Bitcoin News - January 2019
This month we saw an increase of 20% in capacity on the Lightning Network, a new Bitcoin developer school in Switzerland, data on the increased number of transactions, mining decentralization, 50% of btc not having moved in a year and an increased association of Bitcoin with freedom.
What the monthly news is about:
For those unfamiliar, each day I pick out the most popular/relevant/interesting stories in r/Bitcoin and save them. At the end of the month I release them in one batch, to give you a quick (but not necessarily the best) overview of what happened in bitcoin over the past month.
A recap of Bitcoin in January 2019
Adoption
- The number of daily bitcoin transactions has been increasing rapidly again (10 Jan)
- 50% of the bitcoin supply hasn’t moved in a year (10 Jan)
- Bitcoin ads in Tokyo (11 Jan)
- A fish-market in San Diego accepting bitcoin (12 Jan)
- A discussion on handing out bitcoin at work (14 Jan)
- Bitcoin transactions have increased by 50% over 6 months, with fees at a 2 year low (16 Jan)
- LocalBitcoins has more volume than the Venezuelan stock market (16 Jan)
- A popular content creator deletes his Patreon account and starts accepting bitcoin (16 Jan)
- Buying bitcoin at one of 20k coinstar machines (17 Jan)
- A story from a European teacher working in China using bitcoin to send money home (22 Jan)
- Germany has 1/5th of the world’s Bitcoin nodes (23 Jan)
- SatoshiLabs’ Lightning Node routes over 1 btc in transactions in one day (27 Jan)
- Someone in Cambodia uses the Lightning Network and Bitrefill to pay their $1 weekly phone bill (30 Jan)
- The Lightning Network reaches 600 btc in capacity (30 Jan)
Development
- A special thank you to all the Bitcoin Core contributors in 2018 (1 Jan)
- A discussion on the need for a lightning network stress test (6 Jan)
- New Lightning apps made at the Seoul Bitcoin Lightning Hackathon (7 Jan)
- Wasabi wallet can now mix large amounts faster (12 Jan)
- Bitcoin Core developer Adam Gibson talks about fungibility, privacy and coinjoin (16 Jan)
- A new Bitcoin developers school is launched in Switzerland (28 Jan)
Security
- Bitcoin’s immune system (2 Jan)
- A discussion on the importance of running full nodes after an attack on another cryptocurrency (8 Jan)
- Google Play store requires Samourai Wallet to disable some of its security features (8 Jan)
- The Kraken exchange CEO warns users to not store coins on an exchange if you’re not actively trading (16 Jan)
- LocalBitcoins.com is compromised (26 Jan)
Mining
- Bitmain lost 28% of its bitcoin mining market share in 6 months (2 Jan)
- An analysis of a strange nonce pattern in Bitcoin since block 400k (7 Jan)
- Bitcoin mining becomes more decentralized as Bitmain loses dominance (18 Jan)
Business
- Overstock becomes the first major US company to pay taxes in bitcoin (4 Jan)
- Gemini exchange promises it will start using SegWit, Bech32 addresses and transaction batching by the end of Q1 2019 (7 Jan)
- Gab emails its 850k users about its switch to Bitcoin (9 Jan)
- Bitrefill launches a Lightning channel opening service (9 Jan)
- Jihan Wu is stepping down from his role as CEO of Bitmain according to an insider leak (10 Jan)
- Bitcoin crowdfunding powered by BTCPay (10 Jan)
- Bitmain shuts down its btc.com office (14 Jan)
- One of the biggest banks in the Netherlands launches a bitcoin wallet (23 Jan)
- A ‘leaked’ photo shows that the Samsung Galaxy 10 has a cryptocurrency wallet (24 Jan)
- Data collection by bitcoin businesses (29 Jan)
- Fidelity will launch its bitcoin custody service in March (30 Jan)
- Paxful a P2P bitcoin marketplace, launches its second school in Rwanda (31 Jan)
- The QuadrigaCX exchange goes bankrupt after losing access to its cold wallets (31 Jan)
Research
- Data on the Proof of Keys event over the last 9 years (2 Jan)
- A rebuttal to the reports of Bitcoin’s environmental damage (31 Jan)
Education
- Bitcoin’s first block was mined 6 days after its genesis block (10 Jan)
- TIME on why Bitcoin matters for freedom (24 Jan)
- A simple explainer video of the Lightning Network (27 Jan)
Regulation & Politics
- Coinbase bans Gab.com and its founder (5 Jan)
- Some Yellow Vests in France are calling on their supporters to withdraw their money from the banks (8 Jan)
- Wyoming introduces bill offering cryptocurrencies legal clarity (19 Jan)
- The government of Zimbabwe shuts down the Internet country-wide and hurts its economy (21 Jan)
- Venezuela’s new interim president is pro-bitcoin (25 Jan)
- Iran lifts its Bitcoin ban (29 Jan)
Archeology (Financial Incumbents)
- The European Central Bank has printed €2.85T since 2015 to help sustain the EU economy (4 Jan)
- Some of the Yellow Vests in France are calling upon supporters to withdraw money from the banks (8 Jan)
- EU fines Mastercard for €570M for high fees (22 Jan)
Price & Trading
- Don’t look at ATHs, look at yearly lows (3 Jan)
- Whenever you doubt your investing decisions, remember this guy (4 Jan)
- Someone creates an open-source terminal dashboard for automated trading and charting (15 Jan)
Fun & Other
- Someone put 5% of their paycheck into bitcoin for 3 years (1 Jan)
- Bitcoin featured in The Times newspaper on its 10th anniversary (2 Jan)
- Bitcoin was launched 10 years ago (3 Jan)
- A “How to use bitcoin anonymously” article gets banned on Medium (5 Jan)
- A street art treasure hunt in Paris with a Bitcoin puzzle (7 Jan)
- An AMA with the co-founder of Wasabi Wallet (7 Jan)
- People are trying to encourage others to quit smoking and acquire bitcoin with those savings (8 Jan)
- 10 years since Hal Finney’s “Running Bitcoin” tweet (9 Jan)
- Gab calls bitcoin “free speech money” (9 Jan)
- Nick Szabo on Central Banks, gold and bitcoin (11 Jan)
- A discussion on the public perception of ‘hodl’ (12 Jan)
- A Twitch streamer receives 20 bitcoin in donations (13 Jan)
- The Paris bitcoin puzzle was solved (14 Jan)
- An AMA by Blockstream (16 Jan)
- The challenges of launching a new cryptocurrency with Proof-of-Work today (16 Jan)
- A bitcoin logo on a football team’s shirts in Israel (21 Jan)
- Buckminster Fuller on an energy-value system in 1981 (22 Jan)
- Someone started anonymously broadcasting messages over Blockstream’s satellites (24 Jan)
- Bitcoin is inspiring a new generation of investors (28 Jan)
- A story from someone who lost ~$2M USD in btc (29 Jan)
- A discussion on tokenization in stock and bonds trading (31 Jan)
Sam Wouters
Sam is a Bitcoin & Blockchain educator. He has been learning about them every day for years and uses his knowledge to help others understand and these complex topics in simple terms.