December was a super exciting month for Bitcoin, with the first live Lightning Transactions happening, some insights in the upgrades coming in 2018 and a lot of charitable donations by bitcoiners. It was also a month of exposing incompetence, as many journalists received a lot of criticism for poorly informed Bitcoin coverage and many businesses got backlash for complaining about scaling for a year only to not adopt SegWit. The bitcoin price also almost reached $20k.

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 December 2017

01: One of the most important Bitcoin related charts & The CME has been approved to launch bitcoin futures trading on December 18th & Two Drivechain BIPs

02: The Rootstock sidechain will be released on the 4th of December

03: A Dutch newspaper tries to get people to sell their bitcoins but instead provides a list of reasons why Bitcoin exists & A post by one of the 14000 Coinbase clients that the IRS has targeted

04: Rootstock is released as a Sidechain bringing more sophisticated Smart Contracts to Bitcoin & Coinbase is working on SegWit support & A CNN host is salty he didn’t buy bitcoin & A livestream of the Latin American Bitcoin conference & More people probably understand Bitcoin than the central banking system

05: Updates on Confidential Transactions efficiency & Bitcoin reaches €10000 for the first time

06: The Lightning Protocol 1.0 passes all compatibility tests on the live Bitcoin network & NiceHash, a mining marketplace, got hacked for $60M in bitcoin & Bitcoin reaches a new all-time-high of over $13000

07: r/Bitcoin reaches 500k subscribers & Someone sends a $500K donation to Andreas Antonopoulos for all his Bitcoin education, while others add over $200k on top & Bitcoin reaches a new all-time-high of over $19000

08: People are beginning to get (even more) excited about the Lightning Network & The US Senate has a hearing about a bill that would criminalize concealed ownership of Bitcoin

09: An elaborate description of how to spot a price correction & A discussion and video regarding the impact of the CME bitcoin futures

10: Some cryptocurrency trading advice & Craigslist adds a checkbox that says “you can pay me with bitcoin” & Saudi Arabia’s most prominent newspaper lists bitcoin on the economy page

11: Bitcoin exposes the economic illiteracy of financial journalism & Muslim clerics said that owning bitcoin is compatible with Islam

12: Ebay is ‘seriously considering’ accepting bitcoin as a payment on its platform & The end of life of a sidechain

13: A visualisation of the Lightning Network testnet of 478 nodes & SegWit is implemented in Bitwala & The Pineapple Fund plans to donate 5057 bitcoins to charities

14: Danish Bitcoin billionaire becomes a new sponsor of a professional ice hockey team and renames its stadium to “Bitcoin Arena” & One of Hal Finney’s last posts on bitcointalk.org

15: While users are still waiting for major bitcoin businesses to implement SegWit, Bitcoin Core developers have finished their MAST proposals & Google says Bitcoin is the #2 ‘How to’ search term of 2017

16: Some love for Bitstamp, which is growing at over 100k users per day and has been SegWit compatible since September & A discussion on not giving bitcoin for holiday gifts & The South Korean government plans to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges

17: A discussion on ‘taking bitcoin profits’

18: Mining bitcoin with pencil and paper at 0.67 hashes per day in 2014 & Bitcoin block 500.000 has been mined

19: You can try a testnet Bitcoin Lightning transaction & A discussion on the anti-Bitcoin articles in the media around the world & A map of the Lightning Network today

20: People are upset as Coinbase engages in insider trading & A bitcoin millionaire is giving away their fortune to scientific research

21: A guide to help people send cheaper transactions using SegWit & The Bitcoin Billionaire song & The New York Stock Exchange wants to launch Bitcoin ETFs

22: Bitcoin ‘veterans’ are trying to calm down newcomers about the price crash

23: A grateful community member/developer joins the Lightning Test team

24: The people at the Internet Archive get excited about a $1M bitcoin donation from the Pineapple Fund & A call to help the Lightning network go live on the Bitcoin network by helping with testing

25: A reminder of the 60 free lectures from Princeton on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency & The Pirate Bay is using the new SegWit address format

26: Lightning Network release candidate 1 is out with the beta on the way & Tom Lee thinks Wall Street resents the fact that Bitcoin was not invented on Wall Street

27: A warning from Andreas Antonopoulos about community infiltration by those who want to stop Bitcoin & Community frustration about the extreme focus on the bitcoin price and not the Bitcoin technology

28: A mainnet lightning network transaction to pay a phone bill on Bitrefill & Someone clears up misinformation about South Korea’s Bitcoin regulation

29: A community member shares his free “Practical Guide to Bitcoin Investment 2018” & Another Lightning Network simulation & A guide for Windows users to setup a Lightning Network node & A repost of the Schnorr Signatures article I wrote half a year ago

30: A reminder that open systems and decentralised solutions will only work if we fight for them & Someone destroys 12.5 newly mined bitcoins by not testing their software

31: A reminder that other coins that claim to be instant without/with low fees don’t have the amount of users or traffic as Bitcoin & A call to boycott exchanges without SegWit & People are upset that some wallets still make you overpay by a factor of 10 due to bad fee estimations