This year has perhaps been one of the busiest for the first cryptocurrency since its birth. Historical highs, growth, adoption, investment. We have definitely seen a lot of events that have moved us or have not kept us in suspense.

We could say that, although it still has some problems to solve, bitcoin is still the most popular cryptocurrency, known, accepted and with the largest market capitalization among the rest.

The creation of the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, after 8 years, is still present and giving us something to talk about. In this article we will take a look at the most important and important thing that happened with Bitcoin during the whole year that is about to end.

We begin our journey with the behavior of the cryptocurrency in the market and the prices that have come to reach.

By the end of 2016, bitcoin was close to closing the year at $1,000 per unit. At that time, the second Halving had already taken place, bringing the mined block rewards in the 25 BTC network to the current 12.5 BTC. Just a month later, in January 2017, Bitcoin again made history by reaching and surpassing, for the first time, the price of gold.

Thus, 2017 began with the price of the cryptocurrency surpassing itself in a matter of weeks and by February it had already reached 1,200 dollars. Among the factors that influenced the price of cryptocurrency for the date, include the uncertainty in the United States due to the election of Donald Trump as president, the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union and above all the confidence that could generate some regulations.

By mid-May, according to CoinMarketCap, each BTC was around $1,800. In the middle of the year, although it was close to three thousand, a bitcoin -at the end of July- was equivalent to 2,889 dollars. After this first half of the year, we began to see an even greater growth in which in less than six months BTC doubled its price on several occasions.

We see that in September he sailed around $4,000. In November, a series of events also influenced the escalation: the expectation that more and more institutions joined the sale of Bitcoin futures (CME, LedgerX, Swiss Bank), bringing more and more investors, along with companies focused on options and investment tools, consider Bitcoin. Which of course, made BTC one of the biggest milestones in its history: the $10,000 per unit. In the same month it reached $11,000 with a market capitalization of $185.9 billion, a value close to the market capitalization of Coca-Cola at that time.

Earlier this month, the first cryptocurrency increased its appreciation in the market by more than 23% and surpassed 17,000 dollars to reach $17,955. Finally, in mid-December it achieved another of its biggest milestones: the $20,000 after the CME Group's bitcoin futures were launched. At this point, it shows a correction - like the rest of the altcoins - to the 15,000 dollars, after having dropped to $12,000, so we would still have to see how much this singular year will close.

It is no secret that the Bitcoin blockchain has faced and continues to face legal and other more technical problems such as scalability. In recent months, transactions with this cryptocurrency have become slow and commissions quite high, due to the fact that the blockchain network it supports is congested and has been under spam attack. The size of the blocks in the chain does not seem to be sufficient and several solutions have been proposed, among them SegWit (Segregates Witness), which although it does not vary to a large extent the size limit of the blocks, it does improve the distribution of information. That is to say, it allows more transactions per block and more economical commissions.

The SegWit protocol was activated around August by Bitcoin Core, specifically in the 481.824 block mined by BTCC, with 99.95% network support at the moment. This protocol makes it possible to increase the number of transactions per block, which could exceed 2,000 in 1 MB blocks.

In fact, the activation of SegWit was one of the reasons why bitcoin reached an all-time high in the year ($3,250 near code activation). However, thanks to this protocol, the confirmation of a 1.6MB block was recorded in the Bitcoin blockchain in November, becoming the largest mined blockchain to date. However, this protocol has not yet been fully implemented, as many portfolios, bureaux de change and platforms do not yet use it.

On the other hand, in the so-called New York agreement another protocol emerged in response to bitcoin scalability, called SegWit2x. It does not have much resemblance to SegWit, as it was not even very well received by most of the bitcoiner community. So much so that it was cancelled, after being frozen in the 494,782 block in its activation not long ago, due to lack of consensus and support.

aqui se pega el parrafo.

Hardforks, to a certain extent, aim to improve the blockchain networks by correcting errors or optimizing certain aspects, so the new bifurcations that appear claim to rescue things that supposedly the first cryptocurrency lost, such as the problem of congestion and the price of transaction fees on the original network.

Bitcoin Cash came into being in August of this year and from there it has been greeted with both enthusiasm and strong criticism. This cryptocurrency was promoted by the exchange house and mining group ViaBTC and among its characteristics highlight the blocks of 8MB, protection against repetition and disappearance attacks (Wipeout), among others. In November, when the market fell, the price of BCH increased by more than 32%.

