Lots of gems this month in Bitcoin. Besides the progress on developing the Lightning Network and Bulletproofs, we got an AMA from ex Mt.Gox CEO Mark Karpeles, interesting research into Proof-of-Stake by BitMEX, the first Halong miners shipped to customers to decentralise ASIC manufacturing, detailed analysis on the Bitcoin UTXO set and more countries taking measures and speaking out about cryptocurrency adoption.

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 Bitcoin in April 2018

01: People unsurprisingly spend the day making April fools jokes about Bitcoin
02: A list of all words used to generate 24-word bitcoin seeds with 10^72 combinations
03: The 0.4.1 beta version of Lightning Network implementation Lnd is released
04: Mark Karpeles, ex-CEO of Mt. Gox does an AMA & Eclair’s Lightning Network wallet is released for mainnet on Android
05: Satoshi Nakamoto chose this date as his birthday as a reference to gold confiscation from US citizens
06: Electrum is adding support for the Lightning Network & Nick Szabo on some of the basic concepts of a blockchain 14 years before bitcoin’s release & The SEC allows Bitcoin ETF proposals again & Elizabeth Stark, CEO of Lightning Labs on Yahoo Finance
07: People argue over an infographic on technology adoption
08: Twitter suspends the @Bitcoin account after it kept tweeting against Bitcoin
09: People discuss the value of Technical Analysis for cryptocurrency markets & Someone gets a 1 satoshi tip using the Lightning Network
10: People discuss whether r/Bitcoin is nuanced enough & Canadian banks ban cryptocurrency purchases resulting in skyrocketing volumes on P2P exchanges
11: BitMEX research on Proof-of-Stake viability & HalongMining is a 10nm ASIC fabricated by Samsung semiconductors
12: The biggest 1hr volume in the history of Bitcoin happens as the price rises $1000 in an hour
13: Developers at Chain make Bulletproofs twice as fast & A community member shares content, tools and advice on cryptocurrency and taxes & Yahoo Japan buys a 40% stake in cryptocurrency exchange BitARG
14: Bitcoin is declared legal under Islamic law
15: r/Bitcoin reaches 800k subscribers
16: A 2-minute reminder of how the banking system works & Coinbase buys Earn.com
17: IMF Director Lagarde makes positive comments about cryptocurrencies & Someone is looking to make a Lightning and NFC integration for in-store payments
18: Analysis on the age distribution of unspent transaction outputs throughout time
19: A reminder that Amazon filed a patent in 2014 to de-anonymize bitcoin transactions and sell the data to law enforcement
20: Benedikt Bunz and Pieter Wuille on Bulletproofs & Bitwage integrates SegWit
21: The Eclair Lightning Network wallet is improving & A deep dive into Lit: A Lightning Network implementation
22: The high court in India is discussing the Bitcoin ban with the Central Bank of India
23: The Lightning Network reaches 2000 nodes, $150K capacity and 7000 active channels & Ken Sheriff is repurposing vitage computers to mine bitcoins & You can buy Reddit Gold with bitcoin again
24: Exploring the Lightning Network Daemon 0.4 Beta release
25: The Nasdaq CEO says they are open to becoming a cryptocurrency exchange & Misleading references get removed from the Bitcoin Wikipedia article
26: The 17 millionth Bitcoin has been mined & A guide to using BTCPay, a free and open-source Bitcoin payment processor
27: Hundreds of Bitcoin users seek lawsuit against Bitcoin.com for misleading visitors
28: Bitcoin was the 9th most read article on Wikipedia in 2017 & France reduces the tax rate on cryptocurrency sales from 45% to 19%
29: The government of the Philippines will allow ten cryptocurrency companies to operate in a special economic zone in Cagayan
30: Eltoo: a simplified update mechanism for Lightning and off-chain contracts & A beginner’s guide to Lightning on a Raspberry Pi