2016 is almost over. Do you still remember these 10 major cryptocurrency events?

2016 was a year of great success for Bitcoin. Looking back at this year, the price of Bitcoin has risen from about 2,800 yuan at the beginning of the year to more than 6,800 yuan, an increase of more than 100%, a three-year high. It is undoubtedly one of the most valuable investments in 2016. So far, the total market value of Bitcoin has reached 15 billion US dollars.

It seems a little different from the previous price increases. This year, more people are talking about blockchain and no longer shy away from Bitcoin. More and more people are facing the value of Bitcoin. In the context of global political and economic turmoil, Bitcoin stands out as a safe-haven asset.

This year, Bitcoin celebrated its 8th birthday and also experienced its second halving. Now, the output of Bitcoin per block is 12.5 BTC. From various indicators, Bitcoin infrastructure is gradually improving, the user base is expanding, and its application is becoming more extensive.

Looking at the digital currency and blockchain communities this year, several new trends stand out: difficulty in raising funds and a booming ICO market; policy push by central banks of various countries and grassroots startups running in parallel; and fluctuations in fiat currency exchange rates and a strong Bitcoin price.

Here are ten events that happened this year that you will not ignore. Looking back a few years later, you may find that what you are experiencing at that time may be a major turning point in the history of Bitcoin development or even the history of world currency.

Many governments abolished banknotes, and India's Bitcoin premium was 10%

On November 8, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the abolition of 500-rupee and 1,000-rupee notes, equivalent to about $7.5 and $15, respectively. Subsequently, the "banknote abolition" rule has undergone a series of changes. When the "banknote abolition" was first announced, Modi emphasized that it was mainly to cut off the source of funding for terrorism. Later, he emphasized that this move was more to recover the black money of tax evasion, and later changed his words to say that it was to encourage Indians to use more digital payments.

Former Indian Prime Minister Singh criticized this as a "legal robbery." Indians who had difficulty withdrawing cash began to seek alternative assets. For a time, Bitcoin was hard to find in India, and the price was nearly 10% higher than the international market price.

Coincidentally, Venezuela abolished the 100-yuan Bolivar banknote and issued six new banknotes with larger denominations; the Australian government announced that it might abolish large-denomination cash banknotes; on December 19, Indonesia also considered abolishing banknotes.

The price of a bitcoin has risen from 4,800 yuan in early November to around 6,800 yuan now, an increase of more than 40% in less than two months.

The government is very good at "demonetizing currency", but the consequence is a serious loss of its credibility. On the contrary, Bitcoin has stood out in rounds of "demonetizing currency". Not only has its price been rising, but it has also made more people realize the importance of using blockchain technology to protect the inviolability of personal property.

The global economic and political turmoil has highlighted Bitcoin's risk-averse properties

In addition to the abolition of banknotes in many countries, several major events that affected the global economic trend occurred in 2016. In response to events such as Brexit and Trump's coming to power, Bitcoin has shown a safe-haven attribute similar to gold to a certain extent.

On June 24, the results of the UK's Brexit referendum were announced, with more than half of the people supporting leaving the EU, and British Prime Minister Cameron also announced his resignation. The pound plunged, and the price of Bitcoin rose accordingly, with an increase of nearly 20%, and the price stabilized at around 4,300 yuan.

On November 9, as the results of the US election continued to be counted, various assets recorded their largest fluctuations since Brexit, and Bitcoin rose sharply, approaching RMB 5,000, as expected. The reason is that the market generally believes that the uncertainty surrounding Trump's policy proposals will drive the prices of safe-haven assets.

In addition, the continuous depreciation of the RMB and foreign exchange controls have brought strong demand to the Bitcoin market, and the price of Bitcoin has soared.

As the pace of regulation continues, could 2017 be the year of regulation?

Since its birth, Bitcoin has always been in a gray area of ​​regulation. Regulatory uncertainty is a huge hidden danger for the development of digital currency and blockchain. But since 2016, the situation has changed. Let's take a look at the attitudes of regulators in various countries towards Bitcoin and blockchain this year:

Japan: In March 2016, the Financial Services Agency of Japan defined it as a commodity; in May, Japan approved the digital currency regulatory bill for the first time and defined Bitcoin as property.
South Korea: Financial regulators have set up a digital currency task force to focus on the regulation of Bitcoin exchanges.
Singapore: In August 2016, the Central Bank of Singapore proposed new regulatory measures for payment providers in the country.
Australia: The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) defines Bitcoin as an "intangible asset" rather than a currency; in November, the Australian government released a white paper guiding digital currency.
North America: In the United States, regulation has become stricter this year. Previously, the Obama administration asked the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to double-tax the digital currency sector. The well-known digital currency exchange Coinbase was required to submit user information; the Canadian government actively promoted Bitcoin legislation.
Europe: Russia abandons its Bitcoin ban; the UK's Global Advisor Bitcoin Investment Fund (GABI) has recently been approved for listing on the Channel Islands Stock Exchange; Gibraltar, also a British territory, has issued its first Bitcoin exchange-traded instrument (ETI). This is the first regulated Bitcoin instrument in Europe and is currently live on Gibraltar and the German Stock Exchange.

