MONDAY, MAR02
1. Surplus solar to BTC, 2. Slovenia safe haven, 3. NFC tap to pay, 4. AI for Bitcoin Core code review?
Supported by Proto and Bitkey - a part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. surplus
French energy giant ENGIE is evaluating bitcoin mining or battery storage to absorb surplus electricity at its 895-megawatt Assu Sol plant in northeastern Brazil, where grid constraints and weak demand have triggered costly renewable curtailment since 2023. According to Eduardo Sattamini, ENGIE's Brazil country manager, the company is "looking at some possible offtakers" to consume power directly on-site as Brazil's grid infrastructure struggles to accommodate rapid renewable expansion that has cost energy producers billions of reals in lost revenue. Bitcoin mining presents operational flexibility for the facility, as ASIC machines can activate when surplus power exists and shut down when the grid requires energy, while Brazil's recent elimination of import taxes on high-efficiency mining equipment through January 2028 could reduce infrastructure costs. ENGIE operates as Brazil's largest non-state utility with nearly 9,000 megawatts of installed capacity across 11 energy complexes, positioning Assu Sol as the company's largest solar project globally and a test case for addressing curtailment through flexible load management rather than grid upgrades alone.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY SHARE TO X2. safe
Slovenia's proposed digital asset tax law has stalled after Bitcoin Association Slovenia and Blockchain Alliance EU mobilized sustained opposition to the 25% flat tax on all digital asset disposals. According to association president Toni Čepon, the draft Law on Taxation of Gains from Disposal of Crypto-Assets treated bitcoin identically to speculative tokens and imposed no holding-period relief, creating what critics called "one of the strictest regimes in Europe." The groups submitted over 80 pages of technical comments arguing that mandatory self-reporting of holdings would create security risks as physical attacks on bitcoin owners increase, and that the law contradicted its stated goal of administrative simplification by requiring transaction-level record-keeping. Ministry meetings in June 2025 yielded no substantive revisions despite 300+ public comments. Slovenia currently taxes only professional trading activity under existing income law, leaving occasional users untaxed, a framework that helped Ljubljana earn recognition as the world's most bitcoin-friendly city in 2024. The proposal's failure preserves that status and leaves space for policy that distinguishes store-of-value assets from derivatives.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY SHARE TO X3. tap
Numo has launched a free, open-source Android tap-to-pay app that enables merchants to accept bitcoin via NFC without additional hardware or platform fees, using Cashu ecash protocol alongside Lightning Network compatibility. The app transforms any NFC-enabled Android device into a point-of-sale terminal where customers tap their Cashu wallet against the merchant's phone to write a payment token in seconds, delivering an experience comparable to Apple Pay or Google Pay. According to the Numo team, "Bitcoin payments should be as easy as tapping your phone," a goal the app achieves through dual functionality supporting both Cashu ecash and standard Lightning invoices. Merchants receive settlements in Cashu ecash held on a mint with configurable automatic withdrawal thresholds that sweep funds to their Lightning address once balances reach predefined amounts, preserving self-custody principles while streamlining treasury management. Built under MIT license with support from OpenCash and BTCPay Server integration under development, the hardware-free approach offers merchants a self-sovereign alternative to traditional payment rails as competition intensifies among Bitcoin-native payment solutions.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY SHARE TO X4. review
Bitcoin Core contributor Anthony Towns reports using Claude AI as code review assistant for cluster mempool pull requests while implementing guardrails preventing autonomous review completion, instead structuring interactions augmenting rather than replacing human review capacity. According to Towns in a Delving Bitcoin post, Claude exhibited unhelpful biases including assuming proposed changes inherently worthwhile while focusing exclusively on correctness, plus attempting autonomous review completion offering to post comments before Towns examined commits himself, prompting strategies like instructing the model to maintain private sub-agent review results until Towns completed independent analysis for comparison. His prompting framework emphasizes "Interactive Assistance" principles specifying "Claude assists; the user drives" with instructions against producing finished artifacts or posting reviews autonomously, operating the system in a dedicated VM with read-only GitHub token without push access or local model experimentation.
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