In May we saw one of the steepest rises in the Bitcoin price ever. This resulted in a lot of mainstream media coverage and increased global adoption. The User-Activated Soft-Fork (UASF) movement started putting pressure on miners to activate SegWit, which dominated a large part of discussion for the month.

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 May 2017

01: 21.co launches targeted pay-per-reply surveys and a microtask marketplace & A beginner’s guide on how to buy bitcoin in 2017 & A girl gets charged by the police for supposedly breaking German law by buying over €12.500 of bitcoin
02: Bitcoin rises over $1400 & After false accusations about having SegWit patents, Blockstream commits to patent nonaggression
03: Bitcoin rises over $1500 & A reminder that Craight Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto & A Lightning implementation now supports Litecoin alongside Bitcoin
04: Bitcoin rises over $1600
05: Someone offers a 50% bounty for recovering 445 stolen BTC & The owner of an NBA team who owns at least $5M worth of Bitcoin, praises Bitcoin & Jihan Wu seems ok with banning ASICBoost
06: Bitcoin billboard in Los Angeles & Bitcoin plummets through all-time-high’s & ViaBTC runs a Twitter poll on SegWit activation
07: SegWit and the addition to Coinbase cause Litecoin to rise by 700% in 1,5 month, leaving people wondering what effect SegWit would have on the price of bitcoin & The new French President showing his love for Bitcoin with a Ledger Blue
08: The Japanese are using Bitcoin more than expected & An explanation on the user-activated soft-fork BIP149 (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal)
09: Bitcoin rises over $1700 & Bitcoin Unlimited suffers from a third major bug that results in most of its nodes crashing
10: Bitcoin will be recognised as a proper currency in Australia starting from July 1st & The first SegWit transaction happens on Litecoin
11: Ulmart, a large Russian online retailer, plans to accept bitcoin
12: A ransomware attack with a bitcoin bounty is made on the National Health Service in the UK, among countless other places
13: Someone puts out a $1M bounty to disprove rumours about SegWit opponents have been bringing up for a year & The US government awards $2.25M to blockchain research projects & Pieter Wuille’s new project to create a new type of Bitcoin address
14: With no currency of their own, Palestinians are considering to create a national cryptocurrency
15: Indian bitcoin exchange Zebpay crosses 500k downloads on Android & An introduction to Bitcoin Rootstock
16: The mempool reaches 200k transactions & A well known guy who likes gold & silver recommends Bitcoin too & UASF SegWit activation can happen in 2 months
17: A list of all the things we could be discussing if we weren’t stuck debating SegWit
18: $400M worth of bitcoin transactions are waiting in the mempool & 7 Altcoins have activated SegWit so far without issues & A comprehensive guide on BIP148 and the risks by Luke Dash Jr.
19: Someone sends a transaction to the WannaCry ransomware address from the address 1FuckU…
20: Bitcoin rises over $2000 on some exchanges & Bitcoin Trezor will be supporting BIP148
21: A study shows forum comments can predict Bitcoin’s price with over 80% accuracy & Rusty Russell, one of the co-authors of BIP9, is in support of a UASF for Segregated Witness
22: A reminder of Ross Ulbricht, operator of Silk Road, who is sitting out two life sentences in jail & Rootstock raises $3.5M and launches its smart contract testnet
23: Bitcoin is #5 in the Top Google Searches in the US & Barry Silbert’s Bitcoin scaling agreement is publicly posted
Blockstream launches its ‘Liquid’ Sidechain in Beta
24: Bitcoin rises over $2300 on some exchanges & Fidelity bank accounts are now integrated with Coinbase to show cryptocurrency balances & A story from “The BearWhale” on the need to UASF & Japan is positively discussing Bitcoin on mainstream media
25: Bitcoin rises over $2700 on some exchanges &
26: A beginner’s guide to a User-activated Soft-fork (UASF) & OpenTimestamps ‘carbon dated’ almost the entire Internet with one Bitcoin transaction
27: Memes reign as bitcoin crashes from its new all-time-high & Russia’s Central Bank drafts a proposal to classify Bitcoins as digital goods
28: A reminder to all the newcomers to have a look at the Bitcoin Whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto
29: Electrum & Mycelium wallets support UASF BIP148 to activate SegWit on August 1st
30: The NY scaling agreement is deliberately made incompatible with the existing SegWit deployment & BitClub mining pool is now signalling SegWit again
31: Chinese exchanges resume withdrawals after months of government investigations