The Bitcoin Weekly column has been running more than two years now and there’s a great deal to cover. The year 2015 was not the breakout year most of the Bitcoin community would have had, but it’s obvious this year the financial industry noticed Bitcoin and the blockchain.

Last year saw the amount of venture capital pumped into the Bitcoin ecosystem exceed one billion dollars with approximately half that during 2015 itself (at about $491 million). This showed an enduring interest in the future of the Bitcoin market and all the businesses and startups dedicated to catering to the community and using the technology. While 2016 may be “The Year of the Blockchain,” it’s certainly true that 2015 has set that foundation.

The year also saw a great deal of ups and downs, especially with the Bitcoin market value starting at $200 from the outset, although it would see a significant rise (approaching $500) by the end of the year.

It has been an interesting year filled with controversy (such as the Bitcoin blockchain block size debate), various frauds from exchanges that stole money, to more hacking incidents than we’re able to cover in a single article. If the year of 2015 is to bear fruit for the Bitcoin industry, it will be that the survivors learned to harden their defenses, buy into insurance to prepare for future troubles, and make headway in building Bitcoin, and the blockchain, as technologies that have markets far beyond what seemed more niche in 2014.

This is part one of a two part series seeking to provide a retrospective of Bitcoin in 2015. Readers interested in skipping ahead to the last six months of the year can read here. Welcome to this Bitcoin Yearly 2015.

January: Bitcoin market falls below $200 and cloud mining outfits shut down

Right out of the gate in January 2015 the Bitcoin market began to show signs of stress as the market value fell below $200. This was quite a plummet for the market in comparison to the massive spike in 2013 that saw one bitcoin selling at over $1,000. The year 2014 also saw the fall of infamous Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, and coming into the new year of 2015 a lot of steam had gone out of the market.

On the subject of Mt. Gox, the beginning of 2015 also rang in news that the Japanese government had begun looking into the exchange’s failure and CEO Mark Karpelès for evidence of possible fraud. Authorities reportedly did not find the claims that hackers had taken down the exchange as plausible. This would come to a head in later months.

Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp Ltd. did suffer a hack and suspended trading after losing approximately 19,000 BTC (an amount that came to around $5.2 million at the time). The exchange then recovered from the compromise and resumed trading within a week. Bitstamp remains resilient and present in the Bitcoin marketplace to this year.

Due to the crash in the Bitcoin market value, newfangled cloud mining concerns began to get out of the game. First on the chopping block was CEX.IO Ltd., a Bitcoin cloud mining company best known for nearly reaching 51 percent of the blockchain hashpower in 2014 under Ghash.IO.

January also stands out because of the launch of Coinbase Exchange right after its parent company Coinbase, Inc. received $75 million in venture capital funding.

This month also saw the beginning of the trial of Ross Ulbricht, aka the Dread Pirate Roberts, the administrator of The Silk Road, an underground dark web marketplace that dealt in drugs and illicit items sold for bitcoin.

Courtroom illustration by Susie Cagle via Forbes

February: The Silk Road Trial begins (and ends) and a raft of exchanges suspend operation

Ross Ulbricht receives a swift trial this month with the jury going into deliberation at the beginning of February and coming back with a guilty verdict within a day. Ulbricht, better known as the Dread Pirate Roberts, was convicted of seven criminal counts related to his operation of The Silk Road. The charges against Ulbricht included drug trafficking, continuing a criminal enterprise, hacking, money laundering, and fraud with identification documents.

When asked about the role of bitcoin in the Ulbricht trial, legal expert Marcus Asner, a partner at Arnold & Porter in New York, said: “I think that bitcoin made the trial more sexy.”

“If you strip away the evidence about bitcoin and the cyber context,” he added, “this case doesn’t really involve much more than a flea market allegedly set up to buy and sell contraband and illegal services.”

Numerous exchanges closed down February 2015 as well, for various reasons, from being hacked and going bankrupt. BTER.com, Exco.in and CAVIRTEX all suffered security comprimises of one type or another and suspended operations. Also amid these suspensions and closures, Hong Kong-based MyCoin shuttered and vanished with over $387 million in bitcoins in what appeared to be the end of a Ponzi scheme.

Japanese e-commerce kaiju Rakuten, Inc. also announced plans to accept bitcoins for products. Also in merchant news, online payments processor Stripe, Inc. opened up bitcoin processing for web commerce (and provided an API).

As for community metrics, in February Blockchain.info opened its 3 millionth wallet.

March: ShapeShift reveals CEO and 21, Inc. receives $116 million in VC funding

The big, bad regulation for Bitcoin called New York’s BitLicense looms on the horizon in March, but it’s not out yet (that comes later). However, numerous states begin looking at the currency with legislation in mind. Utah and New Hampshire begin looking into regulatory measures for dealing with electronic cash.

This is also the month that 21, Inc., the Bitcoin toaster people, made waves with a $116 million round of investment–the biggest investment round for a Bitcoin-related venture.

March also revealed that ShapeShift AG, an interesting alt-currency registrationless exchange, had received $765,000 in seed money and that entrepreneur Erik Voorhees was its CEO. At the website ShapeShift.io anyone can easily exchange BTC or many other altcoins by just putting them up for offer in a near-instant exchange.