For blockchain, regulation is not a bad thing. Regulation means "recognition" to a certain extent. Countries around the world have begun to regulate digital currencies such as Bitcoin. In 2017, I believe that with the implementation of more regulatory policies, the digital currency community will achieve more benign development.

Blockchain industry financing is lower than last year, and the ICO market is mixed

2016 is coming to an end, and we have not seen the latest industry financing data yet, but according to CBInsights, blockchain and Bitcoin startups raised a total of US$492 million in 92 financing events in the first nine months of 2016. At this rate, investment transaction activities in 2016 will decline compared to 2015.

On the contrary, 2016 also witnessed the boom of the ICO market. 2016 is known as the first year of ICO. In this year, many projects obtained financing through ICO. The term ICO comes from IPO, which is unique to the digital currency community and is the abbreviation of Initial Coin Offering. This method is mainly for digital currency and blockchain projects to sell project tokens to early enthusiasts, and the project team will use the funds obtained through ICO to develop and expand the market.

This year, The DAO became the largest crowdfunding case in history with a score of 150 million US dollars. WAVES, Lisk, domestic projects such as Ant, Lingmengbao, and Metaverse have successfully completed ICOs. A number of blockchain crowdfunding platforms have also been born, including bnktothefuture abroad and Youbi Crowdfunding, Yunbi.com, and ICO365 in China.

The initial popularity led to a large number of projects flooding into the ICO market at one time. The uneven quality of projects, lack of supervision, and insufficient user education led to serious speculation. Projects went online and fell below their issue price, or even failed in crowdfunding, resulting in a low overall sentiment in the ICO market. The originally win-win innovation method turned into a hot potato.

Despite this, investors have not lost confidence in ICOs, and we hope that the ICO projects that will be launched in 2017 will not disappoint investors.

Frequent thefts: exchanges are not immune; Is what DAO is saying unjust?

Hacker incidents have been with Bitcoin since its birth. In 2016, several well-known digital currency exchanges were not spared. On May 14, Hong Kong digital currency exchange Gatecoin was hacked, losing Ethereum-related assets worth more than 2 million US dollars; on August 4, well-known exchange Bitfinex was hacked, losing 120,000 BTC, worth more than 72 million US dollars.

Apart from exchanges, the hacking of the largest crowdfunding project, The DAO, was even more jaw-dropping, and it also triggered another major event this year: the Ethereum fork.

On April 30, The DAO, an Ethereum-based project application, started a 28-day crowdfunding campaign. DAO is the abbreviation of decentralized autonomous organization. The DAO can be seen as a crowdfunding venture capital fund, which is authorized by DAO token holders to provide funds for Ethereum projects. On May 28, the crowdfunding ended, raising more than 11.5 million ethers, worth more than 150 million US dollars, becoming the largest crowdfunding project in global history.

No one expected that on June 17, hackers launched an attack on multiple vulnerabilities in The DAO smart contract and transferred 36 million worth of Ether to an anonymous address, almost one-third of the total crowdfunding of 1,150 Ether by The DAO.

In order to recover the losses of many investors whose funds were stolen, on June 30, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin proposed the idea of ​​a hard fork. On July 21, more than 85% of the computing power supported the hard fork, and Ethereum hard forked, resulting in two independent blockchains, ETH (Ethereum fork) and ETC (Ethereum original chain).

The DAO theft has become a commonplace. Every time a similar incident occurs, in addition to a severe blow to investor confidence and price setbacks, the digital currency community will also be subject to dual scrutiny from the perspectives of legal supervision and ethics.

Ethereum fork questioned, breaking the myth of smart contracts

On July 21, Ethereum implemented a hard fork, generating two chains, ETH and ETC.

Although the stolen losses were recovered, the hard fork caused Ethereum to lose some supporters in the community who insisted on the decentralization and immutability of blockchain. At the same time, due to the complexity of smart contracts, the loopholes in The DAO were ignored, and smart contracts were also questioned.

In the following months, ETH executed 4 more hard forks. The development paths of ETH and ETC have also diverged greatly. Community members who support ETH, represented by the original Ethereum developers, still follow the path of smart contracts; while the other side supports the ETC Ethereum original chain, represented by miners, and insists on taking the PoW path.

The ETH community has not released much news recently, but the ETC community activities, which started from scratch, are in full swing. On November 23, ETCWin, the first crowdfunding project on ETC, announced the success of the crowdfunding, and recently launched the ETC enthusiast community ETCFans.

In terms of price, the combined market value of ETH and ETC has now fallen below half of the value before the fork. Separately, the price of ETH has continued to fall recently, remaining at around 50 yuan, and faces a huge test; on the contrary, ETC has performed strongly recently, with the current price around 7.5 yuan. With more developers joining, monetary policy finalized, and applications gradually landing, the prospects of ETC are worth looking forward to.

"Satoshi Nakamoto" appears again. When will the "Find Satoshi Nakamoto" game end?

