January
- 01-06 Bitstamp suspends service after security breach resulting in loss of around 19,000 bitcoins.
February
02-04 Ross Ulbricht was found guilty of all 7 of his charges, including computer hacking, drug trafficking, and running a criminal enterprise. Find out more about Ross: https://freeross.org/about/.
02-06 The number of merchants accepting bitcoin exceeded 100,000.1
The MAK (Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna) became the first museum to acquire art using bitcoin, when it purchased the screensaver “Event listeners”2 of van den Dorpel.3
Screenshot of van den Dorpel’s screensaver, Event Listeners. Courtecy contemporary.com
May
05-09 Samourai Wallet inception with Reddit post that announces enforcement of BIP 39 passphrase when a wallet is created. It claims to be forged to keep transactions private, user identity masked, and funds secure.
05-18 Evolution darknet marketplace goes down, citing technical difficulties. The shut down was soon discovered to be an exit scam, with the operators of the site shutting down abruptly in order to steal the approximately $12 million in bitcoins it was holding as escrow”
October
- 10-02 A proposal submitted to the Unicode Consortium to add a code point for the bitcoin symbol.4
December
12-06 Peter Wuille discusses Segregated Witness at Scaling Bitcoin Workshop in HongKong.
12-07 Gregory Maxwell proposes roadmap to work towards segwit 4MB block soft fork to bitcoin-dev mailing list5.