Well hey there, freaks! Happy 2019. Glad to see you are all still here to take in this drivel. As we begin to clear our minds of the carb-induced fog induced by the holiday season and creep another year further into the Information Age, it's time to roll up our sleeves and get back to work making the masses aware of the grand potential presented by sound digital money. In my mind, there's no better place to start than officially announcing the death of another round of mining death spiral FUD. Our boy Yassine ended 2018 by pointing out that the 3-consecutive downward difficulty adjustment streak had officially ended after a 10% upward adjustment on New Year's Eve.

Let this be a lesson to any of you out there who may have fallen for the FUD; Bitcoin works as designed. A self-correcting distributed system that works to ensure its security by adjusting to demand for bitcoins. Even though this particular FUD has been debunked many times, I'm sure it will be back again in the future, so be sure to bookmark this issue to remind the haters that the death spiral narrative died on NYE 2018.

Make sure you peep the rest of the thread because Yassine dives into some juicy historical mining stats.

Comprehensive outlook for 2019

If you're looking to get a comprehensive breakdown of the whole "crypto" landscape beyond Bitcoin, I highly recommend you check out this piece by Arjun Balaji. Arjun does an incredible job of laying everything out, how the perception of certain aspects of the "industry" has evolved up to this point in time and how they may evolve throughout 2019. We are lucky to have young bright minds like Arjun thinking so deeply on this subject to help newcomers quickly bootstrap an understanding of what's going on. If anything, it's a great starting point for anyone new to "the space" who's looking to get a lay of the land from which they explore individual topics in more detail at their own leisure.

Final thought...

2019 doesn't roll off the tongue too well.