The true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto has always been the biggest unsolved mystery in the Bitcoin community. On May 2, 2016, Australian entrepreneur Craig Stephen Wright publicly admitted that he was the inventor of Bitcoin, "Satoshi Nakamoto", which was the first time someone publicly admitted it.

As early as half a year ago, in December 2015, Wired magazine reported that White might be the real Satoshi Nakamoto. A series of clues subsequently released by the media also showed that White was the most "similar" to Satoshi Nakamoto among those who were considered to be Satoshi Nakamoto in recent years.

Unexpectedly, Jon Matonis, founding director of the Bitcoin Foundation, and Gavin Andresen, former Bitcoin Core maintainer, both supported Wright as "Satoshi Nakamoto" in their respective blogs. However, as a series of evidence was overturned, Wright gave up further proof and apologized to his supporters. Gavin also admitted that he had misidentified Satoshi Nakamoto.

The annual search for Satoshi Nakamoto always causes a stir in the cryptocurrency community, and without exception, it ends with a confession of wrongdoing. Perhaps the disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto is in line with the original design of Bitcoin’s decentralization. The best outcome of the game of “Searching for Satoshi Nakamoto” may be to make Satoshi Nakamoto disappear into history.

Expansion is still pending and remains the focus of the community

The debate over block size expansion has been going on for more than a year. How to fix scalability and achieve block size expansion, the current main focus of the debate is on two solutions: Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Unlimited.

Core's solution is to deploy isolated verification. Although it has received support from some community members, starting from the second half of this year, mining pools and community leaders have gradually stood up to publicly oppose it.

Unlimited believes that the block size should be regulated by the market, but it needs to be achieved through a hard fork. With the Ethereum hard fork, Bitcoin's hard fork will inevitably have the risk of splitting into two systems if the community has not reached a consensus.

This debate is still ongoing and the final outcome has yet to be determined. In 2017, the issue of capacity expansion will continue to be a focus of attention.

Bitcoin’s 8th anniversary, production halved again

On January 3, 2009, Beijing time, the Bitcoin Genesis Block was born.
On November 28, 2012, Bitcoin experienced its first halving, with an interval of 1,425 days, or about 3.9 years.
On July 10, 2016, with the birth of the 420,000th Bitcoin block, the Bitcoin block production was halved again. This halving took 3 years, 7 months, 1 hour, 21 minutes and 35 seconds, and the block reward after the halving was 12.5 BTC.

For Bitcoin, there is another event worth remembering this year. If we count according to the time of the release of the white paper, November 1, 2016 is exactly the 8th anniversary of the birth of Bitcoin.

On November 1, 2008, a mysterious figure who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto officially released the Bitcoin white paper on the cryptography mailing list. No one expected at the time that the birth of Bitcoin would usher in a new era.

On November 1, 2016, the 8th anniversary of Bitcoin, the price of Bitcoin exceeded 5,000 RMB. I wonder if this was a birthday blessing from community users to Bitcoin?

The central bank is developing digital currency and publicly recruiting blockchain talents

Looking back at the beginning of 2016, the People's Bank of China held a digital currency seminar to discuss the launch of the central bank's digital currency and study the multi-scenario application of digital currency, which once ignited the enthusiasm of practitioners and investors. Bitcoin prices also started this year's bull market.

On February 13, Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People's Bank of China, said that the technical routes of digital currency can be divided into two types: account-based and non-account-based, and can also be used in layers to try to coexist. Blockchain technology is an optional technology, which is characterized by distributed bookkeeping, non-account-based, and cannot be tampered with.

In November, the prototype plan for the central bank to issue legal digital currency had completed two rounds of revisions, and it is expected to be tried out first in relatively closed application scenarios such as the bill market. In the same month, the central bank’s website published the 2017 recruitment information, indicating that its direct unit, the People’s Bank of China’s Institute of Printing Science, began recruiting digital currency-related R&D personnel.

In December, the Shenzhen Evening News reported in its headline: Shenzhen has established the country's first Fintech digital currency alliance and research institute, and is expected to be the first in the country to pilot digital currency. This is the first local city in China to initiate the establishment of a financial technology alliance and research institute from the strategic heights of national financial innovation and opening up and promoting the internationalization of the RMB, following the announcement of the establishment of the Digital Currency Research Institute by the central bank. It is of extraordinary significance to promote the further implementation of the central bank's digital currency.

Not only China, but also central banks of various countries such as the United Kingdom and Singapore have begun to make arrangements in the field of digital currency, gradually developing, testing and issuing their own digital currencies.

If the central bank's digital currency previously only referred to the digitized RMB, and was completely different from digital currencies such as Bitcoin, after a year of deepening our understanding of the central bank's digital currency, we will find that the country's emphasis on blockchain may be the strongest driving force for the large-scale implementation of blockchain application scenarios.

Today, the highest price of Bitcoin has exceeded 6,800 yuan, and the community is enthusiastic. With the implementation of regulatory policies, the application is further expanded, and the general public's acceptance of Bitcoin is increasing. With the global negative interest rate trend, Bitcoin is more worth looking forward to in 2017.