This month we saw SegWit adoption rise to over 50%, the Lightning Network reach 12.5k channels, deployment of BTCPay servers in under a minute, the introduction of many stablecoins and a very stable bitcoin price. And of course the 10 year anniversary of the Bitcoin Whitepaper!

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 October 2018

Adoption
SegWit adoption rises to over 50% (4 Oct)
A large bus company in Europe accepts bitcoin (4 Oct)
A holiday home in Germany accepts bitcoin (4 Oct)
A coffee shop in Bern, Switzerland accepts Lightning Network payments (5 Oct)
A shop at Brisbane airport accepts bitcoin (7 Oct)
An exchange in Latin America adds Lightning Network payments (12 Oct)
Some Venezuelans have turned to cryptocurrency and gaming currencies to make money (13 Oct)
Mycelium wallet will finally support SegWit (16 Oct)
Australia Post helps Bitcoin adoption through its digital identity service (24 Oct)
Blockchain.com still hasn’t implemented SegWit 1.5 years after their promise (25 Oct)
The Lightning network is now at 12500 open channels (26 Oct)
A bar in Mexico City accepts bitcoin payments (28 Oct)

Development
A BTCPay server can now be deployed in 1 minute (2 Oct)
Bitcoin Core 0.17.0 is now available for download (3 Oct)
Electrum will get a Lightning Network integration (3 Oct)
Scaling Bitcoin Tokyo slides and presentations (5 Oct)
People discuss building on the Lightning Network at an upcoming event (11 Oct)
A Lightning Network-powered E-bike (14 Oct)
Bulletproofs were implemented in Monero resulting in a huge boost in scalability (20 Oct)
Watchtowers were merged into LND (25 Oct)

Security
A discussion on “out of the box” Bitcoin nodes (20 Oct)
A warning about a “dusting attack” on wallets to deanonymise people (25 Oct)

Mining
By 2032 99% of all bitcoins will have been mined (6 Oct)
Bitmain’s new firmware is causing problems (22 Oct)
Antpool stops including transactions that use SegWit (29 Oct)

Business
The inventor of the World Wide Web launches a platform to redecentralize the Internet (1 Oct)
Coinbase added 5M users in ~6 months (3 Oct)
Yale University will reportedly invest $400M in a cryptocurrency fund (7 Oct)
An interview with the CEO of Bitrefill on their Lightning Network experiences (9 Oct)
The Liquid Network is officially launched as a Bitcoin sidechain (10 Oct)
Fidelity launches a digital asset service (15 Oct)
Goldman Sachs plans to use Bakkt’s cryptocurrency custody service (18 Oct)
Ledger reveals it sold 1.3M hardware wallets (18 Oct)
Goldman Sachs invests in cold storage solution provider BitGo (18 Oct)
Shapeshift’s KYC is now in place (19 Oct)
Coinbase and Circle announce the USDC stable coin (23 Oct)
An investigation finds that some crypto media outlets don’t disclose paid promotional content (25 Oct)

Research
A high-resolution Lightning Network overview (2 Oct)

Education
A guide on how to accept bitcoin using BTCPay server (14 Oct)
An explainer of Neutrino for the Lightning Network (17 Oct)
Bitcoin is the invention of digital scarcity (28 Oct)
10 years ago Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin Whitepaper to a mailing list (31 Oct)

Regulation & Politics
Scalability discussion at a Senate hearing in the US (12 Oct)
Japan grants cryptocurrency industry self-regulatory status (24 Oct)
Chinese court says it is legal to own and transfer bitcoin (26 Oct)
China’s merchants are legally allowed to accept bitcoin (27 Oct)
A US Presidential candidate wants to exempt cryptocurrencies from capital gains tax (30 Oct)

Archeology (Financial Incumbents)
Anti-cryptocurrency propaganda promoted by American Express (16 Oct)
Many of the banks calling bitcoin a money laundering tool are caught money laundering themselves (19 Oct)
Mastercard files patent for bitcoin transactions on credit cards (26 Oct)
The Visa CEO says cryptocurrency is not a big threat but they will support it if needed (27 Oct)
Banks asking you for the reason for payments is why we need bitcoin (28 Oct)

Price & Trading
Analysis on the activity of ‘whales’ in the bitcoin market (10 Oct)
Bitcoin has been less volatile than Nasdaq, Dow and S&P 500 (24 Oct)

Fun & Other
People discuss the quality of some largely upvoted posts on r/Bitcoin (7 Oct)
People try to make clear that Bitcoin has no CEO (8 Oct)
An easter egg in the Bitcoin genesis block (12 Oct)
A bitcoin ATM operator gets money back from the police who confiscated it (13 Oct)
eToro creates a cryptocurrency ad with Game of Thrones star (17 Oct)
$194M was moved using bitcoin with a $0.1 fee (19 Oct)
Why Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency have no future (21 Oct)
Elon Musk’s Twitter gets blocked when talking about Bitcoin upon suspicion of being hacked (23 Oct)
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak plans to travel somewhere using only bitcoin (26 Oct)
A Halloween gift with claimable bitcoin (29 Oct)
Someone gifts $20 of Bitcoin to Janet Yellen’s public email after she makes negative statements on stage (30 Oct)
Bitcoin receives a lot of bad press based on a poorly researched report (30 Oct)