r/Bitcoin recap - November 2019

Hi Bitcoiners!

I’m back with the 35th 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 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 November 2019

Adoption

• An update on Bitcoin in Venezuela (5 Nov)

• FBI Director indicates cryptocurrency is a significant and growing issue for them (10 Nov)

• A $15.3M luxury property in Manhattan sold for Bitcoin (11 Nov)

• SegWit usage reaches a new all-time high of 63% (23 Nov)

• Using bitcoin to buy travel insurance (28 Nov)

Development

• Lightning developer Joost Jager builds encrypted messaging on the Lightning Network (2 Nov)

• Bitcoin developers are testing Schnorr and Taproot upgrades to improve privacy and scalability (17 Nov)

• The Bitcoin Core code is preserved for 1000 years in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault (22 Nov)

• Bitcoin Core 0.19.0 is released (24 Nov)

• Someone is developing a bitcoin mobile game (24 Nov)

Mining

• An AMA by Matt Corallo, Peter Todd and Braiins, the company behind Slush Pool and mining Software Stratum V2 (20 Nov)

• A new Bitcoin mining facility in Texas that could theoretically scale to 1 Gigawatt (21 Nov)

• The bitcoin mining distribution over time (21 Nov)

Business

• Starbucks to accept direct bitcoin payments through Bakkt in 2020 (1 Nov)

• Coinbase is sharing account data with third parties (4 Nov)

• Square’s Cash App sells $148M bitcoin in Q3, up 245% in a year (6 Nov)

• Alibaba partners with bitcoin rewards shopping app Lolli (12 Nov)

• Australians can pay their bills using the Lightning Network through Living Room of Satoshi (15 Nov)

• ProtonMail reveals it has been holding its bitcoin paymetns for years (17 Nov)

• A private equity company bought the rights to the entire .org domain registry and removed price caps, this affects bitcoin.org too (23 Nov)

• Bakkt’s monthly futures volume continues to rise (28 Nov)

Education

• Why you should run your own full node by Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille (10 Nov)

• A guide on running a pruned Bitcoin node on a $12 Rock Pi S (12 Nov)

• An anonymous group has set up a platform to educate Lebanese people on Bitcoin (18 Nov)

• Andreas Antonopoulos on Bitcoin being hacked (21 Nov)

• An overview of what is new in Bitcoin Core 0.19.0 (24 Nov)

Regulation & Politics

• China scraps plans to categorise bitcoin mining as an industry to be eliminated (6 Nov)

• Bitcoin hailed as a success in China in a dramatic shift in attitude (13 Nov)

• A Legal panel in the UK decided Bitcoin & digital assets are legally property (20 Nov)

• Germany passes law that enables banks to store cryptocurrency (30 Nov)

Archeology (Financial Incumbents)

• 30% of surveyed Americans believed the USD is backed by gold (4 Nov)

• A presentation about Bitcoin at a bank-organised event (13 Nov)

• The Federal Reserve won’t disclose which banks are receiving repo cash for at least 2 years (14 Nov)

• A journal from 1932 during the great depression on how the credit system would turn out to be no good (15 Nov)

• HSBC closes bank accounts for Hong Kong Protesters Movement (18 Nov)

• PayPal’s CEO owns some bitcoin (20 Nov)

• First German Bank imposes 0.5% negative interest rates to small savings accounts (20 Nov)

• Poland repatriates 100 tons of gold from its storage in the Bank of England (26 Nov)

Fun & Other

• George Soros on Bitcoin (8 Nov)

• 6 years ago a student held up a QR code to his bitcoin wallet on live TV and was sent over 22 BTC (10 Nov)

• A fancy hardware wallet (15 Nov)

• Bobby Lee apologises for supporting SegWit2x 2 years earlier (16 Nov)

• An AMA with a major DarkNet vendor who went to federal prison (17 Nov)

• $310M worth of bitcoin is moved for $0.32 in fees (25 Nov)

• A bitcoin rollercoaster mug (29 Nov)