Announcements

• Respect people’s privacy
• Chatham House rules
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• Follow us on Twitter (@HonoluluBitcoin)
• Donate sats
• Sponsor shoutout
  • Hawaii Technology Development Corporation
  • Entrepreneurs Sandbox

Geopolitics

• Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried arrested in Bahamas
• Coin Center response to the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act introduced by Senators Warren and Marshall
  • BTC Policy Institute: “Senator Warren’s Misguided War on Self-Custody”
  • Opinion piece on how this bill proposes unconstitutional privacy restrictions for bitcoin users
  • “An opportunistic, unconstitutional assault on cryptocurrency self custody, developers, and node operators”
• EU to force crypto companies to report their users’ holdings to tax authorities
• Bank of International Settlements (BIS) committee finalizes policy proposal about standardizing digital asset exposure limits for banks

Market/Adoption

• Bitnob partnerships enabling LN-based remittances in Africa
  • Strike enables instant, cheap remittances for people in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana
  • CoinCorner partners with Bitnob to facilitate cross-border transactions from UK and Europe to Africa

Technology

• Bitcoin Core version 24.0.1 released
  • Mempool observer tool to view recent full-RBF replacement events
• Ledger launches Stax hardware wallet
• Jack Dorsey provides 14 bitcoin grant to open source distributed communication protocol ‘nostr’ with goal of censorship-resistant Twitter replacement
  • @fiatjaf splits grant with @jb55 to enable 2 competing foundations pushing Nostr development
  • 2 days later: Twitter announces policy banning promotion of other social platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr
• Coinkite launches ‘BinaryWatch’ Hub: tracks popular bitcoin software signature verification
  • The BinaryWatch.org website checks binaries from Bitcoin-related projects and monitors for any changes
  • The company also operates bitcoinbinary.org a service that archives reproducible builds for Bitcoin-related projects.
• First successful discreet log contract has been executed on the Lightning Network
• Anonsats: Privacy-focused Chaumian ecash payment system built on Bitcoin, Lightning, and Cashu

Mining

• Mining in a bear market
  • How does the current bitcoin mining bear market compare to previous ones?
  • Further analysis of the bear market impact on miners
  • Coin Metrics’ State of the Network’s Q4 2022 Mining Data Special
• River report: “What Could Bitcoin Mining Look Like at One Zettahash?”

Optional Topics

• Everyone’s a Scammer (Hold your own keys!)
  • Digital Currency group owes Gemini users $900m amid Genesis insolvency
  • Gemini modifies terms of service as Gemini Dollar stablecoin gets caught in market contagion
  • Assessing Binance reserves and liabilities
  • SBF secretly funded ‘The Block’ news organization: CEO Michael Mccaffrey used Alameda money to buy out other investors, becoming the majority shareholder himself
• Brazil approves bill regulating use of bitcoin as payment
• Nigeria looking to legalize the usage of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies
• Japan’s largest power company will mine bitcoin with excess energy
• Core Lightning v22.11: “Alameda Yield Generator”
• New Lightning Network privacy research
• “Maturation of the Lightning Network: Growing up by going vertical” by Roy Sheinfeld from Breez
• Replit + Mash
  • Blog post from Mash about Lightning monetization and payment tools on Replit
  • TFTC Issue #1293: Replit + Lighting could open the floodgates to app building
• Legends of Lightning tournament announces winners
• “Structural Adjustment: How the IMF and World Bank repress poor countries and funnel their resources to rich ones” by Alex Gladstein from the HRF
• “Oil, Gold, and LCLo(SP)R” by Zoltan Pozsar of Credit Suisse
• Coinbase received 12320 government demands for customer info this year: up 66% from last year
• “Do Not Rug on Me: Leveraging Machine Learning Techniques for Automated Scam Detection” research paper
• Gridless, a bitcoin mining company in East Africa, raises $2m in funding led by Stillmark and Block, Inc.