Hacks of Bitcoin exchanges continue as well, with Coinapult having a hot wallet compromised (to the tune of 150 BTC) and AllCrypt lost 42 BTC to a hack as well. Near the end of the month Cryptoine went offline due to a compromise as well, citing a loss of every altcoin on the exchange.

Also this month ChangeTip, a Bitcoin social media tipping service, announced integration with Twitch.tv making bitcoin tipping available to numerous video game streamers.

Mark Karpeles, chief executive officer of Tibanne Co., poses for a photograph with a bitcoin in the office operating the Mt.Gox K.K. bitcoin exchange in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday, April 25, 2013. Bitcoin digital currency, which carries the unofficial ticker symbol of BTC, was unveiled in 2009 by an unidentified programmer, or group of programmers, under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. Supply is capped at 21 million Bitcoins and managed by a software algorithm embedded into the digital currency?s design, rather than a monetary authority such as a central bank. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg via Getty Images

April: The Bitcoin Foundation “effectively bankrupt” and Xapo partners with Taringa!

The Bitcoin Foundation is discovered to have almost exhausted its coffers when board member Olivier Janssens announced that the foundation was “effectively bankrupt.” This news came amidst messages of “restructuring” from the Foundation. The Bitcoin Foundation is best known as an operation that promotes Bitcoin evangelism and maintains Bitcoin core developer Gavin Andresen’s employment as Chief Scientist. As a result of fallout from the reveal criticism arose about the operation of the Foundation and a lack of transparency from members.

The Japanese investigation into the implosion of Mt Gox reveals that thieves had been operating on the exchange for years, with evidence showing embezzlement as early as 2011.

Bitcoin wallet service Xapo, Inc. partners with Taringa!, a social media service that serves Latin America, to provide bitcoins via a revenue sharing program. This move would open up cryptocurrency to over 27 million Spanish speaking people.

A massive earthquake in Nepal, India (measuring 7.8) brings the Bitcoin community together to assist with relief via multiple funds including CoinTelegraph, BitPay, ChangeTip and the Red Cross.

May: Blockchain block size debate and Nasdaq enterprise-level blockchain platform

Five months into 2015, and the maximum block size debate (an ongoing controversy about the future of Bitcoin to be sure) is just beginning to be felt by every corner of the community. In May, Bitcoin core developer Gavin Andresen argued in a blog post entitled “Why increasing the max block size is urgent” that the Bitcoin block size urgently needs attention.

The Bitcoin block size debate has burned every month since (and kindled many months before May, 2015) as an answer to the expectations that the Bitcoin network might be facing a bottleneck in the future. Every 10 minutes a Bitcoin mining operation discovers and adds a block to the blockchain; this process keeps the blockchain stable and secures it against fraud and unauthorized modification. Currently the blockchain is only able to handle seven transactions per second, compared to the VISA credit card network which can handle a sustained 2,000 transactions per second with a peak around 56,000. This is currently way beyond the current capability of the Bitcoin network. Increasing block size could allow the network to handle more transactions–but it could also lead to other unintended issues–and there’s questions as to if Bitcoin should be aping the legacy credit system anyway.

The race for blockchain technology begins to heat up this month with Nasdaq, Inc.’s announcement of an enterprise-level blockchain solution for securities trading. The beta version of the technology even went into testing before the end of the month (shortly after the initial announcement). The hope for Nasdaq is to produce a trading system that can allow for settlements more swiftly than any other legacy system on the planet. Beating the mythical “T+3” settlement time (or a minimum of three days).

Bitcoin businesses still can’t get a break this month with Bitfinex, another Bitcoin exchange, gets hacked to the tune of 1,474 BTC. Not enough to make a dent in the exchange’s coffers, but enough to sting.

The Block Chain Summit happens on Necker Island, an island owned by Richard Bronson, where a great number of Bitcoin luminaries gather together to talk shop and show off inventions. One of these inventions includes a lightbulb from BitFury that mines bitcoins while providing illumination.

Hernando de Soto, MaiTai Global’s Bill Tai & BitFury’s George Kikvadze at the @BlockChainSum via @ILDthinktank

June: New York BitLicense final draft, T0.com cryptobonds and Bitcoin XT 

The final draft of New York’s BitLicense finally appears, and reactions are mixed. The regulatory draft from the New York Department of Financial Services and it’s director, Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky, has been in the works for quite some time and this version includes some changes following comments from the industry. However, many critics of the legislation still find it problematic to this day.

Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, Inc., purchases the first blockchain security, aka cryptobond, for $500,000. All part of a project by Overstock.com known as T0.com, a platform designed to allow for cryptocurrency settlements of securities (similar to other projects that use blockchain technology for securities as seen in previous months and certainly more in future months).

In the Bitcoin blockchain scalability debates a potential hard fork arises in the form of Mark Hearn’s Bitcoin XT client. Gavin Andresen comes out in approval of Bitcoin XT, however much of the rest of the Bitcoin Core development team does not, and this disapproval materializes from lead developer Wladimir “wumpus” van der Laan and Blockstream co-founder Adam Black, as well as Peter Todd. Proposals continue, but little headway is made in deciding exactly what to do with the blockchain and the controversy over scalability.

In the world of blockchain using technology the Nasdaq OMX Group names Bitcoin platform startup Chain as its partner for testing the upcoming blockchain securities service it is testing.

photo credit: Bitcoin IMG_1924 via photopin (license)