Bitcoin News - April 2019

This month we saw Bitcoin reach over 400M transactions, big companies like Samsung and Rakuten make investments, a large rise in the global full-node count and an ongoing case about Bitfinex and Tether for $850M.

What the monthly news is about:

For those unfamiliar, each day I pick out the most popular/relevant/interesting stories in r/Bitcoin and save them. At the end of the month I release them in one batch, to give you a quick (but not necessarily the best) overview of what happened in bitcoin over the past month.

A recap of Bitcoin in April 2019

Adoption

• Lightning Network capacity crosses $5M USD and is up 44% in 30 days (2 Apr)
• The global full node count is up from 60k to 95k in 2 months (5 Apr)
• A reminder that Binance still hasn’t adopted SegWit (6 Apr)
• A senior gentleman spends bitcoin at Bic Camera in Tokyo (7 Apr)
• Bitcoin reaches 400M transactions (8 Apr)
• The Lightning Torch has reached its final destination (13 Apr)
• The Lightning Network passes 8k visible nodes (16 Apr)
• A parkour gym in Canada accepting btc (25 Apr)
• Bitcoin has more daily transactions than during it’s all-time-high price period (25 Apr)
• An in-store bitcoin payment in Venezuela (28 Apr)
• Coinjoins have tripled to over 4% of all bitcoin transactions over the past year (29 Apr)
• Over 29k btc has been made fungible through Wasabi wallet (30 Apr)

Development

• Nopara73 re-applies for the 46 btc bounty for his work with coinjoin in Wasabi Wallet (3 Apr)
• The next Bitcoin Core release will let hardware wallets connect to full nodes (9 Apr)
• In-browser micropayments over the Lightning Network with WebLN, without invoice copying (14 Apr)
• The lnd v0.6 beta is announced (16 Apr)
• Someone creates a fee estimation tool (23 Apr)
• Lightning Labs’ desktop wallet is now on mainnet (23 Apr)
• Gab is forking Brave’s browser, removing their token and integrating bitcoin (25 Apr)

Security

• A friendly reminder to take your cryptocurrency off exchanges (2 Apr)
• Electrum’s servers are being DDoSed by a large botnet to drive people to scam version (7 Apr)
• A reminder to not fall for scammers (9 Apr)
• Intel wants to backdoor every computer (11 Apr)
• A warning for a in-person trade scam through Telegram (19 Apr)
• bitcoins from the Bitfinex hack in 2016 were moved (25 Apr)

Mining

• Someone mining btc in 2011 at a loss (8 Apr)
• A discussion on a small Chinese-owned mining operation that burned down (21 Apr)

Business

• Slush is planning to add Coinjoin functionality to Trezor (6 Apr)
• Facebook stops the selling of bitcoin hats on its platform (7 Apr)
• Samsung invests $2.9M in hardware wallet company Ledger (25 Apr)
• $89M in btc is withdrawn from Bitfinex’ cold wallet (26 Apr)
• 16 new Bitcoin ATMs in Germany as regulations are cleared up (26 Apr)
• New York AG going after Bitfinex over $850M in Tether funds (26 Apr)
• E Trade is close to launching cryptocurrency trading (27 Apr)
• P2P Bitcoin exchange HodlHodl announces Lightning support (27 Apr)
• Rakuten plans to launch a cryptocurrency exchange (30 Apr)
• Microsoft Azure now supports RSK’s smart contracts (30 Apr)

Education

• Calculating the Merkle Root for a Block (3 Apr)
• An infographic on the history of the Lightning Network (13 Apr)
• Andreas Antonopoulos on the importance of bitcoin even if you don’t need it (20 Apr)

Archeology (Financial Incumbents)

• The former chairman of the Federal Reserve claims to not know where $500B in loans to other Central Banks went (18 Apr)
• Argentina’s inflation is at 54.7% in 12 months (20 Apr)
• Nasdaq is testing to offer bitcoin trading (22 Apr)
• Ameritrade is testing the trading of bitcoin futures (24 Apr)

Price & Trading

• People discuss bitcoin passing a golden cross in price (22 Apr)

Fun & Other

• Bitcoin is an insurance policy against an Orwellian future (1 Apr)
• A Lightning purchase with a fee of 0.003 satoshi or about $0.00000015 (4 Apr)
• Free Bitcoin icons (9 Apr)
• Julian Assange receives $20K in bitcoin donations in 24 hours (12 Apr)
• Peter McCormack on being sued by a Satoshi Nakamoto impostor (12 Apr)
• A Bitcoin update from Venezuela (14 Apr)
• A reminder of what the average person on r/bitcoin can do to help (16 Apr)
• Another fraudulous attempt of Craight Wright pretending to be Satoshi Nakamoto is debunked (16 Apr)
• US presidential candidate Andrew Yang wants more clarity around cryptocurrencies (20 Apr)
• People discuss the euphoric feeling upon their first bitcoin purchase (20 Apr)
• $1.6B in gold vs in btc (22 Apr)
• Someone wrote a book about them travelling the world on 1 btc (23 Apr)
• Fees are back down to 1 satoshi per byte (25 Apr)
• A poster of the Bitcoin whitepaper (27 Apr)