Bitcoin News - July 2019
This month the volume of Lightning Network payments surpassed the volume of most altcoins, research showed that 10.5M bitcoin hasn’t moved in a year, Braiins’ Stratum V2 Mining software was released and there was a lot of regulatory/political activity.
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 July 2019
Adoption- Setting up a full node on an unused laptop (1 Jul)
- Lightning network payments are more popular than nearly all altcoins (2 Jul)
- 10.5M btc has not moved in one year (4 Jul)
- Tony Hawk has been holding bitcoin for 6 years (5 Jul)
- WikiLeaks has received more than $46M in btc at this days’ valuation (7 Jul)
- A Venezuelan on how cryptocurrency is helping them deal with hyper inflation (7 Jul)
- SegWit adoption on a daily basis hits a new all-time-high of 56% (11 Jul)
- Statista’s research on cryptocurrency adoption around the world (11 Jul)
- SegWit usage hits a new all-time-high of 53.86% (18 Jul)
- A poker site earns the Guinness world record for the largest cryptocurrency payout in bitcoin (25 Jul)
- Business Insider compares spending Gold to bitcoin at various merchants in New York (29 Jul)
- A Grayscale survey finds that 36% of US investors would consider to buy Bitcoin (30 Jul)
- A technical overview of an upcoming improvement to the Lightning Network called JIT-routing (1 Jul)
- lnd v0.7-beta has been released (2 Jul)
- Electrum Wallet is adding support for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network (5 Jul)
- C-Lightning v0.7.1 has been released (6 Jul)
- The CEO of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX gives a $60k grant with no strings attached to a Bitcoin Core developer (12 Jul)
- Simplified fee negotiation for the Lightning Network (20 Jul)
- M5StackSats Lightning Network point of sale terminal (28 Jul)
- Lightning Pay Station point-of-sale terminal, an extension to BTCPay Server (30 Jul)
- lnd v0.7.1-beta has been released (31 Jul)
- Someone creates a cold storage design for cryptocurrency that looks like a cash bill (3 Jul)
- Facebook confirms it will collect all payment data from all Libra purchases (10 Jul)
- Safe deposit boxes at banks are not as safe as people think (20 Jul)
- Another testimony to Dave Bitcoin for helping people recover lost wallets (23 Jul)
- A list of all blocks over 2MB so far (2 Jul)
- Bitcoin mining on an Apollo Guidance Computer at 10.3 seconds per hash (8 Jul)
- A miner wastes an estimated $150k trying to reward themselves with more bitcoin (10 Jul)
- Bitcoin’s hashrate reaches a new all-time-high of 70 exahashes (11 Jul)
- SlushPool launches Stratum V2 mining software through its Braiins initiative (26 Jul)
- Bisq decentralised exchange breaks its monthly volume records in June (5 Jul)
- Bitstamp opens a Lightning Network node (8 Jul)
- A draft of a map of Bitcoin exchanges and which countries they serve (8 Jul)
- BTCPay Server launches a crowdfunding campaign for the Tor project (15 Jul)
- Coinbase passes 30 million accounts with 22k new users per day (22 Jul)
- Bakkt begins user testing bitcoin futures (22 Jul)
- A discussion on Libra compared to Bitcoin (23 Jul)
- Norwegian Air will accept bitcoin and is opening its own cryptocurrency exchange (24 Jul)
- Newegg expands bitcoin as a payment option to another 73 nations (24 Jul)
- Lolli’s CEO on making bitcoin accessible by letting users earn it (26 Jul)
- OpenBazaar launches its iOS and Android apps (29 Jul)
- Facebook warns investors that Libra may never see the light of day (30 Jul)
- An introduction to Schnorr Signatures (7 Jul)
- A reply to an Italian national newspaper that states Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme (8 Jul)
