Bitcoin Year-In-Review 2016.

As with our 2014 Edition and somewhat stillborn 2015 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 :

  • USD lost 40% of its value relative to BTC.
  • Network difficulty and hashrate increased nearly 3x.i
  • The block reward halved for only the second time.ii
  • BitBet entered receivership.iii
  • Chinese mining cartel busted politically.iv
  • MPEx went private.v
  • S.MPIF closed.vi
  • Court transitioned from #bitcoin-assets to #trilema following BitBet schism.vii
  • Redundant logs implemented.viii
  • First Republican block explorer / slicer released.ix
  • Raft of new bots introduced in-channel.x
  • T – ticket management system released.xi
  • New WoT visualiser and browser released.xii
  • No Such lAbs (NSA) unveiled FUCKGOATS entropy dongle.xiii
  • Republican mailhole released.xiv
  • Altcoins and their pimply pumpers frankly continued to fizzle.xv
  • The Real Bitcoin Foundation celebrated its second birthday and officially released client.xvi
  • GPG parachute designed.xvii
  • AMD hardware debugger unbricked.xviii
  • Hanbot wrote the best Elliot Rodger-themed fanfic.xix
  • Eulora lifted off.xx
  • Unicode badly bludgeoned.xxi
  • The Deep / Dark Web officially defined.xxii
  • DNS fell out of favour while, ironically, the prospect of a Republican DNS registry materialised.xxiii
  • Block cipher competition announced.xxiv
  • Courts Circus competition winners announced.xxv
  • Jokes were had.xxvi
  • TMSR participation levels made explicit.xxvii
  • Leaner and meaner Lordship list announced.xxviii
  • Gossipd spec updated.xxix
  • The SFYL playbook formalised.xxx
  • Potentially very, very silly WoT bet made.xxxi
  • Phuctor broke a lot more RSA keys than anyone expected.xxxii
  • Bubble bullet dodged.xxxiii
  • Republic selected upcoming US President.xxxiv

See you in another twelve short months!

___ ___ ___

 

  1. Difficulty increased from 103`880`340`815 to 286`765`766`821 while hashrate increased from 743`604`444 GH/s to 2`052`749`317 GH/s.
  2. As of July, miners are now awarded only 12.5 BTC plus tx fees, down from 25 BTC, which was the rate for roughly the last four years. It was 50BTC ~every ten minutes prior to that.  
  3. The foremost perimutuel betting website in Bitcoin was dissolved by its founding partners following a contractual dispute. I then lost a pretty thrilling live auction for the tainted bones.
  4. Apparently the miners don’t control Bitcoin after all. Who knew ?  
  5. This resulted in the largest (~250kbtc) and cleanest unwinding of stock issuance in the history of Bitcoin when S.MPOE was delisted
  6. Turns out that investing in anything Bitcoin-related that isn’t Bitcoin proper is no mean feat.
  7. kakobrekla, punkman, and Funkenstein_ were the most notable stragglers, the rest move forward, onwards, and upwards unflinchingly.
  8. Public-facing channel logging had previously been dependent on kako, which obviously couldn’t stand going forward, so phf and Framedragger stepped up and released their own public log sites, each with differing formats. Redundancy and complementarity FTW!
  9. Our man Ben Vulpes released the mythologically-named Mimisbrunnr.
  10. The bots directory has them all listed with their ever-expanding functionalities. This past twelve months has seen Vietnam War-levels of explosions in bot capability and scope. Trinque even made vpatches for an IRC bot and a log bot.
  11. mod6 made this spiffy little tool for keeping track of TMSR software development projects and objectives.
  12. Old maintainer mike_c was lost to meatspace commitments as near as anyone can decipher. So trinque, who also maintains deedbot, took charge and crafted a replacement.
  13. Entropy is a tricky business, as we know, so 0.028BTC for FUCKGOATS is an exceedingly modest sum for an auditable and WoT-manufactured source. Particularly as more whitening “bugs” come to light.
  14. Ben Vulpes at it again!
  15. Zcash sputtered and started like an old VW diesel, Ethereum and its unscrupulous founders flopped about like fish out of water, and “Classic” / “XTcoin” / “Hard fork” / “Soft fork that’s really a hard fork” all sucked a dead donkey. Bitcoin 2.0… what was that again ?  
  16. After thorough and iterative testing conducted by yours truly as well as a whole host of other dedicated Republicans, mod6 officially released a decrufted v0.5.4 client and made possible offline builds. Huzzah!
  17. Alf outlined how one can stave off cryptographic death and the attendant, and quite isolating, stench of rot.
  18. Alf cracked the puzzle of this time-limited hardware peripheral for x86-64 iron.  
  19. There was a competition, she won. And paid her tax too!
  20. The Ministry of Games’ principal title is officially up up and away!
  21. Why ? Because it’s fucking stupid. ASCII FTW.
  22. As is so often the case, MP had the definitive take on the subject.
  23. MP both launched the formal attack on DNS and is jointly crafting the specification for the registry with Framedragger.
  24. With a stonking 10 BTC to the winrar. And yet it remains open to this day! Ten months on!!1
  25. mats plugged away hard on this one and took home 24.7779686 BTC (USD$ 16.5k at time of tx) for his efforts while the helping hands of hanbot took home 2 BTC (USD$1.3k). Indeed, there are always and everywhere jobs for the industrious and well-connected. 
  26. Qntra had a contest for best Clinton/Cosby jokes. Yours truly snagged a piece of the prize pie!
  27. Where do you fit in ?  
  28. Much fat was trimmed.
  29. But it’s really the comments section where the debate gets juicy. Oh, so, sooo juicy. Kinda like this organic mandarin orange I’m presently enjoying.
  30. Bingoboingo set the record straight and laid out the steps in a readily digestible manner.
  31. Will Ben or I massively regret this bet ? Stay tuned to find out!
  32. All of which invariably “unhappened” of course. Why ? Because reality is a cold and cruel mistress, like Mata Hari but less forgettable, certainly in our present digital age of ~free reproductions. So it is that previously adaptive behaviours – ones suited to life at linear speeds – are now maladaptive at the connected world‘s exponential speeds. Shitty break for you to be born into this missilic morass, this frantic freight train, eh ?  
  33. What’s a movement without a monarch ? TMSR was this close to a going Full Cat-V
  34. Trump was always the man to beat, but the Republic sealed his fate.

6 thoughts on “Bitcoin Year-In-Review 2016.

  1. cazalla says:

    Much appreciated given my lack of finger on the pulse.

  2. This will be great to read in 2026 :D

  3. […] to mention FUCKGOATS and most every other Republican innovation to date. […]

  4. […] with our 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 […]

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