Bitcoin Year in Review: The Top 10 Bitcoin News Stories of 2016

The ten most-viewed and shared stories of 2016, according to you, the readers of Cointelegraph. And the top Bitcoin news story of 2016 is...
The ten most-viewed and shared stories of 2016, according to you, the readers of Cointelegraph. And the top Bitcoin news story of 2016 is...

2016 has been a very exciting year, typified by a near constant demand for bitcoin wallets, a near doubling of its global market price, and the Bitcoin halving this past summer.

2017 looks like it can be the Bitcoin’s best year ever, but before we put 2016 into the history books, let’s review where we’ve been this year before we step into Year Nine of the decentralized digital currency age. Feel free to use this as a Bitcoin historical reference for where the community has been, through the years.

Here are the top ten most-viewed and shared stories of 2016, not according to us, but according to you, the readers of Cointelegraph. We’ll start with the tenth-most popular story and end at number one. So let us begin with the always popular subject of Bitcoin’s price potential, and a story from not too long ago.

Bitcoin can rise to $2000 in January 2017

It seems like just yesterday this article was being shared because it basically was. On December 9th, “Bitcoin Can Rise to $2000 in January 2017” was written by Olusegun Ogundeji focusing on the Saxo Bank prediction of a $2000 USD Bitcoin price in 2017.

This forecast was based on the recent election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States and their forecast of his fiscal spending creating a super-strong dollar, which could create international markets to adjust and move investment elsewhere.

Five Reasons Why Bitcoin Value Must Increase In the Future

Evander Smart wrote the op-ed article “5 Reasons Why Bitcoin Value Must Increase In Future” in July about the upside potential the Bitcoin market can bring for 2017. Bitcoin is really designed to win for investors, over the long run, and this article highlights what is working in the Bitcoin investor’s favor.

Rothschild Family Dumps U.S. Dollar For Gold & ‘Other Currencies’, Bitcoin?

In August, this article by Evander Smart reviews the Rothschild family, one of, if not the, wealthiest families in the world, announcing that they are moving out of the U.S. Dollar, the global reserve currency, into gold and ‘other currencies.’

Why did their family leadership feel the need to make a public declaration against the holding of the U.S. Dollar? A very public move like this could change the financial markets significantly, at least in the short-term.

Uber Switches to Bitcoin in Argentina After Govt Blocks Uber Credit Cards

More and more emerging markets are showing a genuine interest in Bitcoin, and it has helped many people and businesses in real-world conditions. This article written by Joël Valenzuela goes over an authoritarian move, the Argentinian government stopped Uber from using credit card companies. This caused the company to begin to use Bitcoin instead. Argentina has been a hotbed of Bitcoin demand and adoption, in recent years.

Bitcoin Can Reach $10,000 or Even $1 mln, Chandler Guo Explains How

Chinese Bitcoin mining magnate Chandler Guo’s opinion carries a great deal of weight, according to the demand for this article by Olusegun Ogundeji from mid-November. Guo was speaking at the University of Cambridge in a roundtable discussion about Bitcoin and its capabilities, and he shared a way that Bitcoin can go “to the moon.”

One Coin, Much Scam: Swedish Bitcoin Foundation Issues Warning Against OneCoin

Fun Fact: The most-viewed article in Cointelegraph history was about OneCoin that’s been described as a persistent digital currency scam, and this article by Joseph Young made the top five for the year. Apparently, OneCoin gained enough traction inside of Sweden to force the Swedish Bitcoin Foundation to take action against it.

Hackers Track HashOcean Mining Company

At the top of the news stories for 2016, you will start to find a common thread, and that thread is the heist that was HashOcean, once one of the largest and most respected cloud mining operations in the history of Bitcoin. In the aftermath of this blow to the global Bitcoin community, Olusegun Ogundeji covered how the online hacking community went after the digital trail of HashOcean, post-heist, in an effort to track the owners of this operation.

Japan Officially Recognizes Bitcoin and Digital Currencies as Money

No one saw this coming. Japan has had a star-crossed relationship with Bitcoin going back many years, through the history of Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, which folded in early 2014. Since then, Bitcoin demand has skyrocketed in just the last two years to the point where the Japanese government approved the use of Bitcoin as money, on par with the Japanese Yen itself. Shivdeep Dhaliwal reported on this major vote of confidence from the most unexpected of sources.

HashOcean Responds, Cites a Hack, Ready to Resume Usual Payout

The top two were reported on by Olusegun Ogundeji and deal with the same unfortunate subject, the dissolution of HashOcean. This article focuses on the response, later discredited, by the company itself at the end of June 2016. After five days that the user site was out of commission, the corporate leadership made an announcement on their Facebook page, taking no responsibility for the issue.

Major Bitcoin Miner Disappears Along with Millions of Dollars Worth of Bitcoin

Welcome to the top Bitcoin news story of 2016, and the #2 article in Cointelegraph history, the reveal that HashOcean is no more. One day, everyone woke up to screens at HashOcean’s domain reading ‘403 Forbidden CloudFlare-nginx’ and “Hashocean.com is PARKED.” The site would never operate again, nor has any real resolution come to pass when it comes to the Bitcoins lost and who was ultimately responsible.

Full disclosure: I was one of the estimated 700,000 who was hustled out of a Bitcoin mining stake. Fortunately for me, I was in the final stages of testing the site and lost less than $100 USD in the heist. Our best wishes to all those affected by this scam, which seemed to have been over three years in the making. Hopefully, this did not dampen anyone’s enthusiasm for Bitcoin. Just because there are scams within the Bitcoin community does not mean that Bitcoin itself is a scam. This should not need to be explained much further.

I hope you have enjoyed this trip down “Memory Lane” and will continue to join and support Cointelegraph in reporting all the Bitcoin news for 2017 and beyond. Happy Holidays!