In April things really heated up, and not just in terms of the bitcoin price. There were awesome announcements regarding the Lightning Network and privacy improvements. The scalability debate evolved with Litecoin adopting SegWit and F2Pool signalling for SegWit on Bitcoin.

With Bitcoin’s market dominance dropping, a vocal group of users is spelling the end of Bitcoin if it can’t resolve the scalability debate, to further their personal agendas in altcoin pumping.

There was also major controversy around Bitmain and several mining pools, with vulnerabilities with discovered in their mining equipment.

What the monthly news is about:
Each day, usually around the same time, I pick out the most popular/relevant/interesting stories in r/bitcoin and save them, after which I release them in one batch after the month ended. This gives you a quick (but not necessarily the best) overview of what happened in bitcoin over the past month.

A recap of April 2017 in r/bitcoin

01: The Lightning Network is used for the first time on Bitcoin’s testnet to buy beers in Berlin & Bitcoin logo’s remain on Reddit’s r/place April fools pixel drawing war all day & Bitcoin becomes an official method of payment in Japan without consumption tax
02: Someone hacked major mining operations from Antpool, ViaBTC and BTC.TOP
03: Blockstream reveals new privacy tech ‘Confidential Assets’ & Bitfinex fully repays all clients that lost money over their 2016 exchange hack
04: Thailand’s billionaire ex-prime minister holds a bitcoin book & A discussion on the risks involved in the new Extension Blocks proposal to scale Bitcoin & Litecoin is within 10% of activating SegWit, possibly allowing the Bitcoin network to see how it goes in practice beyond the testnet & 1Hash mining pool speaks out against Bitcoin Unlimited
05: Bitcoin to be accepted at 260k stores in Japan by the summer & Nick Szabo and Amir Taaki share their thoughts on the scalability debate
06: Gregory Maxwell uncovers a mining exploit in Bitcoin’s proof of work which won’t work if SegWit is activated & Bitmain’s official response
07: Further information about Antpool and the ASICBOOST exploit
08: Someone posts a guide on how to create a full node with network statistics & price using a Raspberry Pi3
09: Samourai Wallet supports a user-activated soft-fork of BIP148 & Pools against SegWit on Litecoin begin to significantly increase their mining power to block activation
10: A contributor to the user-activated soft-fork BIP does a Q&A

11: At least 3.7M BTC has been gambled & Russia is considering to legalize Bitcoin by 2018
12: SegWit will likely be activated on Litecoin with over 75% hashpower signaling for it & Samson Mow becomes Chief Strategy Officer at Blockstream & Microsoft Office can verify documents on the Bitcoin Blockchain
13: Bitcoin.com operators boycott Bitcoin Core and Blockstream
14: Gregory Maxwell says he doesn’t support the BIP 148 UASF because it is rushed
15: F2Pool starts signalling for SegWit and Extension Blocks & The general public is made aware that the SWIFT global banking system has been hacked by the US government
16: Bitcoin gets on one of Snapchat’s front pages & An interesting conversation between F2Pool’s Wang Chun and Bitmain’s Jiang about hardforks and UASF’s
17: A backdoor is found in the Large Bitcoin Collider client & Bitcoin is growing rapidly in India and business will soon get regulated & Bitfinex halts all money deposits
18: F2Pool formally announces support of SegWit on Bitcoin
19: A presentation on the harmfulness of turing completeness for blockchains & Bitcoin Core’s lead maintainer shares test results on Virtual Machines & After Bitfinex, OKcoin also halt their USD transfers due to bank problems
20: The Indian government is looking to grant legal status to Bitcoin & Why LTC1BTC is not signalling for SegWit
21: Litecoin miners agree on activating SegWit & Lessons for Bitcoin from the dot.com bubble
22: Bitcoin Core 0.14.1 is released & The operator of BTC.TOP mining pool begins to signal for SegWit on his Litecoin pools
23: Malta approves a national strategy draft to embrace Bitcoin & The Bitfinex price is $100 over other exchanges and reaches a new all-time-high
24: A 1.7MB block with 8885 transactions is mined on the Bitcoin testnet with SegWit & Bitcoin Unlimited nodes go offline due to a bug
25: SegWit usage becomes completely optional for miners in Bitcoin 0.14.1 & Winklevoss COIN ETF decision is re-examined by the SEC & Jimmy Walles from Wikipedia reaches out to the Bitcoin community for Wikitribune
26: A backdoor is revealed in Bitmain’s antminers which can be used to remotely shut down miners & Chatlogs reveal that Bitmain/Antpool and BTC.TOP have a hidden reason “without just cause” to block SegWit adoption at all costs & Bitcoin passes $1300 again
27: Bitmain releases a fix to the “Antbleed” vulnerability & Someone is spending $500K per month to try to get Bitcoin Unlimited adopted
28: Bitfinex paid back clients that lost money from the hack with accounting tricks
29: Andreas Antonopoulos on conspiracy theories & Bitmain’s latest firmware fix still has the same issues and more
30: Wife of a Bitcoin entrepreneur in Brazil is kidnapped and ransom is requested in bitcoins