With the price crashing substantially this month, it’s easy to forget all the amazing progress that has been made. The full node count reaches an all-time high, bitcoin mining and agriculture get combined in a project, Bitcoin gets its first real-world monument, the Lightning Network is launched live on the bitcoin network followed by a bunch of applications, and much more.

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 March 2018

01: How to set up a Bitcoin Lightning node for <$100 & A Court in Russia orders to unblock 40 Bitcoin sites
02: There are now 72% more full nodes than 2 years ago & Jameson Lopp quits BitGo for a new cold storage solution targeting high net worth hodlers
03: Coinbase gets sued for alleged insider trading
04: Bitcoin gets a lot of TV coverage on various networks
05: The full story of the Bitcoin Pineapple fund which donated $56M to non-profits & The odds of winning the powerball lottery vs. guessing one bitcoin private key
06: Ledger Nano S gets a firmware upgrade allowing up to 18 apps on the device
07: The Mt. Gox trustee has sold 35k btc over the past months to pay back creditors who lost their holdings in the hack & Halong Mining acquires a defensive “Overt ASICBoost” patent
08: People discuss how the Mt. Gox trustee is selling on exchanges instead of auctioning off the coins
09: Someone gets $70k worth of bitcoin stolen by trusting a scam wallet and people discuss ways to deal with it
10: Bitcoin Core’s source code is now being timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain & The first batch of cryptomatoes is ready to be harvested as cryptocurrency mining and agriculture get combined & An analysis of how at least $3B of all daily cryptocurrency volume is fabricated & Kakao to integrate cryptocurrency for 12000 merchants and its millions of users
11: Why Bitcoin is the petroleum of our day & An infographic about the Lightning Network for non-technical people
12: John Oliver on Bitcoin and the Blockchain in Last Week Tonight & The first Bitcoin monument, located in Kranj in Slovenia
13: Japan’s third-largest electricity provider will test bitcoin on the Lightning Network & How we can have both a P2P and a Hub approach within the Lightning Network
14: Some statistics on UTXO consolidation now that the mempool is empty & Bitmain is estimated to have made $3-4B in profits in 2017 & The Winklevoss twins propose a self-regulatory organisation to monitor the cryptocurrency markets & Every major Wall Street bank has quietly invested in cryptocurrency and distributed ledger companies
15: Lightning Labs launches the beta version of LND on the Bitcoin mainnet and raises $2.5M in funding from among others the CEO of Twitter
16: The Mt. Gox trustee confirms he sold the bitcoins in a way that “would not affect the market price” & A Wall Street firm that traded $5 Trillion in 2017 just started trading bitcoins & Peter Thiel’s latest stance on Bitcoin: A hedge against the world falling apart
17: The current Bitcoin code is 77k lines long, compared to the original of 14k & Someone debunks a Lightning Network attack vector
18: People discuss the price crash in comparison to the one in 2014
19: US Congress praises cryptocurrency and blockchains in a joint report on the state of the economy
20: Lightning Nodes are getting DDOS’ed, a good test for resilience of the network
21: Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, says Bitcoin will be the single global currency of the Internet & The governor of China’s central bank makes some remarks about Bitcoin
22: A Dutch court rules that bitcoin is an official financial asset
23: Blockstream launches the Lightning Publisher app for WordPress & Malta’s prime minister personally welcomes cryptocurrency exchange Binance to the country
24: Slush Pool mines the first block using overt AsicBoost using a Halong miner & A reminder that only 26% of full nodes have upgraded
25: Blockstream launches Paypercall allowing API monetisation through the Lightning Network & A reminder to encrypt and store your bitcoin offline with new laws infringing data privacy passing
26: Hackers tried to steal funds from a Lightning channel, but ended up losing theirs through the penalty system
27: Reddit drops bitcoin as a means to buy Reddit Gold as Coinbase changes its merchant tools
28: A reminder that Hal Finney wrote code for a bitcoin wallet using only his eyes while paralyzed by ALS
29: A bitcoin.com writer exposes himself for using a sockpuppet account
30: People talked about the bitcoin price, a lot, after it went down drastically
31: An article on the benefits of Schnorr Signatures & The Nvidia CEO believes cryptocurrency will be core business for the company