After the emergence of Bitcoin Cash, tension was created between the two networks as the BCH sought to take the title away from the first cryptocurrency. Bitcoin went from managing a processing power of 10 million gigahashes by Nov. 8 versus 1 million for Bitcoin Cash, to matching this network, handling 5 million gigahashes each. Events like this caused the BTC price to fall. However, a hardfork was performed on the Bitcoin Cash network to implement a specific Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm that resulted in a new hashrate migration, this time to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Cash was the first fork in the Bitcoin network, which will always be the best known, but this has given rise to other cryptocurrencies that claim to rescue values from the original. One of these other forks was born from the same Bitcoin Cash: Bitcoin Clashic.

Finally, in the area of forks, this December brings us some more: Super Bitcoin (block 498888), Bitcoin Platinum (block 500000), Bitcoin Uranium (unknown), Bitcoin Cash Plus (block 501407), Bitcoin Silver (TBD) and Bitcoin God (god) that was scheduled for December 25th.

Undoubtedly, one of the events that attracted the attention of the bitcoin community and the crypto-world in general was the creation of atomic swaps. These are, in essence, transactions directly from one blockchain to another; i. e. without exchange offices, or any other inter-mediate participating in it.

The first one that we could appreciate in relation to Bitcoin, was the fact that two of Zcash's developers, Jay Grabber and Ariel Gabizon, were able to demonstrate live a way of carrying out exchanges between Zcash and BTC. Then, in October there was an exchange between ethers (the cryptocurrency of Ethereum) and bitcoins, which was carried out by a team of Altcoin Exchange developers. The most recent was the first atomic exchange between Litecoin and Bitcoin, specifically between the testnets of both platforms, in which SegWit had already been activated.

These investment tools, a little more traditional, are increasingly using the benefits of the first cryptocurrency. The last few days of the year large companies have made it fashionable to offer investment methods based on the price of bitcoin and others such as investment funds.

Among the largest and most outstanding are the services of CBOE and CME Group. The futures contracts of the former opened on December 10 at $16,000, making this the first time that cryptocurrency is used as a regulated and institutionalized financial product. While the latter, he had confirmed the launch of the contracts for this December 18 and shortly after they were launched, Bitcoin's price rose to $20,000.

Although regulations and laws in relation to bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies coins often appear to be totally contrary, these legislations benefit the cryptocommunity.

An event of the most outstanding - perhaps expected - in this field was the legalization of this cryptocurrency as a method of payment in Japan, although not as a legal tender, and also gave more momentum and confidence in this asset as a payment option. It is not new that Japan is one of the most advanced nations in almost everything that has to do with cryptomoney and blockchain, so besides being a legal payment method, consumers were tax-free when making transactions with BTC.

And since we mentioned taxes, another fact that was highlighted was the elimination of taxes by using cryptocurrency in Australia, which announced in May that this measure would apply from July 2017.

But not everything is pink, on the contrary side of the regulations, Mexico's FinTech Law, although it seems to have the intention of promoting blockchain adoption, I leave out cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, since according to the authorities they lack sufficient maturity to be regulated.

Along with the price, the use of Bitcoin has also given us something to talk about during the year. Starting from the fact that the word "Bitcoin" is one of the most searched in google. From the sale of a palace in Ibiza with BTC, to the sale of a house in the United Kingdom have highlighted the name of the first cryptocurrency. Not to mention that big companies like PwC - a member of the Big Four - accepted their first payment in bitcoins for consulting services offered.

Hand in hand with the more than 620 stores that will begin to accept bitcoin as a payment method at the Gangnam Terminal Underground Shopping Center in Seoul, South Korea.

To close this tour, we will take a look at some of the promises of companies and other plans that could mark Bitcoin's future, beyond the influence of the series of forks that have occurred and will occur in the future.

We are already talking about the future contracts that have been implemented, but we still have a chance for Germany to make inroads into this sector, as one of the country's stock market traders put it. In addition, giants like Nasqad and Cantor Fitzgerald, who are planning future contracts with Bitcoin for the first half of 2018, come to light. This is joined by the US financial institution TD Ameritrade, which before formalizing this step wants to ensure that the market is ready for it.

Other investments have been announced by VanEck Vector and REX, which recently requested authorization from the SEC (United States) to offer bitcoin-traded fund services (ETF). At the same time, the famous online auction site, eBay, is considering offering bitcoin as a payment method on its platform.