July was an intense month with a lot of deadlines for technical upgrades and anticipation of the events that would unfold in regards to scaling, resulting in SegWit eventually getting locked in. Of course that wouldn’t be enough to keep bitcoin interesting, so we also had people create an altcoin using the bitcoin name, we got an epic analysis of the spam attacks on Bitcoin over the past 2 years, an epic analysis of a theoretical Lightning Network with 10M users, major reveals about the 2013 price bubble and Mt. Gox hacking involving the BTC-e exchange which went down this month, and of course the best timed photobomb in the history of Bitcoin and potentially humanity.

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 July 2017

01: Some appreciation for Andreas Antonopoulos & Japan’s removal of consumption tax from Bitcoin goes into effect
02: A discussion about what non-technical users can do when they can’t tell truth from fraud & Blockstream’s Bitcoin side chain solution, Liquid, will be launched in early 2018
03: South Korea will legalise Bitcoin and regulate businesses & A simulation of a 10M user Lightning Network
04: The Trezor team enables a UASF/BIP148 wallet, continuing their admirable display to give users choice & A simple explainer on Schnorr signatures (written by me)
05: 1Hash Mining Pool is now signalling for SegWit & An overview of current Lightning apps that developers have built
06: Another reconfirmation that SegWit2x is about getting rid of the Core developers
07: A math teaching YouTuber makes a technical video explaining Bitcoin & The IRS stops asking for extra outrageous details on Coinbase users and sticks with normal outrageous
08: The story of how the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 and how Bitcoin should remain under control of the people & A lesson from monopoly on why the banking system is messed up
09: Mark Karpeles, former Mt. Gox CEO goes to trial a few year later
10: Bitcoin positively in the Wall Street Journal
11: Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles admits to operating bots on his exchange to push up the price and volume back in 2013
12: “Bitcoin sign guy” holds up a “Buy Bitcoin” sign on live TV right as Janet Yellen opposes an audit of the Federal Reserve
13: r/bitcoin becomes the trending subreddit & Buy Bitcoin sign guy receives a total of 6.5 BTC in donations in 24 hours
14: A Swiss bank gets authorized to work with Bitcoin & A spam transaction analysis by LaurentMT uncovering clear patterns
15: The SegWit2x deadline is missed so miners patch their existing software to signal BIP91 & People ask for help for the only guy fighting the Bitlicense in New York
16: The first BIP91 block gets mined by BitClub network & Everyone blesses us with their infinite wisdom on what the bitcoin price will do during one of the largest crashes in its history
17: A simple breakdown of BIP91, for which miners have now began signalling
18: John McAfee incentivises the community to get Bitcoin to $500K & A demo of the Zap Lightning Network wallet
19: BIP91 reaches the 80% threshold for activation
20: BIP91 activates & We see the steepest price rise in Bitcoin’s history in USD
21: People are happy BIP148 User-activated Soft-fork pressured miners enough to activate SegWit
22: All miners now begin signaling the original SegWit through BIP141
23: In India government bodies argue over who gets to regulate Bitcoin
24: 1Hash mines 2 non-SegWit blocks which people think looks a lot like covert ASICBoost use
25: Bitcoin crashes a few hundred dollars surrounding talk about an altcoin and BTC-e going offline for maintenance & The SEC releases a report about the DAO and ICOs
26: Someone with unclear ties to BTC-e was arrested in Greece and a story on how he was the main suspect in the hacking of Mt. Gox is released
27: Bitstamp’s view on some altcoin & The (hopefully) last period of SegWit signalling has started
28: People worry about a Bitcoin altcoin and how it may affect them & Some miners and exchanges issue statements with their stance about it
29: Someone shares a picture of 20th century artifacts with bitcoins stored on them & The Hong Kong Economic Journal calls Bitcoin a “currency revolution”
30: Coinbase lies about why withdrawals are delayed
31: Everyone mentally prepares for August 1st