Has the bitcoin network gotten stronger over the past year? I would say yes there is high hashpower than last year, theres been a lot of bug fixes,
Are more people using bitcoin than last year?
There have been a number of big moves for bitcoin this year, Lightning network and the world overall is more aware of bitcoin. Are there any more big bitcoin news events that happened this year.
Negative news is the price but its not all about the price sometimes.
The first sidechains have come online -- RSK and Liquid.
Well, there was a pretty serious bug in the last several releases of the reference implementation (run by most of the network) that was fixed a couple months ago. It could have been used to inflate the Bitcoin supply:
The bug originally rocked the bitcoin world when it was reported the vulnerability could be used to shut down a chunk of the network.
While this sounded bad enough for many, it turns out developers for Bitcoin Core kept a second, bigger part of the bug a secret. As disclosed through an official Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) report, an attacker could have actually used it to create new bitcoin – above the 21 million hard-cap of coin creation – thereby inflating the supply and devaluing current bitcoins.