Bitcoin Year-In-Review 2017
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Bitcoin Year-In-Review 2017
By Pete Dushenski
Posted December 21, 2017
As with the 2014 Edition, somewhat stillborn 2015 Edition, and triumphant 2016 Edition, it’s that time of year again when we review the past twelve months and take stock of what The Most Serene Republic of Bitcoin has accomplished. Without further ado :
If I missed something, don’t be shy! History is still being written.
- Compare with a 40% spanking in 2016. Too volatile! Too crashing!!1 Better make some “bitcoin” futures and settle them in cash. That’ll solve all your problems. ↩
- Difficulty increased from 317
688400354 to 1590896927258 while hashrate increased from 2274102150 GH/s to 11388083`790GH/s. ↩ - Instant Bitcoin transactions are in the order of 900 satoshis per byte as of this writing, which works out to 0.002 BTC for a median 226 byte tx. That’s about $34 Trumpbucks, which seems high compared to the freeeeee transactions of yesteryear, but BTC still requires fewer forms to fill out, fewer hours at the bank, and just minutes instead of weeks for the receiver to receive. SWIFT and the rest of its necrotic fiat infrastructure are still dead in the water even at 10x the BTC tx price. ↩
- Bigger bloxx! Lower fees!1 The end result was abject failure. BCH is now trading at half what it did at launch relative to BTC. But if you still haven’t cashed out, there’s still my open offer to broker your nearly worthless BCH into sexy, sexy BTC. Thinkaboutit. ↩
- For any of the Three Little Pigs building their straw houses on this miner-empowering lulzfest : inb4 toljaso. Also, TRB still doesn’t recognise your existence. ↩
- Server hosting troubles abounded in the Republic in 2017 and news service provider Qntra was tragically caught in the crossfire. ↩
- Told you there were server hosting troubles! Phuctor was previously hosted somewhere in the Baltics but the whole hosting business model seems to select for varying degrees of scamminess and ineptitude. Phuctor was not immune from this. ↩
- In light of the dim prospects for Qntra in particular and mankind in general without proper server hosting, BB took it upon himself to leave Egypt’s Land in a laudable effort to establish a WoT-worthy ISP. ↩
- Phew! When I won the bet on March 15th, BTC was maaaaybe $1200 and none of us fully anticipated just how much more worthless USD would become in 2017 (see footnote i). Needless to say my liability would already be USD$ 282`150 as it stands today were not the pain plan already well underway. ↩
- shinohai was added under the title “Baron Titsbare” and Framedragger was added as “Lord Scanner” before the latter moved countries this summer and has now been essentially dark since July with only a single sign of lyf in October. mike_c was removed from the fourth Lordship list not for working for OkCupid per se, but for having been largely absent from channel discussions for, as MP put it, many months. ↩
- It was previously fixed at 1 ECu = 1 satoshi and it’s now 10-to-the-satoshi with further inflationary events all but assured. And would you believe that this is still a better deal than USD ? ↩
- It was record-setting at the time. Given the new lobbesbot function, this is a record that may well stand the test of time. ↩
- The robots tookurjerbs!!! Hats off to lobbes for the fine work. Let the bots do the drudgery, even if it was kinda fun drudgery. ↩
- Znort, who beat me in The Great Auction, found the continued management and operation of the parimutuel betting site worth less than the bother. Hopefully she made her 86 BTC’s worth. ↩
- The Kickstarter campaign of 2017 was very much the “Initial Coin Offering.” Few if any delivered products or made any meaningful progress towards that end despite their prodigious use of blockchain technology. Weird, huh ? Maybe that talking head on BNN didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about after all. It’s a thought. ↩
- In minor milestones for TRB, I even submitted my first patch : getpeerinfo. ↩
- Following discussion in the forum, the point were laid out thusly. ↩
- An “extremely early” draft at that. FFA is leading toward this future. ↩
- PeterL, ben_vulpes, and sina all independently crafted their own brews. ↩
- Stanislav wrote a “fits-in-head” set of routines for multiple-precision arithmetic to replace OpenSSL and other similarly unauditable atrocities. The first three chapters of FFA have already been published but more are expected. ↩
- ben_vulpes, diana_coman, and PeterL all took successful cracks at the MP-proposed problem. ↩
- Where Taleb shied from the light, I entered stage right. ↩
- Efforts to test the fully auditable True Random Number Generator on MacOS and OpenBSD were met with misery and confusion. Only Linux was up to the task. Thank goodness for diversity! ↩
- diana_comanreleased an important library for Eulora communications. ↩
- There’s at least 1 BTC up for grabs. Y’know, in case you’ve got kids to feed. That’s also a lotta ramen! ↩
- If you thought the 1 BTC for the Learning Tournament was sweet, sink your salivating mouth into the 10 BTC award for a new block cipher! Alas, 22 months came and went and the desired item was neither produced, nor, in the end, that desired. ↩
- trinque developed an online, IRC-accessed wallet based on PGP identification that is available to anyone with a key deedbot-registered key. It’s also currently free to use. ↩
- While not exactly Bitcoin-related, “Finding the light” did serve to better explain another piece of the world around us. And isn’t that why we do what we do ? ↩