 The G20 met this week in Argentina amid mounting tensions between the U.S. and China, who agreed on a temporary ceasefire regarding the trade war, leading gold to fall in the Dow to shoot up 288 points. But then, Huawei's CFO was arrested in Canada for violating sanctions and is now awaiting extradition to the U.S. China, of course, is demanding her release. Fearing a tit for tat response, the Dow plunged 784 points before recovering. With all this going on, G20 member states were able to discuss crypto, and rather than talk of further crackdowns, they were reasonably open to it. A summary of the meaning was published titled, Building Consensus for Fair and Sustainable Development. Crypto is mentioned once in reference to an open and resilient financial system that is crucial to support sustainable growth, while also promising to fight money laundering and terrorism. In short, crypto can be a force for change, but we want to tax and regulate it. In recent months, the crypto market, rather than being a safe haven from volatility in traditional markets, seems to be down when the stock market is down. Bitcoin held above 4K until Tuesday, but by the end of the week slumped under 3.3K. Weekly, the leading crypto was down about 20%. Monthly losses are just over 47%. Ripple was down 23% and 40% monthly. Ethereum did even worse, trading in double digits, down 31% weekly and 60% monthly. Although maps were mostly red this week, hodlers have a date when they can cross their fingers in February 2019. The SEC has set a new deadline for the Bitcoin ETF decision. Commissioner Hester Pierce, aka CryptoMom, who dissented over the SEC's decision to reject the Winklevoss Bitcoin ETF, told investors this week, don't hold your breath awaiting a BTC ETF approval. Also this week, Maduro fights fire with Petrofire. Binance launches its own blockchain. Eris X has a big funding round, and Bitcoin builds schools in Rwanda. I'm Molly Jane, and this is your Weekly HODLers Digest. Venezuela's national currency, the Bolivar, aka the Bolivar Severano, is doing so badly that it's causing the mainstream media to praise Bitcoin. In November, the Washington Post compared the leading crypto with the embattled national currency, saying, congratulations are in order. Bitcoin is a better store of value than the worst store of value there is. The cause of the national currency's dire performance is of course hyperinflation. Monthly rates are currently about 250%, and the IMF predicts inflation could reach 10 million percent by 2019. This is the biggest economic collapse that the hemisphere has ever seen. This is more or less twice as big as the Great Depression in the US. This is three times bigger than the largest recessions in Argentina or Chile. It's twice as big as the Spanish Civil War in terms of declines in incomes. So it's a collapse of unheard of proportions. In a foolish but typically misguided effort to circumnavigate the hyperinflation and crippling sanctions, the Maduro government opted to launch a national crypto currency, an effort that was widely deemed DOA. Each petro is meant to be backed by a barrel of oil. But Reuters reported earlier this year that the oil fields meant to supply this oil are in fact nowhere near ready for production. The petro itself is not available on any major exchanges and Trump banned US citizens from dealing with it. If the reporters were on the ground, they would check out the oil fields there. There's no development whatsoever. That field is at least five to ten years away from meaningful production, even if they were to start today. The town is in destitute conditions. It's not a thing. It's not credible that these people are backing the petros with the oil coming from this area. A lot of people during 2017 saw that they could make easy money doing an ICO. And I think that the Maduro administration caught on to that. And they just wanted to raise money quickly by selling air. If you really read the white paper very closely, you'll see that they don't promise you to give you the oil back, like if you have the petro as a crypto asset. They promise you to give you the Bolivar denominated price of the crypto asset based on an exchange rate that they themselves control. So they are basically giving you money in a currency that they can and have shown to hyperinflate also at an exchange rate that they control themselves. So they're basically giving you nothing. It's the most absurd investment in the world. Despite all of this, Maduro plods on, recently increasing the reference value of the petro from over 3,000 Bolivars to 9,000 in a desperate response to tackle the economic turmoil currently engulfing his administration. Hot off the heels of this announcement was one that, on the face of it, would turn even Bernie Sanders conservative. Maduro raised the minimum wage of whopping 150%. Venezuelan economist Leonardo Boondiak believes that the wage increase will only lead to further hyperinflation and was highly critical of the national crypto. He said, to anchor the Bolivar to petro is equal to anchoring it to nothing. One way of beating hyperinflation is dealing in a currency that's designed to be anti-inflationary. And so, some ordinary Venezuelans are actually mining crypto and even using crypto to get money out of the country. Some are even using it to avoid violence from corrupt government forces. Without physical cash, it's much more difficult to demand bribes or shake someone down. We spoke to one such Venezuelan about the clandestine crypto community where he is. Here, electricity is very cheap. Even if Bitcoin was worth $100, it would still be profitable to mine in Venezuela. Producing an entire Bitcoin could end up costing around $10. The electricity costs are so low since they are subsidized by the government. The same happens with gasoline. As the price of Bitcoin dropped below $5,000, a lot of miners in other countries shut off. The difficulty went down as well. And so now, mining