The post The Channel Factories We’ve Been Waiting For appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Visions of future technology are often prescient about the broad strokes while flubbing the details. The tablets in “2001: A Space Odyssey” do indeed look like iPads, but you never see the astronauts paying for subscriptions or wasting hours on Candy Crush.  Channel factories are one vision that arose early in the history of the Lightning Network to address some challenges that Lightning has faced from the beginning. Despite having grown to become Bitcoin’s most successful layer-2 scaling solution, with instant and low-fee payments, Lightning’s scale is limited by its reliance on payment channels. Although Lightning shifts most transactions off-chain, each payment channel still requires an on-chain transaction to open and (usually) another to close. As adoption grows, pressure on the blockchain grows with it. The need for a more scalable approach to managing channels is clear. Channel factories were supposed to meet this need, but where are they? In 2025, subnetworks are emerging that revive the impetus of channel factories with some new details that vastly increase their potential. They are natively interoperable with Lightning and achieve greater scale by allowing a group of participants to open a shared multisig UTXO and create multiple bilateral channels, which reduces the number of on-chain transactions and improves capital efficiency. Achieving greater scale by reducing complexity, Ark and Spark perform the same function as traditional channel factories with new designs and additional capabilities based on shared UTXOs.  Channel Factories 101 Channel factories have been around since the inception of Lightning. A factory is a multiparty contract where multiple users (not just two, as in a Dryja-Poon channel) cooperatively lock funds in a single multisig UTXO. They can open, close and update channels off-chain without updating the blockchain for each operation. Only when participants leave or the factory dissolves is an on-chain transaction…

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The post Italy passes law on AI outlining privacy and child access appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Italy has formally passed a sweeping new law to regulate artificial intelligence, becoming the first member of the European Union to roll out comprehensive legislation in step with the bloc’s landmark AI Act. The Italian Senate granted final approval after a year of debate, concluding what Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government described as a decisive step in shaping how new technologies are deployed across the country. Italy sets tough penalties for offenders The legislation, ministers argue, lays out the boundaries for human-centric, transparent, and safe use of AI while balancing the need to foster innovation, cybersecurity, and economic growth. The law casts its net widely, and it stretches into healthcare, schools, the justice system, workplaces, sport, and the public sector. AI access for children under 14 has also been tightened, and it now requires parental consent. “This law brings innovation back within the perimeter of the public interest, steering AI toward growth, rights and full protection of citizens.” Alessio Butti, the undersecretary for digital transformation. Lawmakers also opted for a hard line on abuses. A new offence has been added to the criminal code covering the unlawful spread of AI-generated or manipulated content, such as deepfakes. Anyone found guilty faces between one and five years in prison if their actions cause harm. Using AI to commit fraud, identity theft, market manipulation, or money laundering will now be treated as an aggravating circumstance, raising potential sentences by a third. Judges remain the sole authority in legal rulings, though courts are empowered to demand rapid takedowns of illicit material. Government agencies to oversee its implementation Responsibility for enforcing the regime lies with the Agency for Digital Italy and the National Cybersecurity Agency, though existing financial watchdogs such as the Bank of Italy and Consob retain powers in their own spheres. The Department…