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- 🕵️ EU greenlights Travel Rule, 🛠️ Bitcoin's anti-censorship, 🫤 BIP Trezor & Wasabi team up but concerns linger
🕵️ EU greenlights Travel Rule, 🛠️ Bitcoin's anti-censorship, 🫤 BIP Trezor & Wasabi team up but concerns linger
Thursday Update: 20 April 2023
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Highlights
(3 minute read)
The European Parliament has approved the proposed regulations for the controversial so-called Travel Rule and the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) legislation. The Travel Rule requires service operators to identify their customers and counterparties in an apparent bid to halt money laundering. Under the MiCA legislation, which will be fully implemented by 2024, cryptocurrency issuers, exchanges, and wallet providers will be subject to authorisation and supervision, anti-money laundering rules, and investor protection measures. The regulation is criticised for being too stringent and potentially hampering innovation. The deadline for compliance with the regulations has been set for 2026.
(3 minute read)
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 324 will make it harder for governments and ISPs to censor Bitcoin by encrypting traffic between nodes. If powerful entities are aware of what users are doing online and can identify transactions, they can potentially censor Bitcoin transactions. BIP 324 would make network metadata private, ensuring it is harder for them to spy on what users are doing. The project was revived in 2021 by Bitcoin Core developer Dhruv Mehta, following up on work done by former Bitcoin Core maintainer Jonas Schnelli over the years. Mehta sees BIP 324 as a critical change to keeping Bitcoin out of the control of powerful entities, and has been working hard to bring it to life. Although BIP 324 will not fully prevent such attacks, it does make gathering data much harder as the attacker would have to connect with each node they want information from. The project is nearing completion. Most of the code is already written and Bitcoin users are already testing the code on the main Bitcoin network. It just needs more developers to test and review the changes to get it fully over the line.
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