became even easier for us. The president said that it's already possible to use Petro to pay for electricity, water, and so on. However, I think Petro is still in its beta phase. Very few people, almost no one, owns Petro. Personally, I don't know anyone who owns Petro, as it cannot be used for everyday transactions. Peer-to-peer crypto exchange Paxful is using Bitcoin donations to build schools in the African country of Rwanda. Since the hashtag built with Bitcoin campaign was launched last year, Paxful raised the relatively modest sum of 15 Bitcoin and yet still managed to open two primary schools. We encourage the cryptocurrency sector to contribute more to humanitarian projects. The hashtag built with Bitcoin initiative is an example of Bitcoin being used as more than a speculative tool, but as a testament to the usefulness of cryptocurrency, said Ray Yusef, the CEO and co-founder of Paxful. Paxful plans to build 100 more schools around the country by leveraging the power of blockchain. Besides traditional subjects, Rwandese students will be learning about blockchain technology and how to transact in Bitcoin and exchange it with the local currency. Potentially useful knowledge in a country with a burgeoning blockchain community. The local government has been showing particular interest in this space. We asked Paxful CEO Ray Yusef to give us more insight into the project. Paxful went all in and we built the school. We went there and the school was built. We actually had children there and we said, hey, this is amazing. Let's take it a step further, right? We actually started upgrading the school, providing lunches for the kids, giving them uniforms, paying their teacher's salary. We even got them health insurance for a year. And then we thought about ways we could expand the project further. Built, built, that's the key. We want to build things. We want to build structures and we want to fund them and we want to have education being the focal point of this. So if you could name two things that you wish you learned in school that you did not learn, what would they be? For me, it was always finance, learning how to use my money, and nutrition, right? So for me, the big payoff is now, you know, we can actually introduce that kind of curriculum to these kids, teach them about money, teach them where the money comes from, teach them how to best use their money, how to invest it, how to save it. The peer-to-peer finance is going to help the emerging world. Why? Because we're actually, the emerging world is doing it themselves, right? They are, we're giving them crypto and we're teaching them how to take that crypto, sell it in their local economy. So we donated $100,000 to the second school, right? And we gave them Bitcoin, right? And they took the Bitcoin and then we showed them how to sell it on taxable for a wanded francs, right? And they got, I think, an additional 5%, right? Off of that, so we sent them $100,000 but they actually got a hundred and five, right? And with that, we could pay for health insurance for the kids and, you know, get them really nice cute little uniforms, toys, et cetera. But the point was, it's peer-to-peer finance. We educated them on how to use crypto. Crypto by itself is not enough. You have taught these people there that, hey, cryptocurrency is a real thing. You can turn this into money, right? And then, you know, even so, some of them have to start their own business doing it as well, right? In very simple import-export way where they could play on the arbitrage of cryptocurrency, their local economy. Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world by trading volume, intends to launch its own native blockchain, Binance Chain. Like Ethereum, Binance Chain will facilitate ICOs and allow for the creation of new cryptocurrencies. As the company revealed in a tweet, on the platform, millions of tokens can easily issue projects. Speaking of Forbes Asia Forum in Singapore, finance CEO CZ said the platform will be based on an old idea of crypto and it will serve to increase cryptocurrency adoption globally. Later this week, CZ released a demo video preview of the upcoming decentralized exchange, DEX, to be built on Binance Chain. We reached out to CZ and asked him more details on his upcoming project. The Binance Dex is really a decentralized exchange where it allows you to trade one token to another token on the Binance Chain. So very similar to Ethereum, URC 20 tokens. But the Binance Chain also allows you to send and receive the Binance Coin, which is a native coin, plus other tokens. So the blockchain can allow you to send and receive directly if I want to send it to you. The Binance Dex also lives on the Binance Chain but allows you to trade in a decentralized manner. Cryptocurrency is supposed to be cheaper to transfer and is supposed to be instantaneous. But given, I think initially it did that, but then the network, given the popularity of crypto, now the two main popular networks are very saturated. So we're kind of losing that. Now transferring on Bitcoin network sometimes takes five to $10 or more. So we want to go back to a fast and fast and cheap transactions. So that's where, I guess when I was referring to the original inspiration for crypto, that's what I was referring to. I think the current decentralized exchanges are either slow or have relatively difficult to use UI. So I think the main thing for us is that we're combining a very easy to use UI on top of a very fast, high capacity chain. So we believe that will improve the latency and the user experience on the decentralized exchanges. And when that improves, we're hoping to see the liquidity increase on the Dex and hopefully make a contribution to the market. So we are working with many partners on the business side to have partnerships to use Binance Coin as the coin in the ecosystem for payments, including many large travel booking sites or platforms. We wanna see a situation where the