🌎 Kenya Goes Bitcoin

Kenya's Largest Power Provider To Offer Geothermal Energy To Bitcoin Miners
By Shawn Amick

KenGen, the leading supplier of electricity in Kenya, wants to provide excess geothermal power to bitcoin mining companies, according to a report from Quartz Africa.

Kenya is the top producer of geothermal energy in Africa, and delivers over 14,000 megawatts (MW) of power with an equipment capacity of only 863 MW. Additionally, along the Rift Vally circuit alone, an estimated 10,000 MW of geothermal energy lies dormant.

The current limitations of the grid and the excess of potential power, makes Kenya an attractive place for bitcoin miners, especially since there aren't any bitcoin mining firms currently in Africa — at least not yet.

"We have the space and the power is near, which helps with stability,'' – Peketsa Mwangi, KenGen's geothermal development director

How To Set Up And Use The SeedSigner DIY Bitcoin Signing Device
By Econoalchemist

SeedSigner is a project that brings together free and open-source code, inexpensive and general-purpose hardware, and a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to secure and take personal responsibility for your bitcoin.

The goal of SeedSigner is to lower the cost and complexity of Bitcoin multi-signature wallet use. To accomplish this goal, SeedSigner offers anyone the opportunity to build a verifiably air-gapped, stateless Bitcoin signing device.

This article is a full guide to self-custody your bitcoin using the SeedSigner, covering everything you need to know about unboxing, software, hardware, testing and assembly, generating a new seed, seed backup, the use of Sparrow Wallet, multisig, the importance of self custody, a video summary and trade offs.

1. Bitcoin is the most secure network in human history. Without the security and immutability unique to Bitcoin, DeFi will never achieve mass adoption.

2. Making sure your bitcoin transactions remain private is made significantly easier with a computer dedicated to this function alone.

3. A growing awareness of Bitcoin is a good sign for adoption, but education is the low hanging fruit that can be improved to support newcomers.

4. Public complaints around bitcoin mining noise pollution are growing, but miners have plenty of solutions at their disposal. Let’s use them.

5. The Biden administration is reportedly crafting policies intended to lower energy consumption and emissions from bitcoin mining.

6. Bitzero is planning to build their central headquarters for bitcoin mining operations in North Dakota valued at $500 million.

7. CleanSpark, a sustainable bitcoin mining company, released a mining production update for May showing an increase in custodied BTC with improved operations.

8. Bitcoin doesn't just "break all your models." Bitcoin breaks all cycles.

9. Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange, i s being sued by the CFTC on allegations of false statements made to obtain certification for bitcoin futures contracts.

10. Law, markets, architecture and social norms are forces that constrain individuals’ behavior. Can governments take advantage of these to regulate Bitcoin?

Why The Denial-Of-Service Argument Against Bolt 12 Doesn’t Hold Up
By Shinobi

BOLT, or Basis of Lightning Technology is the Lightning equivalent to the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP). BOLT 12 is a proposal to optimize how payments are made over the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s second layer payment protocol, and would ultimately become the successor to BOLT 11.

One of the biggest criticisms brought against the BOLT 12 proposal has been the inclusion of general purpose onion messages and the worry that it would open new denial-of-service (DoS) attack vectors. This article focuses on the trade-offs and issues regarding the denial-of-service argument and its author shares his technical expertise and insight to demonstrate that such an argument does not really make sense.