Hard fork Ethereum, Bitcoin's birthday and other key events of the week

In the traditional Sunday digest we talk about the main events of the first week of January — hard forkEthereum, the anniversary of the launch of the Bitcoin network, the alleged data leak on Poloniex and the new details of the SEC proceedings against Telegram.

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In the market without changes

On the eve of the New Year, the price of Bitcoin fell byarea of $7,100, and on January 2 it crossed the $7,000 mark in a downward direction. The bulls recovered their losses the very next day — on the 11th anniversary of the network’s launch, the price returned to the $7,400 level, where it continues to trade at the time of writing.

BTC / USD, TradingView data

On the first day of the year, the hashrate of the first cryptocurrency updated its historical maximum at 119.35 EH / s.

At the end of the decade, Bitcoin turned out to be the most effective investment — it grew by 9,000,000%.

Hard fork Muir Glacier

Despite criticism from individual developers, on January 2, the Muir Glacier update was activated on the Ethereum network, designed to postpone the «difficulty bomb» for 4 million blocks (611 days).

Hard fork held on Ethereum network

Although it was announced back in mid-December,not all were ready for a hard fork. At least 14.5% of the full nodes did not support the latest version of clients on the day of the upgrade, and many exchanges did not have time to confirm their readiness.

According to Ethernodes, at the time of writing, the sharenon-updated nodes fell to 0.4%, but some trading floors have not yet clarified the position on hard fork. Among them are Poloniex, Huobi, Bitfinex, Gemini and Bithumb.

A few days before the update, Parity developers reported a bug in version 2.5.12, which prevented the synchronization of nodes with the main network. It has already been eliminated.

Estimated leak on Poloniex

Poloniex Support Notified Someusers about the need to change the password because of the anonymous post on Twitter. The latter has published a list of emails and passwords allegedly belonging to the exchange's customers.

One user suggested that the posted database contains account data no later than 2015.

The exchange then denied the leak and explained that it had reset the passwords of only 1% of the «potentially vulnerable» users.

«We can confirm that neither the list nor the information contained in it was taken from Poloniex."

New Turn in SEC vs. Telegram

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said that Telegram refused to disclose financial information related to the $ 1.7 billion TON token sale.

The SEC is interested in the scheme of distribution of funds andcost items for creating a new blockchain. Telegram considers such a request to be “unreasonable fishing.” Now the judge must either satisfy the regulator’s demand or take the side of the defendant.

On January 7-8, Pavel Durov will testify in the already sensational case in Dubai.

New Year's materials cycle at ForkLog

We talked about the main events of 2019, regulation, changes in the mining sector, pleased you with memes, and also identified the most influential representatives of the industry.

Ten main events and trends of 2019 in the bitcoin industry.
Major changes in the regulation of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in 2019.
How the mining industry has changed in 2019.
Top 10 people in the bitcoin industry: who we followed and who we worried in 2019.
Murders, hacks, arrests and exit scams - how the bitcoin industry survived the hectic 2019.

In the traditional section «Bitcoinization» on our Youtube channel we summed up the results of 2019 together with Maxim Onegin.