 Is this the end times? It sure seems that way. With the Bitcoin cash-holy war, profits drying up for miners and an almighty apocalyptic market crash, it is hard to see sometimes the light through the darkness. But please, hodlers, do not lose faith. Wise sages foresaw this sell-off and told us not to panic. Like technical expert Willie Wu of Wuble, who said the bear market would continue until quarter to 2019, and Mike Novogratz, who warned Bitcoin would not break 10k this year. Also this week, me too in crypto, crypto and religion, the IMF loves CBDCs and the battle for Bitcoin cash. Ladies and gentlemen, here's your weekly hodlers digest. For the first time since October of last year, Bitcoin's market cap fell below $100 billion, breaking the recent trend of low volatility. In just 12 hours, the total market cap fell from around $210 billion to $180 billion. Almost all major cryptos, including Ethereum, XRP and Bitcoin cash, were similarly affected, posting double digit losses. Following the heavy depreciation of Ethereum, XRP became the number two crypto. Though still too early to identify the cause of the market crash, many immediately linked it to the uncertainty surrounding Bitcoin cash's hard fork, which was scheduled for November 15. From its inception, crypto and blockchain were believed to be the means to bank the unbanked and change the world for the better. One overlooked, perhaps invisible group of the so-called unbanked are women, particularly those in abusive relationships or survivors of sexual assault. In developing economies and even in some developed ones, it is often the men who control the finances, depriving the women of financial agency. Well, an unexpected use case for crypto and blockchain appears to be helping women enjoy financial independence. In China, a previously suppressed story of historical sexual abuse was uploaded onto the blockchain as a way of circumventing the Chinese government censorship. In Afghanistan, a woman was able to support herself using Bitcoin during a difficult divorce. Sex workers, the majority of whom are women, can find themselves in precarious financial situations because banks can often refuse them everything from checking accounts to mortgages, a decision not based on income, but on dubious moral grounds. More recently, a sexual assault survivor was able to use innovative crowdfunding to support herself while recovering from an attack. When most people think crowdfunding, they think Kickstarter, which is a great way for raising funds for health care, but not so good if you need anonymity. Well, now there is a token-based system on the Ethereum network that allows survivors to post requests for help, which doesn't require a government ID or a bank account to raise the money. Only the organization who runs the scheme needs to know the survivor's identity. We spoke to Rachel Cook, CEO of Seeds, about the project and more broadly how it relates to the overall Me Too movement. Women in those situations, people in those situations who are being exploited often feel that they have to stay because they need the money, because they have to pay for, they have kids or whatever, they have bills that they have to take care of. So the extension of that that I saw was, okay, we need to start creating opportunities to make it very easy and anonymous if necessary for people to get funds when they're in those circumstances. And the current system, the non-crypto system, makes it often very difficult to do that. Even if you're going to a non-profit or whatever, they're just all of these hurdles. We wanted to make it super simple and super easy to access help. Yeah, and blockchain can obviously facilitate that in ways that other stuff can't. One of the requests for help we granted was for a guy in South Sudan who wanted $500 to open up a small business. And that guy's network, we can assume, isn't going, he's not going to be able to source very much money if he had like a GoFundMe or something. So it's sort of like a distributed GoFundMe that allows you to reach people that wouldn't otherwise see your request. I discovered crypto in 2013, so it wasn't like I was crazy earlier anything, but I mean the Bitcoin that I bought in 2013 I had to sell later to pay employees when investors were ignoring me. In large part I think because of gender discrimination within the VC world. So I'm also solving a problem for myself, which is that it's been way harder for me to get the funds I needed to do the things I wanted to do than for many of my mail, like peers. People were really afraid of like being attacked if they spoke up. I've been so disheartened so many times that I just didn't have any hope. So it was really encouraging, astonishing really to see like that me too happened. So there are real shifts happening that I couldn't believe that I didn't believe that I would necessarily see, at least not for a longer period of time. Ethereum based stablecoin X8, issued by Swiss crypto firm X8 AG, was recently declared compliant with Shariah Law. The Shariah Review Bureau, a Katari consultancy and audit firm specializing in Shariah advisory services, issued the certificate of compliance. Crypto trading has often associated with sheer monetary speculation, which is forbidden by Islamic law. However, X8 crypto asset, which is backed by eight fiat currencies in gold, proved it can be trusted by Islamic investors. X8 AG is now planning to launch a crypto exchange that will include a Shariah compliant trading platform. We talked to Mansour Ahmed, representative of the Shariah Review Bureau to clarify the issue. The first thing is to understand the platform, its protocol and the native currency and how it is issued. Once the structure has been understood, then the next level is to review the