This month we saw the amount of SegWit transactions continue to rise, talk of Wall street coming into cryptocurrency markets, news from big companies such as Microsoft, Nvidia, GMO, Square and of course an increase in usage and more education on the Lightning Network.

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 2018

01: SegWit adoption rises to 35% & Peter Thiel backs a venture that brings Wall Street trading expertise to Bitcoin
02: Giacomo Zucco about Bitcoin and the possibility of Altcoins overtaking it & What the Lightning User experience may look like in every day life & The CFTC chairman on respecting this generation’s interest in Bitcoin
03: Cryptocurrencies and blockchains in a newspaper in Uganda
04: Vaultoro is the first bitcoin exchange to accept bitcoin deposits through the Lightning Network
05: Coinmarketcap removes a misleading website from its Bitcoin page
06: Goldman Sachs announces they will launch a Bitcoin futures trading platform
07: Ask what you can do for Bitcoin
08: The New York Stock Exchange is planning to create a cryptocurrency exchange
09: Bitcoin on the front-page of the New York Times & Satoshi Nakamoto on unofficial Bitcoin sites
10: Rawtx, a mobile Lightning wallet is released for test net & A farewell from the Pineapple Fund
11: A lecture on how Bitcoin Script works & Decompiling a malware wallet
12: Anonymous buying and selling will not be possible on Localbitcoins.com anymore & Nvidia made $289M from selling mining equipment in Q1 2018 & Samourai wallet even checks your clipboard to help you stay safe
13: The current state of cryptocurrency mining & The amount of contributions to the Bitcoin Github & A discussion on the “release schedule” of the 21m bitcoins
14: Microsoft shows off their decentralised identity proof of concept on Bitcoin at Consensus 2018 & The reserve bank of Zimbabwe bans Bitcoin & Japanese giant GMO is developing 7nm ASIC mining chips
15: People are upset about Gemini exchange still not supporting SegWit & A discussion on places where Bitcoin is accepted for tax payments
16: The French finance minister on his passion for cryptocurrency & The CEO of Twitter on the currency of the Internet: Bitcoin
17: The Lightning Network becomes more distributed as big hubs get attacked & Christian Decker on scalability of the Lightning Network
18: The Lightning Network now has 2000 nodes & A bank in the Philippines mined some bitcoin as an experiment
19: The top 10 cryptocurrencies by marketcap on coinmarketcap 5 years ago
20: 37.7% of bitcoin transactions are using SegWit and they pay for 14% of total fees & A reminder to not get involved in Cloud mining
21: A guide to using decentralised cryptocurrency exchanges & Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 118 brings an improvement to disputes over payment channels
22: A new bitcoin payment processor which also works with the Lightning Network & A former VISA UK CEO moves to a cryptocurrency startup & Bitcoiners celebrate bitcoin pizza day
23: A bank in Argentina allows customers to use bitcoin for international payments & People have forked the Bitcoin code 44 times over the past year to create their own version
24: MIT launches a new Lightning app development tool & The US Justice Department opens a criminal probe into bitcoin price manipulation & Zimbabwe lifts its cryptocurrency ban
25: Xapo finally implements SegWit & The Opera browser allows you to convert currency to BTC & A UK company trademarks the word Bitcoin & A discussion about Bitcoin and gold
26: Andreas Antonopoulos on digital communities
27: A reminder of the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto from 1988, describing something like Bitcoin
28: A discussion on technical analysis in Bitcoin & A reminder to not tell friends and family to invest in Bitcoin, but to encourage them to explore it & Rootstock did an ICO
29: A new store to buy games using the Lightning Network
30: Exploring Lightning Network routing
31: Bitcoin’s transaction costs are the lowest in 7 years & Bittrex exchange adds USD-BTC trading