Every time a bank or something else is talking about the blockchain, you can be sure they are working on bitcoin and use the blockchain as a coverop. If they would really be interested in blockchains they would have said so 7 years ago. There is absolutely nothing new about blockchains 7 years later. the blockchain has not changed in any way, and anything financial should have know about it and looked into it about 6 years ago.
What is new is that bitcoin has grown up. If they are interested NOW, you can be sure that they are interested in bitcoin itself, as a currency. They may experiment with there own blockchains and there own alt-coins, saying it will improve the services for there customers (like they ever cared about that), but in the end they will go to the coin where money is to be made.

last 1000 blocks until halving... (which also marks 75% of all bitcoins mined!)

I doubt the pound's going to take much more beating. Dollars and Euros are being printed at an alarming rate, and both can't really stop doing that, only try to not print faster than anybody else. The UK books are more in balance than the EU books, therefore the UK has the option to slow it's money press a little. I don't think the pound will have a large effect on BTC.

But there are other interesting things: UK citizens may face higher transaction cost to/from Europe, and especially small consumers will get more trouble with import taxes, i.e: a maximum amount they can spend tax-free each year.
(European consumers can now spend a relatively small amount in the US. Pass that limit, and substantial taxes (~20%) are added.)
UK citizens may also spend more in other countries in the world, now they are similarly priced to products for Europe (especially from China)
More worldwide payments that need to be cheap and fast for small payments, is good for bitcoin.
I think these 3 have more effect on BTC than the rate of the pound.

Large UK and EU companies will make sure they are well represented in the negotiations for new trade agreements, so they will be much less affected. The UK was in favour of a trade agreement with China, but the EU has blocked that until now. I don't know how good this would be for the UK, it would definitely be interesting, but maybe not affect BTC much.

The remaining countries in the EU are facing a hard choice: a few countries will need to make up the membership fee of the UK, or the EU would need to cut spending. The first will mean speeding up the money press, the second has never happened before, a may cause trouble for some of the EU countries that are depending on EU cash to survive.

Bought one at $810, in Jan 2014, and still HODL'ing it.

It's actually very simple, see this info-graph:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Supranational_European_Bodies_with_NATO_members-en.svg/2000px-Supranational_European_Bodies_with_NATO_members-en.svg.png

And no, none of the European politician know that whole graph.

What is a currency that you can only spend on a selection of government approved products and services really worth?
The switch to Euro's was well planed to include all "non registered" businesses. They didn't want half the economy of some countries to keep using the German-Mark, or worse, switching to Dollars.

Try that with dollars :-)
a) getting the transfer processed 500 times in one afternoonen, and b) have anything left to transfer after 499x transaction costs.

The peak in total output disappears if you exclude returned change. Someone is buying ice creams directly with a multi-million wallet:
https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume

I did'n follow the news. I thought there was a problem with bitcoin, not some social thing.
Looking into this, the first thing I see is a link to one of the first e-mails by the real Satoshi Nakamoto, which contains:

Which is contradicting the recent letter:

Stop wasting time on this hoax.

Yes. That is what technical people do. As a first public response in years, they would write a detailed and (mathematically) well supported response about why there orignal design is still good, or why and how it should be improved, not a short note without any technical support of there opinion.
Study the original paper and learn how cleverly all technical aspects fit together, and ask yourself if someone who designed that would write such a vague letter without properly substantiating and supporting his opinions.

I had not seen that letter until now, but it looks like a lot of vague bla-bla without even a hint of a technical argument.
I'll eat my hat if that was written by any of the very skilled mathematician/cryptographer(s) that designed bitcoin.

Only 33 weeks to go!

Well, they certainly aren't going to trade there Yuan for Dollars after seeing that graph.

I have never been in this situation, but I would write a program that tests various passwords 24/7.
(I think any closed-source tool you download from the internet will just send the key to whoever write the tool when found :-)
Breaking the wallet private key is impossible, but a not too long password may be possible if you remember some parts of it, or at least how/if capitals and numbers where used.

Yes. (in my European country) Used to be average of jan 1st and dec 31, but now it's just Jan 1st.
The tax rules are not clear on time of day, only the date, so I just make a couple of print-screens during that day, and pick the most favourable one as "proof"    I'm still waiting for the tax office to publish "official" exchange rates for jan 1st. That would be cool.
It's only a few euro's in taxes, so I'm playing by the books. 1.2%/year is nothing when talking about bitcoin.

Can we please NOT peak on jan 1st?
I pay 1.2% property tax over whatever bitcoin is worth on that day.

After buying all the way down from $810 to $216 (and hodling), this gentleman just reached break-even.

Same here, bought from $800 all the way down to $200. Now nearly at break-even again. I'm fine with a slow rise, but this is ok too.

I changed it to 7 days, and Ghana is still the 2nd result, all from a single city. Someone in Akkra has a stuck F5 key, or is it a popular VPN end-point ?

I read the ChartBuddy posts like this: When there are two ChartBuddy posts in a row, it's a slow news day :-)
(When I registered, 2015 was far away. maybe I should change my nick.)