r/Bitcoin recap - August 2019

Hi Bitcoiners!

I’m back with the 32nd monthly Bitcoin news recap.

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 an 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 August 2019

Adoption

• Supporting Bitcoin by asking people to accept bitcoin as a payment (4 Aug)

• Bitcoin discussed on Dutch TV as a possible investment (5 Aug)

• A newspaper/book store accepting bitcoin in Edinburgh (7 Aug)

• Bitcoin is now the 11th largest money in the world by supply (8 Aug)

• Bitcoin plays a prominent role in the new movie The Hustle (13 Aug)

• An update about bitcoin in Venezuela (18 Aug)

• Bitcoin accepted at a local Farmer’s market in Alabama (30 Aug)

Development * Bitcoin Core Developer Andrew Chow is straming his code tests on Twitch (7 Aug)

• Bitcoin Core 0.18.1 is released (9 Aug)

• Pieter Wuille launches a website for the Miniscript project (20 Aug)

• c-lightning 0.7.2 is released (21 Aug)

• Zap iOS Lightning Wallet is released for mainnet (23 Aug)

Security

• A warning to avoid flash memory for long-term storage of your bitcoin (7 Aug)

• A discussion on the ability to use a brain wallet and the risks involved (8 Aug)

• A map of Bitcoin nodes by country (20 Aug)

• The creators of Coldcard Wallet put out an overview of technology standards for external recovery across most available bitcoin wallets (23 Aug)

• A security alert for the Lightning Network to upgrade nodes with older software (30 Aug)

Mining

• Bitcoin reaches an all-time high of 430 “proof of work equivalent days” (3 Aug))

• Blockstream reveals massive Bitcoin mining facilities with Fidelity as an early customer (8 Aug)

• Bitcoin mining on a 55 year old IBM 1401 mainframe at 80 seconds per hash (10 Aug)

• 280 days until the Bitcoin block reward halves again (11 Aug)

• Another 1.8MB block was mined showing the increased blocksize SegWit provides (28 Aug)

• Bitcoin reaches a new all-time high in hashrate of 83.5 Exahashes per second (30 Aug)

Business

• Roger Ver quietly relinquishes his CEO role at Bitcoin.com (2 Aug)

• A bitcoin ATM in Barcelona (3 Aug)

• Norwegian Air charges less if you pay with bitcoin (12 Aug)

• BitPay will now demand a Social Security Number, Photo ID and private address for all users making purchases of $3k or refunds of $1k from merchants (13 aug)

• Samsung adds Bitcoin support to the Software Developers Kit for its “blockchain phones” (14 Aug)

• Coinbase custody is seeing $200-400M in cryptocurrency deposits per week from institutions (16 Aug)

• Bakkt announces its new launch date of 23 September (16 Aug)

• A bitcoin ATM in Malaga (20 Aug)

• Bitpay rejects a $100k donation in bitcoin towards Amazin Rainforest protection (23 aug)

• Paxful has a hidden fee on outgoing transactions that they blame on transaction costs (24 Aug)

• The Middle East gets its first licensed bitcoin exchange (24 Aug)

• 2 Cryptocurrency brokers get licenses in Switzerland (26 Aug)

• German Bitcoin ATM startup spot9 is sending lawyers and regulators after its competition (27 Aug)

• Bitcoin Lightning Payments are now supporting on e-commerce platform Shopify (29 Aug)

• CME Bitcoin Futures has an average volume of $370M per day (30 Aug)

• Bitwala launches its bitcoin “bank accounts” to all countries in Europe (31 Aug)

• 1.4M Brazilian PoS devices can support bitcoin payments through a custodial service (31 Aug)

Education

• An explainer on fluctuations in the capacity on the Lightning Network (3 Aug)

• Andreas Antonopoulos on regulating cryptocurrency (6 Aug)

• A discussion on how many people are not aware they can buy less than a full bitcoin (11 Aug)

• Bitcoin’s predecessors that created some of its foundational principles (15 Aug)

• A guide to running a Lightning Network node (16 Aug)

• An explainer of how we know if someone is Satoshi Nakamoto (20 Aug)

• A conversion tool of satoshis to bitcoin (21 Aug)

• The release of The Little Bitcoin Book (22 Aug)

• Announcement of Mastering the Lightning Network by Andreas Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun and René Pickhardt (28 Aug)

Regulation & Politics

• A discussion on the common assumption that certain governments won’t hyperinflate their currency (2 Aug)

• Bitcoin is now a legal form of taxable payment in New Zealand (13 Aug)

• Some Hong Kong protesters plan to withdraw their money from ATMs (17 Aug)

• The petition to free Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht gets 200k signatures (27 Aug)

• Portugal’s tax authority says cryptocurrency trading and payments are tax-free (29 Aug)

Archeology (Financial Incumbents)

• A $5 Billion Zimbabwean dollar bill showing the effects of hyperinflation (5 Aug)

• A $100 Trillion Zimbabwean dollar bill showing the effects of hyperinflation (5 Aug)

• The US government freezes all Venezuelan government assets (6 Aug)

• Zimbabwe bank notes before hyperinflation (8 Aug)

• The US government’s budget deficit rises by 27% in one year (13 Aug)

• UK branch of Santander Bank blocks all payments to Coinbase (14 Aug)

• Wells Fargo charges a customer $2 for checking his balance from a non-network ATM (20 Aug)

• Bank of America files a patent for a digital currency wallet (20 Aug)

Price & Trading

• CNBC refers to Bitcoin as digital gold and a safe haven as the price rises back over $11k (5 Aug)

• A discussion on technical analysis (5 Aug)

• $1B worth of bitcoin was moved and its effects on the price (13 Aug)

• A bitcoin price flyer that was posted 10 months ago (15 Aug)

• Hal Finney was calculating a price of $10M per bitcoin just one week after the genesis block in 2009 (24 Aug)

Fun & Other

• The Sun newspaper explains how currencies other than Bitcoin will have their value “go down the toilet” (2 Aug)

• Someone who predicted 3 years ago that Bitcoin would be gone (4 Aug)

• A story of giving back 1 btc that was accidentlaly given (4 Aug)

• Someone scams a scammer and donates the money to Bitcoin Venezuela (5 Aug)

• The opposites of Economics and Politics (6 Aug)

• A Merkle Tree in nature (9 Aug)

• r/Bitcoin is growing by over 1000 members per day (9 Aug)

• Someone put the Bitcoin logo as a sponsor on BBC One Match of the Day (11 Aug)

• A social experiment of giving away $5 or $25 worth of bitcoin (14 Aug)

• Allegedly collapsed Ponzi scheme Plus Token is liquidating part of its reported $3.5b in stolen cryptocurrency on exchanges (15 Aug)

• A discussion on why some people hate Bitcoin (16 Aug)

• Someone’s grandmother buys them a coin with the Bitcoin logo (18 Aug)

• The @Bitcoin account on Twitter gets a new owner (20 Aug)

• Someone creates a visualisation of how they imagine the Lightning Network (20 Aug)

• Someone creates a working Bitcoin wallet on a Minecraft server, with a private key protected by lava (25 Aug)

• A man who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto is ordered to hand over $5B after losing lawsuit (28 Aug)

• Forgetting about your bitcoin for 5 years (30 Aug)