practices. This article is essential if you plan on running a node or run one and want to ensure you’re plugging some of the possible gaps for an attack.

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"I am unbelievably sorry for my role in all of this," Singh said, adding that he knew by mid-2022 that Bankman-Fried's hedge fund, Alameda Research, was borrowing FTX customer funds, and customers were not aware. He has agreed to forfeit proceeds from the scheme. Singh, 27, pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud, three counts of conspiracy to commit fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States by violating campaign finance laws.

Whether or not Bitcoin “should” be used for this NFT-like activity is a hotly-contested issue and the data coming from the effects of this mini Bitcoin collectives craze is intriguing. Inscriptions could be a short-lived fad, but several early data sets from the first weeks of inscription activity show tremendous interest in this new use case for the Bitcoin network. Diving in, this article provides an overview of six sets of data from the inscription mania.

BIP-300, which enables a feature called Drivechains on the Bitcoin network. Normally, one would hope that the author of a BIP is not very central or relevant to whether or not it gets attention, but as Sztorc seems to be the major voice continuing to push for Drivechain after being essentially rejected or ignored on the forums and mailing list, it might be worth knowing this brief background & motivation. Sztorc is no intellectual slouch, and he's very open about his conviction that the success of Bitcoin is fully dependent on its adoption of Drivechain. Drivechains fundamentally change the transaction validation mechanism from “all spends must provide cryptographic proofs” to “some spends do not require cryptographic proofs”. It fundamentally changes the ability to attack the network from “the attacker must acquire 51% of the hash rate” to “the attacker must propose a transaction and fight out ownership in meatspace”. It fundamentally changes attack response from “move hash away from the bad actor” (e.g., out of a pool, or by adding more honest hash) to “convince all the miners or nodes to do a UASF in favor of one party over another”.

Bitcoin has been compared to a decentralized clock because of the way it keeps track of the order of transactions as they happen around the world. The nature of inscriptions on Bitcoin uses this ordering to number the inscriptions as they are written onto the blockchain, aka timechain. As the inscription count approached 100,000, people rushed to get their inscriptions confirmed before or exactly at that number. We saw the largest increase in fees around this time. After this monumental inscription number, the rush to create NFTs on Bitcoin has drastically decreased. While there is still a backlog of transactions in the mempool, the fees required to get a transaction confirmed in the next block have dropped considerably and the daily total fees spent on creating inscriptions is “down only.”

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Group of 20 (G20) nations have some disagreements over restructuring debt for distressed economies, the chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Kristalina Georgieva said on Saturday, adding that banning private cryptocurrencies should be an option. "We have to differentiate between central bank digital currencies that are backed by the state and stable coins, and crypto assets that are privately issued," Georgieva said. "There has to be very strong push for regulation... if regulation fails, if you're slow to do it, then we should not take off the table banning those assets, because they may create financial stability risk."

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Unbeknown to many cryptocurrency newcomers, in 2014 the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, went bankrupt following a series of hacks and mismanagement issues. The fall resulted in customers losing over 800,000 bitcoin — a level of worry that makes FTX seem like a blip in time. Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, whose domain (MtGox.com) was originally registered in 2007 to host a trading site for the wildly popular “Magic: The Gathering” game cards, began operating as a rudimentary bitcoin exchange in late 2010.

Building a Bitcoin wallet is no easy task, but with the right tools and frameworks, developers can build robust and secure wallets that provide a seamless user experience. The use of Flutter, BDK, and other standards and protocols provides a powerful and reliable platform for building Bitcoin wallets.

Last month, Bitcoin developer James O'Beirne sounded the alarm: The dominant blockchain might lose some very talented contributors if someone doesn’t step up to pay them for their work. That work involves writing and maintaining code for the Bitcoin blockchain, tasks completely dependent on grants and donations from businesses and voluntary contributors. But relying on grants, stipends and free labor makes Bitcoin development prone to the ebb and flow of crypto markets – and goodwill.

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Blockstream, a leading Bitcoin infrastructure company, has announced a formalized Blockstream Research team with a focus on advancing the platforms at the core of the Bitcoin ecosystem, tackling complex problems and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with Bitcoin. The research team now consists of 10 highly experienced researchers, including the likes of Andrew Poelstra, Andrew Chow, Dr. Russell O’Connor and Christian Lewe. There are a variety of projects already in progress that the research team is working on. The team has created a more robust programming language, Simplicity, which is designed as an alternative to Bitcoin Script. The team has also created Miniscript, a safer language for writing structured Bitcoin Scripts that enables analysis, composition, generic signing and more. In addition to this, the company is also developing Elements Script, a set of extensions to Bitcoin Script that includes new covenant opcodes, which are still being explored.

The regulators stressed that banks should actively monitor the liquidity risks tied to crypto-derived funding sources, assess any potential concentration of funding they may have in the sector, monitor representations their crypto partners may make to the market regarding funding, and incorporate liquidity risks into contingency plans, including stress tests for liquidity.

Lndhub started as a weekend experiment on a new fringe technology barely used at the time called the Lightning Network. Today, with the availability of more mainstream services offering scalable solutions, Lndhub has fulfilled its purpose in its current form. Lndhub as a software and FOSS self hosted solution will keep existing and being supported for anyone interested in running it. You will always be able to connect to your own LndHub from BlueWallet or other software that supports LndHub API specification. If you have sats on BlueWallet’s lightning node, please move them as soon as possible.

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Self-hosted addresses, formerly known as “unhosted wallets” in the European Union's policies, are back in discussion as European Parliament staff look to clarify that lawmakers do not want an outright ban on non-custodial services. Self-hosted wallets will still be subject to a transaction limit of €1,000 ($1,070) if the owner cannot be identified. This aligns with the TFR requiring originator and beneficiary data on crypto transactions of the same cap. The change from “self-hosted wallets” to “self-hosted addresses,” however, may cause regulatory uncertainties since the TRF, with its text finalized, uses different language from the Parliament's AML proposal. The AML proposal under the European Council also currently refers to "wallets" and not "addresses."

Keynesian central banking has turned the American economy into a giant economic science experiment. They are flying by the seat of their pants, guesstimating as they go, while pretending it’s all coming out of scientific economic models. The drunken sailor’s take on the US economy and inflation articulated by Lael Brainard reflects nothing more than the ever-changing groupthink of the Fed heads and their acolytes on Wall Street. It is based on the in-coming data from primitive government measures of inflation, employment, GDP and other macroeconomic series—all stuffed into an economic framework/model predicated on blatantly faulty macroeconomic theories.

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