- An explainer of why inflation is more severe than the public numbers (11 Jul)
- A technical history of payment channels from Satoshi Nakamoto to the Lightning Network (12 Jul)
- An in-depth explainer of BetterHash, using new hashing protocols to decentralise mining (14 Jul)
- IMF report on the rise of digital money competing with fiat currency (15 Jul)
- A discussion on the challenges of locking a bitcoin transaction for a very long period of time (20 Jul)
- Andreas Antonopoulos on using a Blockchain for non-cryptocurrency reasons (20 Jul)
- A guided reading of Bitcoin’s White Paper (29 Jul)
- The US Congress has sent a letter to Facebook to stop development of Libra and work with regulators (3 Jul)
- Abra CEO on a potential Bitcoin Ban (3 Jul)
- Zimbabwe bans the US dollar leading to an increase in local bitcoin trading (10 Jul)
- The US president tweets about Bitcoin (12 Jul)
- Ex US Congressman calls Bitcoin a great idea (16 Jul)
- A US Congressman on Bitcoin and Libra (16 Jul)
- A US Congressman on the unstoppable force of Bitcoin (17 Jul)
- A comparison of Bitcoin and Shitcoin in a US Congress hearing (17 Jul)
- Meltem Demirors full testimony on Bitcoin for US Congress (18 Jul)
- Meltem Demirors on her testimony on Bitcoin for US Congress (18 Jul)
- A Chinese court declares Bitcoin legal in China as a ‘Virtual Propert’ (19 Jul)
- Cryptocurrency is not prohibited in India says its Finance Minister (19 Jul)
- Politicians speak out on private companies issuing their own currencies without democratic control (20 Jul)
- Iran legalises cryptocurrency mining (22 Jul)
- US Banking Committee Chairman Crapo is confident they would not succeed at banning cryptocurrency (30 Jul)
- US Congress is struggling with privacy and cryptocurrency (31 Jul)
- Bitcoin experiences the first US Federal Reserve interest rate cut in history (31 Jul)
- Deutsche Bank will cut 18000 jobs (8 Jul)
- An ex-Deutsche Bank employee on quitting his job to get into cryptocurrency (8 Jul)
- JP Morgan Asset Management gets a ship seized transporting $1.3 billion in cocaine (10 Jul)
- The Federal Reserve Chairman calls Bitcoin a store of value (11 Jul)
- A discussion on banks blocking transfers to cryptocurrency exchanges (14 Jul)
- US bank Wells Fargo no longer allows transactions involving cryptocurrency (14 Jul)
- The Bank of China posted an article explaining who bitcoin is valuable (27 Jul)
- 2 people cited in the Bitcoin white paper on the future of cryptocurrency (1 Jul)
- A video of someone buying 10 btc in december 2010 (1 Jul)
- A scammer’s fake story debunked by a Venezuelan (1 Jul)
- Someone sends 1 btc to the Genesis address (2 Jul)
- Someone finds one of their old wallets from 6 years ago (2 Jul)
- A Bitcoin easter egg in the movie The Spider-Verse (6 Jul)
- A tailor with a Bitcoin bag in front of Deutsche Bank (8 Jul)
- Bitcoin wallet art design on wood (10 Jul)
- A discussion on how girlfriends respond to talking about Bitcoin (13 Jul)
- A discussion on giving bitcoin to relatives (15 Jul)
- Scamming a bitcoin mining scammer (17 Jul)
- A discussion on increased financial awareness because of Bitcoin (18 Jul)
- The US dollar when you put it through FaceApp (18 Jul)
- A discussion on why people don’t understand Bitcoin (22 Jul)
- Holding $0.18 worth of bitcoin since 2013 (24 Jul)
- A survey in the US shows people who haven’t bought cryptocurrency trust Bitcoin more than Facebook’s Libra (24 Jul)
- Cameron Winklevoss on money as an evolutionary experiment (29 Jul)
- A discussion on the Bitcoin halving on CNBC (29 Jul)
- Someone’s story of going all in on bitcoin now (31 Jul)
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.