merchant can accept whichever currency they choose and the retailer can pay in whatever other currency they wish they have. And then we do the conversion in between. So it has to be instantaneous. Newly established crypto exchange, ErisX, secured $27.5 million in funding from big investors, including Nasdaq Ventures and Fidelity Investments. According to ErisX CEO, Thomas Chippus, the funds will be used to hire more staff, build out infrastructure and secure the appropriate steps are taken to develop a regulated market for digital assets. Starting from next year, ErisX intends to allow users to trade Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum on spot markets. Plus, we'll run Bitcoin futures contracts with increasing financial support from leading-edge firms. ErisX stands to provide the most robust, secure and regulated digital asset offering available to both institutional and individual participants, said Chippus. We reached out to James Putra, director of digital asset project strategy at Trade Station, a brokerage from that participated in the funding round to talk about the reasons behind such a major deal. The players that have interested concern in this ecosystem are starting to congregate on platforms like ErisX and it starts to create an environment and ecosystem that we as a current industry are much more familiar with operating with and we can bring that level of, let's say, certainty or lower risk to the mass market. We really like ErisX because it starts to signal a move towards market structure maturity. And if you look at what they're doing, they've really taken a step to pull together a really unique set of partners. They're bringing together partners that are brokerage firms, partners that are custodians, partners that are liquidity providers, partners that also provide cash management capacity, and they really start to round out a market structure that looks and feels more mature and makes it more accessible for institutions like Trade Station or other brokers to access that market because they operate in a familiar way for us. From our vantage point, we really see a lot of interest and activity in advancing the overall market is making it accessible more for the mass market, which is really interesting. And like I said, just getting the work done and trying to fulfill the promises and not have to deal with all of the hype that we saw as the huge prices were up there. Generally speaking, what happens in these crypto winters and what has us excited as well as many of our colleagues is that it's the time when the hype has died down and it allows us to actually focus on getting things done. Pump and dump schemes generate $7 million a month in trading volume. It is an old school crime normally found in commodities trading, now rampant in the crypto market. A de facto criminal will choose a random crypto, accumulate it and announce a pump and dump on a private telegram group. Unsuspecting victims will then see the rapidly inflating price and buy it. The organizer of the pump will then unload all of their crypto onto them and in a matter of minutes be away with their funds. Now, two researchers in Imperial College, London developed an algorithm to spot when these schemes might occur. The ramifications of this are huge for a much needed crypto investment protection. Over 200 of these schemes were studied between July 21st and November 18th. They focused on one particular pump on November 14th at 1930 GMT, announced to several telegram groups, the largest of which was McAfee Pump Signals with 12,000 members. Researchers Zoo and Live Shits found that anybody who got it on the action, even 18 seconds after the pump began, would almost certainly lose their investment and would be sitting on a large holding of worthless coins, their only hope to wait for the next pump and dump. The machine learning algorithm developed by the pair of researchers can identify unexpected trades and obscure coins and recently found six schemes when it was implemented on live data. So it's possible to develop an investment strategy based on our machine learning model. We have very conservative assumptions. We are not even assuming that you are able to, you know, get like 200, 200% gain in one pump, even though that's what advertised by the group members. And that's actually what we observed as well. But, you know, it always depends on the timing. So we have very conservative assumptions, such as you only get half of the gain. And even with that assumption, it's likely, it's proved to be robust that you can get a gain of 80% within three weeks. So that's the return that we demonstrate. Investors still need to be very careful because, again, those coins are arbitrarily selected by the group organizers. They are hand-picked by the group organizers. So if you are, you know, too greedy and if you invest too much money in those coins, in the illiquid coins, they're by nature very illiquid, right? If you invest too much money in those coins, you're likely to move the market even before the actual pump. And if the pump organizers observe unusual market movements, it's likely that they will switch the coin last minute. That's something that we also observed in the telegram chat history. If they observe unusual movements prior to the pump, they would just cancel the pump. Raising the awareness, obviously, that's one thing that we wish to convey through the paper. Hopefully, you know, other researchers will come and work on some of these subjects and hopefully regulators will start paying more attention here as well. Even amid the falling crypto prices, the Bitcoin subreddit reached one million subscribers this week. And in this current bear market, Binance CEO CZ decided to get a very permanent reminder of crypto. He got a tattoo of the Binance logo on his arm. What crypto logo would you get tattooed on your arm? Comment below. And as always, like, subscribe, and hodl. Coin Telegraph, like, subscribe, and hodl.