In October the Bitcoin price reached unprecedented highs and the market cap went over $100B. It’s easy to only focus on the price, but a lot more happened this month! Most notably, a lot of official entities and noteworthy people spoke out about Bitcoin this month, both for and against it. It’s become a more serious thing in the world it seems. The list of businesses and communities against the SegWit2x contentious hardfork grew massively, as several businesses dropped out of the agreement due to a lack of community consensus and the absense of replay protection (to protect user funds in the case of a split in the 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 October 2017

01: Japan endorses 11 cryptocurrency exchanges & The IMF Managing Director believes cryptocurrencies have a future
02: Charlie Lee shares how Coinbase and other Bitcoin exchanges will likely handle the SegWit2x hardfork & Goldman Sachs is considering a new trading operation dedicated to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
03: The list of companies that dropped out of the SegWit2x agreement keeps growing, while nobody new has joined the agreement & The Goldman Sachs CEO is still thinking about Bitcoin, like the rest of us
04: A large Japanese energy supplier adds bitcoin payments with a discount & SegWit2x nodes get a feature to disguise themselves to not get banned by the Bitcoin network for breaking consensus
05: An interesting discussion on the SegWit2x attack on Bitcoin with RSK backing out if no replay protection is added
06: Bitcoin.org warns users about the SegWit2x contentious hardfork
07: A shoutout to Andreas Antonopoulos for all his informative Bitcoin videos
08: People are grateful for SegWit2x because it proves that Bitcoin cannot be taken over by a group of corporate insiders, even with a majority of hash power
09: SegWit adoption hits 10% per block without any of the major businesses using it
10: B2X removes its replay-protection to safely split off, due to a vulnerability found by Core developers
11: Vladimir Putin weighs in on how the financial sector in Russia should deal with cryptocurrencies
12: Bitcoin rises to a new all-time-high of over $5300 & F2Pool stops signaling for SegWit2x & The Seoul Bitcoin meetup of 1600 members speaks out against SegWit2x
13: Bitcoin rises to a new all-time-high of over $5800 & BitMEX exchange announces it cannot support SegWit2x as it has no replay protection, putting customer funds at risk
14: Julian Assange from Wikileaks thanks governments for proving one of Bitcoin’s use cases early on
15: SegWit transactions are now used for ~13% of transactions without any of the major businesses pushing for scaling adopting it
16: Satoshi Nakamoto on Bitcoin’s positive feedback loop back in 2009
17: Bitcoin Core code was so thoroughly tested that the developers discovered a bug in OpenSSL, used in 35% of all websites & r/bitcoin is gaining 2000 new subscribers daily
18: Bitcoin is the 59th most popular article on Wikipedia
19: Bitmain, the largest mining equipment manufacturer, suffers a database leak & Bitcoin now has over 7000 full Bitcoin Core nodes
20: Bitcoin rises to a new all-time-high of over $6000 and a market cap of over $100B
21: SegWit transactions are now used for ~17% of all transactions without any of the major business es pushing for scaling adopting it & A simple reminder on the effects of increasing the blocksize on Bitcoin’s users and why we must scale carefully
22: An infographic on how a Bitcoin transaction works
23: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on Bitcoin
24: Coinbase will continue to call the original Bitcoin chain Bitcoin, and the New York Agreement Bitcoin2x/B2x
25: Coinbase wins award for most confusing communication regarding a contentious fork
26: Peter Thiel says people are underestimating the great potential of bitcoin as digital gold & Bobby Lee, CEO of BTCC exposes China’s failed plan to drop the Bitcoin price and discourage adoption
27: An increasing list of businesses and Bitcoin communities announce their rejection of SegWit2x & BitMEX research shows that the pools arguing most vigorously for larger blocks mine the smallest blocks on average
28: Two discussions about the implications of changing Bitcoin’s hashing algorithm to deal with miner centralisation: Discussion pro-PoW change & Discussion anti-PoW change
29: Bitcoin rises to a new all-time-high of over $6300 & People share their Bitcoin Halloween costumes
30: Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper 9 years ago & Another attempt from the US congress to regulate bitcoin users & Blockstream launches a new smart contract language called Simplicity
31: Another reminder why Bitcoin needs a limited supply and why Central banking is unsustainable