TNCs, the terms and conditions based on which the coins or the tokens are going to be exchanged, transferred or sold. Without those TNCs, there is no Shariah compliance. If a certain coin is linked to an activity, an underlying activity, which is involved in interest based lending or involved in the production and manufacturing of ammunition or pornography, then those coins would not be considered as Shariah compliant. Global religions such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism have maintained a cautious and often skeptical position on crypto currencies, mainly because of their highly speculative nature and shady reputation. However, these very same religious organizations have shady reputations of their own. The Catholic Church, for example, was guilty of institutionalized anti-Semitism in medieval Europe and beyond for exploiting anti-Yursary laws by limiting Jews to money lending and effectively creating a mercantile class. The tax-free status of religious organizations gives the impression that they are not financially savvy entities, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Like any kind of organization, religious ones have revenue streams and complex investment portfolios. But what are their attitudes towards crypto in general? In Jewish law, Bitcoin currently doesn't have the status of currency, but it does have monetary value. We spoke to Rabbi Sharpen to explore Judaism's attitude towards crypto. If cryptocurrency is the common currency used in our official or even an unofficial way, but it common, it used in a country or a municipality or whatever it is, so then it becomes a currency. But until that happens, it would not be considered a currency, it would be a commodity. Just like any other foreign currency somewhere else is a commodity. I think that is a very important lesson that the whole crypto currency teaches, which is not really just about cryptocurrencies, all currencies, but cryptocurrency is really where it drives home that point that we really have to be looking for things that have intrinsic value to them, not just things that are made up value. Doing something positive in the world, doing things positive with people around you and your neighborhood, your community, and you yourself will recognize that it has value, you did something positive, and you impacted somebody's life for perhaps generations to come. And that has intrinsic value. While the the money, you know, today it's here, tomorrow it's gone, tomorrow it might be back. But it doesn't have any any lasting value. Last year, the Buddhist organization Lotto Network launched a cryptocurrency based on the principles of the Buddhist economy. The Catholic herald came out last year actually defending crypto, arguing that it shouldn't be dismissed simply because it's a new technology. The Vatican actually flirted with the idea of wanting a crypto of their own, but it never materialized. More recently, however, the Pope actually condemned Bitcoin for its use in the modern slave trade. We spoke to God's bankers author Gerald Posner about the fascinating financial history of the Vatican. The Vatican uses its its financial apparatus, mainly the Vatican Bank, as a cross between sort of a central bank like the Federal Reserve and a private bank like a JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs. And they invest in all types of properties, the stocks, currencies, bonds in order to get a return and make money for the church. And it's remarkable to think that the Catholic Church 150 years ago was absolutely against the idea of capitalism. They grudgingly got into capitalism because they had no other choice in the 20th century. And then they embraced it wholeheartedly from 1940 and 1950 and on. It has no shareholders. It has only one director, the director in its in its charter is the Pope. It operates as a central bank because all the money that comes through the Vatican goes through that, but it had no disclosure laws, no transparency rules at all that applied to it. So what it was able to do is it was essentially an offshore bank in the heart of a foreign capital room. So who were the Italian who had a lot of money and you wanted to hide it before cryptocurrencies existed or and you weren't able to have an anonymous currency. You didn't know what to do with that money. If you took a suitcase of cash, and you walked across one street corner and one street you're in Italy, technically, that's the jurisdiction across the street. There's no wall barrier customs. You're in the Vatican City. You give that cash to a person who has an account in the Vatican Bank and they deposit it and it disappears. What I mean by that is Italian authorities can no longer follow it. Nobody in tax authorities can follow it. Nobody in the United States can follow it. And with these transfers with that currency to another entity that it deals with, it's out of the international system. So they have a foot in the banking system, but without having to buy by the rules. Now that's changed in the last years because the Europeans are now enforcing rules of transparency on them. But before that, it was just a wild offshore bank. I remember someone in 2017, the Vatican was going to adopt its own Vatican Bitcoin or the equivalent of a crypto. There was talk that maybe recipients of it or people got the point and use the point would pay a small commission. That commission would go to poor people would be recycled into good deeds for the Vatican. They haven't done that yet. Blockchain protocol EOS is being targeted by a new wave of criticism, pointing at its alleged lack of decentralization. Last week, a Reddit user posted a screenshot showing how an EOS arbitrator reversed a previously unconfirmed transaction in order to solve a dispute between