This month we saw the Lightning Network rise to over $2M in capacity while still in “developer mode”, a rapid decline in price and hashpower, more tools for the Liquid sidechain, research showing 78% of mining is from renewable energy, China lifting its Bitcoin ban and much more.

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 November 2018

Adoption
African countries dominate trade volume on P2P bitcoin exchange Paxful (2 Nov)
40k users join Binance Uganda in its first week (4 Nov)
A site to rank banks on cryptocurrency friendliness (4 Nov)
An update on Bitcoin in Venezuela (4 Nov)
Venezuela breaks its bitcoin exchange volume all-time-high again (8 Nov)
93% of Brits have heard of bitcoin and 4% have bought it (9 Nov)
A store in Melbourne is accepting lightning network payments for board games (10 Nov)
The Lightning Network passes 4000 nodes (14 Nov)
A Big Venezuelan department store chain starts accepting cryptocurrency as a payment (16 Nov)
The Lightning Network passes $1M in bitcoin capacity (17 Nov)
The Lightning Network passes $2M in bitcoin capacity (20 Nov)
A discussion on spending bitcoins and how this evolved (20 Nov)
A 6740 bits payment on the Lightning Network in a game store (23 Nov)
Starbucks may accept bitcoin payments (27 Nov)

Development
LND v0.5.1-beta is released (28 Nov)

Security
Intel CPUs suffer from a new hyperthreading exploit that can steal private keys (4 Nov)
Coinbase’s stablecoin has a backdoor installed to give them full control (10 Nov)
Someone got a scam call from a Coinbase pretender (13 Nov)
Bitmain loses $5M worth of bitcoin to theft (11 Nov)

Mining
Any Bitcoin hashpower on the bitcoin.com mining pool is forced to mine another cryptocurrency (14 Nov)
About 700k bitcoin miners have shut down due to the price decline (29 Nov)

Business
Canadians can now spend their bitcoin through a Visa prepaid card (1 Nov)
Blockstream’s block explorer is now live (6 Nov)
Blockstream releases its Liquid full node and wallet (6 Nov)
Hublot’s new watch can only be purchased with bitcoin (7 Nov)
Sony announces a contactless cryptocurrency hardware wallet (7 Nov)
Square’s bitcoin revenue is rising quarter after quarter (9 Nov)
Sony announces the development of a multi-purpose cryptocurrency hardware wallet (17 Nov)
Switzerland approves its first cryptocurrency ETF (18 Nov)
Bitcoin Mining firm Giga Watt declares bankruptcy owing millions (21 Nov)
A request form on Coinmarketcap to fight scamming attempts against Bitcoin (24 Nov)

Research
Coinshares research shows at least 78% of Bitcoin mining uses renewable energy (29 Nov)

Education
A reminder that the Bitcoin Whitepaper is not a bible (1 Nov)
The story of Hal Finney (7 Nov)
Andreas Antonopoulos on some of the future of Bitcoin (6 Nov)
Khan Academy has a few videos on Bitcoin in the finance/banking section (18 Nov)
A beginner’s guide to Lightning on a Raspberry Pi (23 Nov)
A reminder that Bitcoin Core is software for the cryptocurrency bitcoin (23 Nov)

Regulation & Politics
The newly elected governors of California and Colorado are pro-bitcoin (7 Nov)
China lifts its Bitcoin ban for individuals and businesses (8 Nov)
China blacklists millions of people from booking flights through its social credit system (22 Nov)
Cryptocurrency regulation to be enforced in 2019 in Malaysia (30 Nov)

Archeology (Financial Incumbents)
SWIFT cuts off Iran’s central bank (12 Nov)
The US Budget deficit jumps to $100B, 60% more than 2017 (13 Nov)
Deutsche Bank is raided over money laundering again (29 Nov)
Almost 3T USD is unaccounted for by the Pentagon (30 Nov)

Price & Trading
bitcoin drops below $6000 for the first time in months (14 Nov)
An overview of historical bitcoin price corrections (19 Nov)
A discussion on the bitcoin price not going to zero (25 Nov)

Fun & Other
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweets out the Bitcoin whitepaper to his 4M followers (1 Nov)
People discuss offline Cryptocurrency advertisements (3 Nov)
Some BTCPay server statistics (5 Nov)
A rapper gets sued for endorsing a pump & dump scheme (4 Nov)
1 year ago SegWit2x was called off, a major milestone for Bitcoin (9 Nov)
The energy it takes to cool down all Coca Cola drinks around the world (10 Nov)
Fifth grade Bitcoin homework (12 Nov)
Ross Ulbricht’s petition is about to surpass 100k signatures (13 Nov)
A portrait of Hal Finney made of USD bills (13 Nov)
Satoshi Nakamoto forecasting what would happen if a “second version” of Bitcoin would screw up (16 Nov)
A poll by a retired US politician on how you would want to hold a $10000 donation for 10 years (16 Nov)
Magazines about Bitcoin from 2013 (17 Nov)
Andreas Antonopoulos thanks his Patreons (19 Nov)
Bitcoin has been declared dead 322 times (23 Nov)
A discussion on the need for more technology talk and less price (24 Nov)