A year in review – Brave New Coin’s top 10 stories of 2017

2017 will likely go down in history as Bitcoin’s first real ‘hair-on-fire’ year — and there will likely be many more to come. As the wild ride winds down though, we thought a review of some of 2017’s most well-read stories might assist in putting some perspective around the events of the year — and help us prepare us for a 2018 that promises to be just as eventful.

1. Bitcoin Gold — A friendly dividend fork, or Bitcoin’s disaster recovery plan?

Luke Parker’s early October preview of the upcoming Bitcoin Gold (BTG) hard fork makes fascinating reading. The personalities, the motivation, the finances and the politics. Especially interesting when you can check the latest market status and see how it all panned out.

2. When smart contracts go bad – perspectives on loss and liability

Minter Ellison Rudd Watts partner Tom Massland asks the timely question of exactly what should happen when a smart contract goes wrong – and examines the divergent points of view.

3. Fourth largest Bitcoin exchange Bithumb hacked for billions of Won

Exchanges continued to fall victim to hackers in 2017 — this article looks at the events and techniques relating to the hack of the Korean exchange Bithumb in June.

4. Ethereum scaling solution plasma could facilitate billions of transactions per second.

Months before CryptoKitties virtually ground the Ethereum network to a halt, Christine Chiang took a look at Joseph Poon and Vitalik Buterin’s white paper “Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts.” The issue of how to effectively scale transaction volumes continues to challenge both Bitcoin and Ethereum.

[5. Five Bitcoin lessons for every investor

](news/5-bitcoin-lessons-for-every-investor/)

There’s never any shortage of doomsayers when the topic of Bitcoin investing comes up, but this thoughtful piece by Nicholas Colas introduces some alternative perspectives to some common BTC investment themes.

6. The bitcoin mining hardware race is on

We have all heard the phrase ‘a license to print money’. For many this ‘license’ has been granted by bitcoin mining hardware — technology which continues to evolve at pace, as Luke Parker discovered.

7. Segwit2x hard fork abandoned — what happened and why

The proposed Bitcoin hard fork back in November was very contentious and caused huge concern throughout the community before finally being canned just before it was to go ahead. Here Luke Parker performs a succinct postmortem on what, for many, was Bitcoin’s defining moment of 2017.

8. Another crypto bubble and the rise of altcoin markets

Back in May Piotr Piasecki’s piece examined the “Bitcoin bubble” of the day (BTC was around $1400 at the time) and explored the rise of the altcoins.

9. How to hold cryptocurrency in a retirement account – without fees

Among other things, 2017 was the year that Inland Revenue departments around the world started to sit up and take notice of crypto. Here, New Jersey lawyer and taxation expert Jeff Vandrew explores how to minimize fees using crypto in an IRA account.

10. The Bitcoin bubble – pinpointing where bitcoin is among the four phases

In this article Dr. Jean-Paul Rodrigue’s famous “Phases of a Bubble” chart is applied to Bitcoin. Written in June, our man Luke provides some solid arguments that Bitcoin could be sitting in at least three of the chart’s four possible phases. Play along at home by making your own guess as to where it sits today