The international non-profit organization will award each project USD 25,000 in Bitcoin. The Gemini Opportunity Fund supports the awarded funds.

In recent days, two projects to improve the use of Bitcoin received financial aid from the Human Rights Foundation (HRF). The projects that benefited are those of Ben Kaufman and the Global Mesh Labs team. The HRF Bitcoin Development Fund will award each of them the amount of USD 25,000 in Bitcoin.

Open-source software developer Ben Kaufman will use the sum to enhance his “Specter Desktop” desktop wallet. According to the HRF, “Ben’s work at Specter will make it even easier for anyone to be their own bank.”

Ben Kaufman explained that he has spent some time working on Specter Desktop. He said that “this is an interface to protect people’s wallets, without depending on third-party servers.”

Kaufman also described some of the main features that this desktop wallet offers. He mentioned that its own device (node) allows it not to depend on third parties. Besides, he stated that it is compatible with any hardware wallet or physical device for saving private cryptocurrency keys. This tool also allows configuring users’ wallets as single sig and multi sig. Besides, it allows selecting cryptocurrencies and improves the sending of funds through blockstream services.

Improving Bitcoin Core Payment Channels

The Human Rights Foundation will also award USD 25,000 to the Lot49 project from Global Mesh Labs. This company is currently developing a decentralized network of payment channels based on Bitcoin and Lightning Network.

The abovementioned project is based on technology for Android mobile devices with low bandwidth mobile networks. It will allow Bitcoin to “be more usable in environments of mobile devices with irregular Internet connectivity, unstable currencies, and poor infrastructure.” That is what developers Richard Myers, Fodé Diop, and Will Clark predict.

According to the details of the project, “existing payment channel protocols do not focus on efficiently routing data and payments at the same time.” For that reason, they believe that their app would solve this problem by preserving decentralization. Global Mesh Labs claim that their signature aggregation and channel update scheme are more efficient to settle transactions. They believe that their system opens a flexible design space to optimize the coverage and reliability of mobile mesh networks to preserve decentralization.

Other Projects that Have Received Financing

Last year, another project (From Venezuela) aimed at improving payment channels received financing from the Monero community fund. They are Locha Mesh, the creators of a device called “el Turpial”. Its purpose is to issue Bitcoin transactions and messages without the Internet.

Other developers have received help from the HRF thanks to the Gemini exchange. Since December of last year, this platform has had a donation fund to support the development of Bitcoin Core. In December 2020, the HFR also financed, along with Square Crypto, the Package Mempool Accept project. Its objective is to “optimize the Bitcoin fee system.”

By Alexander Salazar

According to Buterin, the brain cannot retain passwords or tracking paper wallets. Buterin’s ideal wallets are the ones that need third parties to retrieve passwords and accesses.

Vitalik Buterin, co-creator of Ethereum, talked about various topics, a relevant one is a weakness that some cryptocurrency wallers show, that weakness mostly includes hardware issues. He claimed that social recovery purses are currently his favorite alternative.

The user of wallets like these can use them normally. The highlight is that: In case users lose their key signature then they can always approach the social recovery to help them to get back the dominion over their compromised wallet.

“The user can simply contact their guardians and ask them to sign a special transaction to change the public signature key that accesses to the wallet contract for a new one,” explains Buterin.

He explains how easy is to add new tutors and also says that in any sensibly designed social recovery wallet, the tutor does not need to download and use the same wallet; the tutor can simply use the user’s existing Ethereum wallet.

“I prefer a high number of tutors, ideally more than seven”, says Buterin says that his preference lays on an ideal of at least seven tutors and clarifies that this preference is to add a major sense of security to his operations.

Keep the Guardians Unknown, it is too Risky

The Etherean community leader recommends keeping the guardians unknown; it is too risky to have known guardians because of the probability of a sudden attack increases in a very high percentage.

He recommends choosing carefully a diverse catalogue of tutors; unknown guardians can reduce the risk of coordinated attacks that may harm guardians simultaneously.

The goal of cryptocurrencies, according to Buterin, “was never to eliminate the total need for trust” but rather to “give more options who to trust.”

Moreover, cryptocurrencies permit people to build more solid forms of trust such as granting a stranger the power to do some things on their behalf but cutting them down from the possibility to act in deliberation.

Of the most popular purses are the multi-signature ones. These are Buterin’s favorites. “The Ethereum Foundation uses a 4 of 7 multi-signature wallets to store its funds, just like many other organizations in the Ethereum ecosystem,” he says.

But, for the Ethereum benchmark, all the wallets proposed so far, such as paper-wallets, hardware, and also multi-signature have several flaws. Buterin explains that sometimes multi-signature wallets decrease any attempt of additional protection against cyber-crimes. Buterin comments that the biggest trouble that happens when there is a loss of funds due to security breaches or failure, or even worse, the loss of a key is that there won’t be a second chance, you are officially at risk of losing it all, he is currently working on help making cryptocurrencies a safer place for investors.

By: Jenson Nuñez

The network added 15 days for comments about the withdrawals that surpasses the sum of $ 10,000. FinCen is granting another 45 days for the proposal that involves the banks.

The United States Department of the Treasury, through the Network for the Suppression of Financial Crimes (FinCEN), extended the deadline for receiving comments on its proposal to regulate self-custodial bitcoin and cryptocurrency wallets.

The resolution comes to light after the entity received a hard pack of critics regarding the short deadline it imposed (15 days) to receive the comments and other suggestions.

The institution reported this Thursday, January 14, that there are two new lapses for two of its proposals: The first, of 15 days, on which the department will receive opinions about cryptocurrency withdrawals that surpasses an equivalent of $ 10,000 towards personal wallets. The second extension is 45 days, and this lapse’s goal is to receive comments about new requirements that could cause an effect on banks or other financial services. In this case, financial institutions would have to provide data on transactions that involve cryptocurrencies and their current operators.

The Requirement of the potential regulation Is for Users to Provide Identification and Personal Information

According to FinCEN, more than 7,500 comments landed on its platform from different entities, users, and organizations that play a significant role in the bitcoin ecosystem.

Adequate control is what FinCen is aiming to, considering all the points and opinions from the community will give the knowledge that the organism needs to achieve its goals. FinCEN received harsh critics for granting the small amount of15 days to receive opinions about this subject. Usually, the periods for observations and comments regarding the regulation proposals are 60 days. The criticism reached a peak when users saw that the 15 days included holidays.

FinCEN’s Proposals to Regulate Self-custodial Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Wallets could transgress the United States Constitution

FinCEN’s proposals to regulate self-custodial bitcoin and cryptocurrency wallets may harm the United States Constitution. That is a consideration of Marta Belcher, a lawyer, and defender of civil rights to crypto-assets.

If the regulation goes into effect, this would give the government an allowance to reach and to obtain financial data that does not guard any relationship with FinCEN’s requirements for non-crypto currency transactions.

The fourth amendment, which guarantees the right to privacy and the right to be free from arbitrary invasion, would be an obstacle to a provision like this. The proposed regulation would give the government the identities and addresses of cryptocurrency wallets.

Due to the nature of public blockchains, this means that the government would know the identity of the actors behind every transaction as well as the addresses, even if the amount is below the required.

FinCEN’s new proposal intends to minimize the risks of money laundering as well as other crypto-crimes. Many users are skeptical regarding this proposal, mainly because it represents a potential risk of data leaking and misuse.

By: Jenson Nuñez