This Week in Bitcoin

For years, lawyer Daniel Kelman has led the fight to recover the lost bitcoins from the infamous Mt Gox exchange.

All of a sudden, Brock Pierce has declared that he is the rightful owner of Mt. Gox and plans to give everyone their coins back.

Daniel and I discuss the timing and motives of Pierce's proclamation and what it means for the future of the hundreds of thousands of bitcoins still locked up.

Plus we revisit the sale of Mt Gox coins in 2018 on Bitpoint that may have contributed to the market crash.

• Craig Wright is being sued for 1.1 million BTC
• Bitcoiners debating about raising Bitcoin's supply
• BTC trading volumes in Venezuela hit record highs
• Cryptopia is allowed to reopen their exchange
• Nasdaq to start offering BTC and ETH indices
• Public pension funds start investing in crypto

• Two groups of hackers responsible for stealing about $1 billion of cryptocurrency
• You can now use wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) on the Ethereum network
• Are unknown Bitcoin miners taking market share from known mining pools?
• Wikipedia accepts BCH
• Iran planning to tackle economic sanctions using cryptocurrency
• Genesis Capital lent out over $1.1 billion in cryptocurrency loans in 2018

• The airdrop error that sent Koreans BTC and other cryptocurrencies
• John McAfee "living in exile"
• Operations of physical bitcoin manufacturers have ceased to exist
• Executives of a South Korean exchange sentenced for inflating trading volumes
• Cryptos: the new television show directed by the Hollywood actor Kevin Connolly

Joey King is back with insightful analysis of bitcoin news. Many bullish and bearish signals are ones that we haven't thought about.

• New luxury hardware wallets
• Bitpay does work: 1 Billion processed in 2018
• Binance has launched a euro and pound fiat-to-crypto trading platform
• Will Russia start to invest in bitcoin? Bullish or bearish signal?
• Scams on social media platforms impersonating bitcoin personalities
• A new impressive "blockchain phone"

China is an important country for bitcoin development, investment, and adoption.

What's in store for 2019? What is the sentiment around Bitcoin, EOS, Zcash, and blockchain tech?

Journalist Cindy Wang is on the ground in China and shares the latest news, rumors and things to keep an eye on as the year progresses.

Bitcoin is everywhere. From the protests in France, to U.S. sanctioned countries, to intellectual debates in Israel.

• A street mural inspired by the Yellow Vests protest contains a solvable puzzle with 0.28 BTC inside
• Binance's decision to terminate services to some of its loyal users in U.S. sanctioned countries

• The entreprise blockchain hype falls flat
• Coinbase, Ethereum Classic, and a 51% attack
• Nick Szabo debates cryptocurrencies as a better, alternative national reserve to gold
• Unit of account: pricing in satoshis.

• Bitcoin's 10th Birthday
• 2018 - the year that many altcoin investors went back to BTC
• The altcoins that failed to survive 2018
• Can you tell when an altcoin is close to death?
• Bakkt has announced that it completed its first round of funding
• 2018's Top Cryptocurrencies Ranked by Github Activity

We spoke to four experts with diverse skillsets: 1. Roger Ver - Founder and CEO of Bitcoin.com, investor in many Bitcoin-related startups. 2. Vin Armani - Founder CEO of CoinText and developer 3. Miko Matsumura - Cofounder of Evercoin and GP gumi Cryptos venture fund 4. Gabriel Cardona - lead at developer.bitcoin.com, created BitBox

And we asked them the following questions: How do you build in a bear market? Is there a chance of cryptoassets appreciating next year on the basis of fundamentals, or are we reliant on a new wave of speculators to fuel the next bull run? Will the Bitcoin Cash / Bitcoin SV hard fork matter a year from now? How will we look back at it? Vitalik Buterin recently stated on R/BTC: "at the end of the day the goal of BCH should not be to grow its community by grabbing off a few more supporters from BTC and BSV, it should be reaching out to larger communities in broader society that stand to benefit from what it has to offer." Do you agree? And if so, how do we do this? At the end of the day, cryptocurrencies have to be used as cash, currency. How do you see usage of crypto in 2019 playing out, especially in developing countries? Let's pretend I, Matt, was off the grid for one year, no internet, human contact … and I come back online December 2019. If you had 60 seconds to fill me in on the last 12 months, what would you say? 2019 was the year of… Will Stablecoins continue to generate attention, development and investment in 2019, or are they simply a sticking plaster for getting traders through bear markets, with their role likely to diminish once more favorable conditions return? Why will security tokens be big?