Bitcoin News - October 2016

October was a pretty eventful month with a mix of progress from Bitcoin companies, rapid price and adoption growth, politicians speaking out about it and a lot of scaling bitcoin talk.

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 October 2016 in Bitcoin

01: Ad-blocking browser Brave will start paying websites from October 1st
02: Unocoin, a Bitcoin company in India, raises $1.5M from various investors
03: Figures on $500 remittances from the USA to India across incumbents and Bitcoin & The first bitcoin-only Redbull machine in the world & Adam Back becomes CEO of Blockstream
04: The Electrum 2.7 Bitcoin wallet is released, with dynamic fees, fee bumping and hardware multisignatures & Bill Gross says Bitcoin may counter central banks & The number of Bitcoin ATM’s more than doubled in the past 18 months
05: Blockstream developers successfully test an end-to-end Lightning micropayment transaction & A community effort to stop OneCoin from harming the public view of all cryptocurrencies
06: A Russian entrepreneur creates Bitcoin mining equipment to heat homes in Siberia & Chicago’s Cook county will test property title transfers over the Bitcoin Blockchain
07: A thank you to all the people running full nodes & Judges question Ross Ulbricht’s life sentence in Silk Road appeal & A discussion on Drivechains vs Sidechains
08: A discussion on if and who will inherit your bitcoin if you pass away
09: The Scaling Bitcoin website is updated with all transcripts, videos, slides and whitepapers of Scaling Bitcoin #3 - Milan & A cartoon on the Internet of ransomware Things & A community effort to keep reporting scam wallets across app stores and search engines
10: ViaBTC signals their support for Bitcoin Unlimited & Tips on how to get Coinbase support to take you seriously
11: The Yuan sinks to a six-year low while Bitcoin is rising rapidly
12: Japan will end its sales tax on digital currency purchases & Some sour people send letters to the SEC to make a Bitcoin ETF fail
13: Steve Jobs on starting with the customer experience & Peter Todd offers a defensive patent license
14: The Cohen Brothers will be writing the Silk Road movie & Multisignature paper notes & Matt Corallo shares his thoughts on Scaling Bitcoin #3 - Milan
15: A discussion on Bitcoin security and Quantum Computing & Ask the Doctor accepts Bitcoin for anonymous medical services
16: Segregated Witness, a long awaited building block in the road to exponential scaling solutions, is ready for launch & Someone transfers $6.4M worth of Bitcoin for a $0.64 fee
17: A Netflix executive wants to have Bitcoin as a global currency
18: Hillary Clinton’s camp endorses “Blockchain” but doesn’t understand what it is & The Winklevoss brothers choose state street to help launch their Bitcoin ETF
19: Circle allows you to buy and sell bitcoins in Europe & First video demonstration of the Yours smart contract micropayments wallet & Hillary Clinton’s campaign thinks Bitcoin is too “libertarian”, Bitcoin doesn’t care what politicians think
20: Mexican Bitcoin trading volume grows in relation to the US presidential elections & A discussion on how to add transaction fees to existing transactions
21: Bitfinex attempts to negotiate with their hacker
22: PayPal is unreachable due to Internet outages, Bitcoin unaffected
23: Electrum announces their next wallet will support SegWit and payment channels
24: OneHash e-sport team wins the Call of Duty World League & WeFunder is the first equity crowdfunding platform to accept Bitcoin & A sentiment index for Bitcoin
25: Iceland’s Pirate Party which wants to make Bitcoin legal tender could win the election
26: A discussion on the fragility of bitcoin nodes & South Korea on creating a national digital currency on a blockchain
27: A reality check on how Amazon alone would backlog even 4MB blocks
28: Iceland’s Pirate Party on making Bitcoin legal tender & Swiss rail operator to sell bitcoin at its ticket machines & The costs and risks of Segregated Witness
29: Bitcoin goes above $700
30: The Pirate Party in Iceland, which wanted to make Bitcoin legal tender, doesn’t win the election
31: LocalBitcoins hits another all-time-high in volume with new records in the USA, Brazil, Malaysia, Sweden and Venezuela
Thank you to everyone who is contributing to this exciting space!