February 2017 was a tense month for Bitcoin. With the upcoming ETF decision in March, ever-rising debates around the scalability of the network and the continued crackdown on Chinese exchanges.

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 February 2017

01: 80% of all bitcoins will be mined within a year & the January 2017 r/bitcoin recap & Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne on Fox Business Channel with a Bitcoin hat & Internet Archive receives a $3000 bitcoin donation
02: Iran ditches the USD & Bitcoin back over $1K
03: Someone creates a Virtual Reality Block Explorer
04: The BTC.TOP mining pool threatens to kill the original Bitcoin using $100M if BU hardforks
05: The good old days of bitcoin & Bitcoin mentioned in Superbowl commercial
06: As Bitcoin ETFs are nearing, analysts warn of a trading frenzy
07: The Philippines regulates Bitcoin exchanges as remittance companies & Getting pepper-sprayed with a Bitcoin hat on warrants an AMA
08: Bitcoin will be a legal regulated method of payment in Japan in two months & PBoC sneezes and bitcoin drops $50
09: OKCoin and Huobi caught a cold from PBoC and now have to suspend BTC and LTC withdrawals for ~1 month to upgrade their system to prevent money laundering
10: Memes about transaction fees & Some excitement about low energy full Bitcoin nodes
11: Discussion on whether we can get to 95% consensus on anything
12: A Bitcoiner is getting married funded by bitcoin, he might segregate the witnesses
13: The new Chief Economist in the US government is very excited about Bitcoin
14: finanzen.net, a major German finance website, lists Bitcoin as one of the most important exchange rates & PBoC is aware they can’t kill Bitcoin and want to regulate it instead & Tor was integrated into OpenBazaar
15: Mathematicians fixed some of Satoshi’s math & Bitcoin deflation meme
16: With Chinese exchanges on hold, prices are unsurprisingly higher in the rest of the world
17: There are over 1000 Bitcoin ATM’s worldwide
18: The story of a localbitcoins trader who got robbed
19: Bitcoin Core 0.14.0 release candidate 1 available
20: Bitcoin above $1000 for the longest time ever and back over €1000
21: Hodlers emotionally bond over a classic Bitcoin meme
22: Washington state bill to ban “Bitcoin for pot” fails, as proposing senator withdraws support after being educated on Bitcoin & Appreciation for the core developers for taking the time to respond to people despite personal attacks
23: Everyone who bought Bitcoin and held it made money as Bitcoin reaches a new all-time high & SHA1, an old cryptographic hash function, is definitely no longer secure as people at Google claim its collision bounty
24: Tim Draper’s $19M BTC investment from the Silk Road auction is now worth $35M
25: How Bitcoiners spend money meme
26: viaBTC tells people to unsubscribe from r/bitcoin and confuses its moderators with Blockstream employees & Gregory Maxwell is permanently banned from Reddit (later unbanned)
27: A technical scalability debate between non-technical people & New all-time highs on Localbitcoins partially due to heavy demand in China
28: Someone used bitcoin to buy gold, but never bought anything with gold & A fancy looking Bitcoin ATM in Amsterdam

Thank you to everyone who is contributing to this exciting space!