Bitcoin News - February 2019

This month we saw a return to over 300k daily transactions at substantially lower fees than in the past. The #LNTrustchain initiative passed through over 137 countries. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square doubled down on Bitcoin & the Lightning Network. According to analysis btc is distributed over more addresses than 2 years ago, and much more.

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 February 2019

Adoption

• bitcoin can now be used to fund your public transport card in 37 cities in Argentina (7 Feb)
• There are as many transactions today as in January 2018 but with all time low fees (7 Feb)
• Bitcoin’s Lightning Network currently has 6000 nodes and $2.4M in capacity (9 Feb)
• A service that lets you buy Domino’s Pizza via the Lightning Network in the US (13 Feb)
• Bitcoin’s average block size is now 1.3MB (14 Feb)
• An Argentinian company settles export deal with a client in Paraguay using bitcoin (15 Feb)
• The Lightning Network reaches 700 btc in capacity (16 Feb)
• A butchery in Kenya accepting bitcoin (17 Feb)
• The ₿ symbol is now a listed currency when you long press the $ sign on a mobile keyboard (19 Feb)
• A Lightning developer’s node is routing more than $10k per month for a 0.25% fee (19 Feb)
• Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, promotes bitcoin tipping on Twitter (20 Feb)
• bitcoin transactions near an all-time high of 3.87 transactions per second (21 Feb)
• Finanzen.net, a german finance site, starts lising the EUR/BTC exchange rate (21 Feb)
• 20% of Localbitcoins 4.8M visits come from Venezuela (26 Feb)
• $52M of bitcoin bought on Cash app in Q4 2018 (27 Feb)

Development

• The Casa node has been open-sourced (1 Feb)
• A specification for trustless non-pegged sidechains (4 Feb)
• Blockstream creates a new Multisignature standard (18 Feb)
• BTCPay Server now has payment requests (26 Feb)

Security

• A discussion on traditional mixers vs Wasabi wallet (2 Feb)
• Another Electrum wallet phishing attempt (4 Feb)
• Someone gets scammed for $50 worth in bitcoin by a QR code switch (19 Feb)
• Coinomi wallet sends your plain text seed phrase to Google’s remote spellchecker API (27 Feb)

Business

• Kraken exchange CEO on the QuadrigaCX coins (3 Feb)
• People discuss the bitcoins held by bankrupt QuadrigaCX (4 Feb)
• TD Ameritrade is advertising how to invest in Bitcoin on YouTube (10 Feb)
• Lightning integration will eventually come to Square’s Cash app according to its CEO (11 Feb)
• Coinbase hires a team of people who used to spy for governments and sell them private user data (19 Feb)
• Samsung’s Galaxy S10 will have secure storage for private keys built in (20 Feb)
• A 21-year old couple is working on a hardware wallet (23 Feb)

Research

• Bitcoin’s wealth distribution across addresses increased over the past 2 years (13 Feb)

Education

• Bitcoin’s prehistory (2 Feb)
• People discuss the best real-time bitcoin news feeds (8 Feb)
• Someone discusses their small bitcoin mining operation (9 Feb)
• A new report on financial privacy from Coin Center (11 Feb)
• Andreas Antonopoulos on splicing (25 Feb)

Regulation & Politics

• The SEC thinks some cryptocurrency will match their ETF requirements eventually (7 Feb)
• Government-mandated asset seizure will be limited in the U.S. (23 Feb)

Archeology (Financial Incumbents)

• The British pound is the oldest fiat currency at 317 years and now worth 0.5% of its original value (4 Feb)
• JPMorgan Chase incorrectly analyses that bitcoin miners operate at a 16% loss (12 Feb)
• JPMorgan Chase launches its own centralized JPM stablecoin (14 Feb)
• The IMF comes up with a plan to devalue cash and introduce negative intrest rates (17 Feb)
• Venmo’s KYC when someone paid back a sandwich is a great reminder why we need bitcoin (20 Feb)

Price & Trading

• Bitcoin passes $4k for the first time in a while (19 Feb)

Fun & Other

• A discussion on former Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn (1 Feb)
• Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says he thinks the currency of the Internet will be bitcoin (2 Feb)
• Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey passes on the Lightning Torch (5 Feb)
• Some instructions on how to send letters using a computer if you think sending bitcoin is difficult (6 Feb)
• Why Bitcoin should succeed (7 Feb)
• Other technologies that died just like Bitcoin (8 Feb)
• Elon Musks compliments cryptocurrency for value transfers (20 Feb)
• Elon Musk says whoever owns the early btc deserves a Nobel prize in delayed gratification (21 Feb)
• A Lightning-powered chicken feeder (22 Feb)
• A Malaysian bookstore with Bitcoin and Blockchain books on top of the finance section (28 Feb)