In February the memory pool of transactions cleared up for the first time in a long time, as businesses implemented optimisations (such as SegWit) that they put off for a long time while they tried to push for larger blocks. On the bright side, more of them have begun to hire open-source developers. Bitcoin also received a lot of publicity again from celebrities, central banks and governments speaking out.

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 2018

01: Princeton’s Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency technologies course & The Indian government clarifies it is isn’t legalising or making bitcoin illegal & 3 accountants answer tax-related cryptocurrency questions
02: A history lesson on Bitcoin crashes & A presentation on Bulletproofs by Benedikt Bünz
03: The mempool of unconfirmed transactions is clear as more exchanges batch their transactions & Milton Friedman predicted Bitcoin 25 years ago
04: A discussion on the correlation between the bitcoin price and tether
05: Coinbase will be implementing SegWit this month
06: The chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission makes positive remarks about the potential of Bitcoin & Australia’s major banks confirm they won’t ban buying bitcoin
07: Singapore confirms it will not ban cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin & An explanation of ‘Graftroot’, a proposal for more space efficiency in MAST
08: Bitpanda implements transaction batching and SegWit & Introducing the ‘Formercoiner’ & The European Central Bank president says European banks could soon hold bitcoin
09: Rabobank gets fined $369M for money laundering after refusing bitcoin businesses to open bank accounts due to money laundering risks & Coinbase is hiring more open source developers for the cryptocurrency space
10: Anonymity in Bitcoin
11: The senate in Arizona votes to accept tax payments in bitcoin
12: A warning to switch from btc.com mining pool as it is growing dangerously large
13: Advances in block propagation by Gregory Maxwell & Cryptocurrencies are not a threat according to Bank of Japan & Microsoft is collaborating to build on top of Bitcoin’s layer 2 protocols & A demo of a Coinbase integration with Lightning
14: Someone shares the desktop cryptocurrency tracker they built
15: Africa’s first bitcoin exchange & 50 apartments are sold for bitcoin in Dubai & Another update from the bitcoin Pineapple Fund
16: Ellen Degeneres introduces Bitcoin to her 3M viewers & Bank of America has filed the most cryptocurrency patents
17: Using bitcoin as an incentive for recommending professionals for jobs & More luxury companies are trying to serve cryptocurrency millionaires
18: A video demonstrating the speed of the Lightning Network & Poland’s Central Bank secretly paid YouTubers to slander cryptocurrencies
19: More evidence shows that most Bitcoin Unlimited nodes were operated by one person
20: Bitfinex adopts SegWit
21: Someone donates 1BTC each to Samourai Wallet, JoinMarket, Qubes OS and ZeroLink
22: The mempool of transactions completely emptied as all kinds of services are implementing scaling solutions & Robinhood Crypto Trading is live
23: Andreas Antonopoulos on why running a Bitcoin full node is important & Ledger Wallet gets new desktop and mobile applications
24: Laszlo Hanyecz orders pizza again but this time using the Lightning Network
25: Vladimir Putin says Russia needs “Blockchain”
26: Bitcoin Core 0.16.0 is released & Nick Szabo shares a list of cypherpunk research & Poloniex is acquired by Circle & Someone who pretends to be Satoshi Nakamoto gets a $10 Billion lawsuit filed against them
27: SegWit adoption rises as Bitcoin Core 0.16.0 gets more adoption & An overview of possible attacks on Bitcoin & Some electronics stores are constantly sold out of graphics cards due to cryptocurrency mining & WizSec proves a Satoshi Nakamoto pretender doesn’t own any of the bitcoins claimed
28: SegWit adoption rises to over 30% & Bill Gates is still confused about Bitcoin