A Florida man uses 10,000 bitcoin to buy a pizza, officially becoming the first person to use bitcoin for a real world transaction.

Meanwhile, at the heart of the cryptocurrency revolution sits the ‘blockchain’. Pure digital genius: at once public but also private while ensuring bitcoin remains decentralized (unlike your everyday fiat money). Massive investment poured into the core technology of bitcoin during 2014.

Another by-product of the Silk Road shut-down was the confiscation by the U.S. Federal Marshalls and subsequent auction of the bitcoins it seized. Two auctions of ~80k bitcoin have already taken place (In June Tim Draper was the highest bidder, paid an undisclosed amount for 30,00 bitcoins and in December, the number of registered bidders decreased by 75% while the number of bids fell by 57%) with ~94k still available to the highest bidder.

Nonce starting at zero is not a vulnerability. Shares are stochastically distributed throughout the 2^32 nonce range and it makes no difference where you start. The nonce is simply 32 bits out of the whole 320 bit coinbase that you are hashing and there is no way to design a target solution to be distributed anywhere within the nonce range of those 32 bits. If you start at a higher nonce value you simply will have less possible chances at finding a solution before you’ll need to get/create a new coinbase to hash.

On 1, it’s true that in different forks, different miners will have been rewarded. However, over time only one of the forks will become the accepted consensus for confirmed transactions. And so only the miners from one fork will be able to redeem their transactions.