r/Bitcoin recap - May 2019

Hi Bitcoiners!

I’m back with the 29th monthly Bitcoin news recap. (sorry a bit late this month)

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.

You can see recaps of the previous months on Bitcoinsnippets.com

A recap of Bitcoin in May 2019

Adoption

• 471k transactions on the blockchain in 24 hours (2 May)

• An Uber driver in New York accepting bitcoin (2 May)

• The Wall Street Journal includes Bitcoin in its financial asset class overview (5 May)

• Bitcoin added 150k daily active addresses since the start of April (10 May)

• The mempool compared to the number of confirmed transactions between the all-time price high and now (11 May)

• A custodial payment processor now allows you to transact with major US retailers (13 May)

• Someone gets excited about buying a pen on Amazon using bitcoin (15 May)

• A Bitcoin ATM at Tbilisi airport in Georgia (18 May)

• An update on Bitcoin in Venezuela (19 May)

• Over 100 merchants accept Lightning payments in Arnhem, the Netherlands (21 May)

• 80% of college students chose $1 when given the option between that and 1 BTC (21 May)

Development

• Bitcoin Core 0.18.0 is released (2 May)

• An overview of what is new in Bitcoin Core 0.18.0 (3 May)

• A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal draft for Taproot on the Bitcoin developer mailing list (6 May)

• A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal draft for Schnorr Signatures on the Bitcoin developer mailing list (7 May)

• Bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille unveils two Bitcoin Improvement Proposals to improve privacy (7 May)

• lnd v.0.6.1-beta has been released (10 May)

• Bandwidth-efficient transaction relay for Bitcoin (28 May)

• The next major release of lnd will integrate Watchtowers (29 May)

• The first 1 btc Lightning channel is live as developers test removal of the channel limit (29 May)

• Ledger finally adds support for native-Segwit, Bech32 addresses, which lowers fees (29 May)

Security

• 7000 btc is hacked from Binance (8 May)

• Binance’s CEO realises he can’t roll back the blockchain to reclaim stolen funds (8 May)

• A reminder to keep your cryptocurrency off exchanges (11 May)

• A warning for a Trezor phishing site (15 May)

• The details of a SIM port hack that cost someone his bitcoin (20 May)

• Another Proof-of-Work-based Blockchain suffers from a 51% attack (25 May)

Mining

• Bitcoin miners clarify that they use clean energy at a Fidelity event (7 May)

• Bitcoin miners are earning 8x the fees of all other cryptocurrencies combined (13 May)

• It is 1 year until another halvening of the Bitcoin block reward (20 May)

• A discussion on using the heat from Bitcoin mining for water desalinisation (29 May)

Business

• Fidelity is slowly rolling out cryptocurrency trading within a few weeks (6 May)

• GoTenna partners with Blockstream to make using Bitcoin without an Internet connection easier (11 May)

• eBay hints at bitcoin acceptance through ads (13 May)

• Microsoft is building a second-layer decentralised identity solution on top of Bitcoin (14 May)

• Blockchain the company is still making their wallet users overpay on fees (16 May)

• Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on implementing the Lightning Network (20 May)

Research

• 10.5M bitcoins have not moved in a year (18 May)

• Over 732k Bitcoin addresses now own more than 1 BTC (19 May)

• Improving the scalability of routing algorithms while preserving decentralisation (28 May)

Education

• A simple explainer of Taproot, a technical upgrade coming to Bitcoin (7 May)

• Concerns over getting your bank account closed over buying bitcoin in India (12 May)

• Someone requests popular YouTube channel Kurzgesagt to make an educational video about Bitcoin (13 May)

• An overview of links for people who are new to bitcoin (14 May)

• Veriblock cannot afford blockspace in Bitcoin to secure its own blockchain, since fees have risen (16 May)

• A Bitcoin developer addresses criticism on Bitcoin by YouTuber kurzgesagt (20 May)

• The full 60 Minutes Video on Bitcoin’s Wild Ride for ~12M viewers (20 May)

• A simple explainer of Submarine Swaps on the Lightning Network (23 May)

• A guide on how to build a cheap Bitcoin node (25 May)

Regulation & Politics

• The US Justice department seizes part of Bitfinex’ “missing” $850M and makes arrests (2 May)

• A US congressman partially sponsored by an illegal gambling facilitator calls for a bill to ban all cryptocurrencies (9 May)

• 2020 US Presidential candidate Andrew Yang on Cryptocurrency and the White House (17 May)

• Macedonia is the only country in Europe which has made Bitcoin illegal as a payment method (20 May)

Archeology (Financial Incumbents)

• BAKKT will start accepting users for testing in July (13 May)

• 1 Satoshi is now worth more than 1 Iranian Rial, 1 Vietnamese Dong or 1 Indonesian Rupiah (16 May)

• A Wells Fargo banker helped launder millions for the Sinaloa Cartel (17 May)

• If you bought bitcoin at its peak in 2017 in Argentina, you would have retained more value than holding pesos (21 May)

Price & Trading

• The Bitcoin market cap goes back over $100B (3 May)

• The Bitcoin price rises $1000 in under 48 hours, to over $7k (11 May)

• Gemini exchange removes some trading functionality and increases fees (12 May)

• Bitcoin trade volume reaches an all-time-high (13 May)

Fun & Other

• Grayscale releases its new “Drop Gold” Bitcoin investment advertising campaign (1 May)

• The New York Stock Exchange chairman on Bitcoin (3 May)

• Someone suggests to mass search “what is Bitcoin” to trigger trading bots (3 May)

• A reminder of a prediction of something like Bitcoin in 1984 (6 May)

• An article by Jameson Lopp explaining why Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto (9 May)

• People appreciate that Satoshi disappeared from Bitcoin early on (10 May)

• Bitcoin has been declared dead 355 times (12 May)

• Shark Tank member challenges the case for Bitcoin (14 May)

• Asking Warren Buffet about cryptocurrency is like asking for a taxi driver’s view on Uber (14 May)

• TD Ameritrade says tens of thousands of their clients are interested in cryptocurrency (15 May)

• SpaceX launches ~12k satellites to low earth orbit to provide global high-speed WiFi, which could help node infrastructure and accessibility to bitcoin (16 May)

• A reminder to take care of yourself when diving down the Bitcoin rabbit hole (17 May)

• A sportsman in the US gets his request to be paid in btc denied (17 May)

• Someone creates a 1-pager financial elevator pitch for Bitcoin (17 May)

• Laszlo “Bitcoin Pizza Guy” Hanyecz is brought back up in the 60 Minutes episode on Bitcoin (17 May)

• A Magic Internet Money Crossstitch (21 May)

• Someone donates 14 btc to Bitcoin.org (28 May)

Submitted June 08, 2019 at 09:52PM by SamWouters http://bit.ly/2KAGUiP