Welcome to the last Bitcoinist news bits of 2014. This time, we’ll make a special edition, a summary, to point out the most significant stories of this year.
Bitcoin 2014 Year in Review
We made a monthly disposition, so lets start with January 2014: Overstock‘s announcement of Bitcoin acceptance caused the price to increase before correcting and settling down at $853 by the end of the month.
In February, After the collapse of Mt.Gox and the loss of an estimated 744,000 Bitcoins valued at $400 million, Bitcoin’s future was heavily debated.
In Marc, Flexcoin, the Canada-based Bitcoin bank, closed after losing $600,000 in a hacker attack. An attacker stole the entire contents of their hot wallet which contained over 800 Bitcoins.
In April, This was the month of rumors. After China had declared that Bitcoin was not a currency, rumors emerged that China’s Central Bank would tell banks to stop dealing with Bitcoin exchanges, resulting in a large market crash.
In May, The PBOC refuted rumors that they were going to instruct banks to quit dealing with Bitcoin exchanges. Though this helped, the rumors continued to spread and cause fear in investors
In June, Expedia announced that they would accept Bitcoin payments. This event was welcomed by the Bitcoin community which had experienced a very turbulent past few months. Canada signed their first bill regulating Bitcoin.
In July, Newegg joins many other retailers that accept Bitcoin. New Ransomware was deployed by hackers in an attempt to steal Bitcoins from known Bitcoin users.
In August, A hacker was able to take roughly $83,000 worth of Bitcoin by hacking into ISPs over the course of 4 months. This kind of attack will be hard to do in the future. The Consumer Protection Agency issued a warning about Bitcoin and the use of virtual currencies.
In September, Paypal and Braintree announced that they would begin to integrate Bitcoin into Paypal. The companies started working on ways to integrate the digital currency into payment processing platforms and aim to make it easier for merchants to accept Bitcoin payments. Bitcoin mining company Butterfly labs was shut down for scamming customers and failing to deliver promised hardware.
In October, Bitcoin’s price experienced very low lows this month. As price started dropping, people continued to panic sell resulting in a final price of $330. Bill Gates stated:
“Bitcoin is better than currency in that you don’t have to be physically in the same place and, of course, for large transactions, currency can get pretty inconvenient.”
In November, A man embedded NFC chips into his hands that to store condensed Bitcoin private keys. This is the first Bitcoin related implant ever performed. The two chips have the memory equivalent of 888 Bytes or 26 condensed private keys.
In December, Bitcoin’s price is $375 at the time of writing. Microsoft has partnered with BitPay and now accepts Bitcoin for digital content and games. In the future, it will be likely that customers will be able to pay for other goods and services with Bitcoin other than just games and digital content.
Thank you for staying with us all year. We are going to start the news bits 2015, with a super exciting prediction by the key market players.
Happy new year everyone!