two users. The arbitrator Ben Gates referred to the EOS Constitution to legitimize his intervention. He wrote, Under the powers afforded to meet as arbitrator under article six of the rules of dispute resolution, I Ben Gates rules that the EOS account in dispute should be returned to the claimant with immediate effect and that the freeze over the assets within the set account is removed. The kind of authority exerted by this arbitrator was seen by many as a form of power abuse, indicating the essentially centralized nature of the EOS protocol. According to critics, this way of solving disputes is reminiscent of traditional customer support services provided by centralized organizations. Others wondered what the point was of investing $4 billion to reinvent something, which essentially does not differ from traditional banking and legal systems. Criticism towards EOS was reinforced by a research paper published by blockchain testing company white blocked, indicating that EOS does not meet the criteria to be considered a real blockchain, asked Zach Cole, chief technology officer at white block to summarize the research team main takeaways. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of other nodes or whatever that are all keeping track of this ledger or anything like that doesn't really matter because as soon as the transaction reaches the block producer, that block producer has total control over saying this is a good transaction or this is a bad transaction. That's it. And if that block producer arbitrarily decides that this transaction is bad, it's gone. That there's really no unique value in using EOS. Why, why use that? Because first of all, the throughput is slower than it would be otherwise. And now they have like a committee of people that arbitrate, right? I mean, that sounds just like a bank. Why not just use a bank? Why not just build traditional software? What is the benefit? I mean, it's obviously not censorship resistant because a block producer can choose to censor my visit, censor my transactions and my communications. So it's not decentralized. It has no security. And it actually presents a lot of vulnerabilities. On the other hand, Robert Kahnstorf, CEO of EOS Detroit and an EOS enthusiast stood up in defense of the technology. EOS is the first government blockchain that has attempted to do governance on this level. It isn't a recreation of the existing legal and judicial system at all, because it is not enforced through violence, which nation states use. Anyone who doesn't want to participate in the EOS experiment are welcome to get rid of their EOS. When an arbitration order comes down, the transaction history is never actually reversed. History isn't altered. So we still have censorship resistant properties. That's really important because you can unwind, you know, the transaction history and see how you can still see what the state of the blockchain was in the past without any alteration. And I that's a really key point that is missed in a lot of these articles. The latest controversy shaking the world of crypto reached its peak this week. Bitcoin Cash, the fourth top cryptocurrency for market cap, born out of a hard fork of the original Bitcoin, found itself at crossroads. With a new hard fork taking place on November 15, the Bitcoin Cash community was deeply divided on which path should be followed. On one side, Roger Ver, Bitcoin Jesus, author of the leading implementation Bitcoin ABC. On the other, Craig Wright, a man claiming to be Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, although without showing much evidence of it, has been pushing for an alternative implementation called Bitcoin SV or Satoshi's vision. The essence of the controversy seems to lie in technical details. While Bitcoin ABC is supposed to tweak the original protocol, Wright supporters want to maintain the fork closer to the original. But the technical debate seems to hide a power struggle over who will control the future of Bitcoin Cash. As the controversy heated up, Wright even hinted at the possibility that miners supporting his version will use their hash power to jeopardize the competing technology. His radical statements sparked wide criticism in the crypto community, with Vitalik Buterin calling Wright a lunatic in a tyrant. As a result of the controversy, major exchanges like Binance and Coinbase decided to freeze most of the transactions involving Bitcoin Cash on the day of the hard fork. Many claimed that Bitcoin Cash's hash war is the main cause of the market crash, bringing Bitcoin and other crypto's value to record lows on Wednesday morning. Bitcoin Cash enthusiasts fear that the struggle will result in the creation of two weaker versions of the original protocol, once viewed by some to be the closest to Satoshi's original vision. Earlier this year, the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, took a combative stance towards crypto. She wanted to fight fire with fire, meaning that to essentially defeat Bitcoin, you could use its underlying technology blockchain against itself. It is then no surprise to hear that her approach and by extension the IMF hasn't exactly softened. She remains not exactly convinced on the virtues of crypto and instead appears to be fighting them on a new front. By shilling centralized digital currencies, Lagarde wants the international community to consider endorsing central bank issued currencies. Speaking at a FinTech conference in Singapore, the IMF head laid out her vision for government back tokens and digital assets. She said, I believe we should consider the possibility to issue digital currency. There may be a role for the state to supply money to the digital economy. Her speech follows the publication of an IMF report hot off the press on the benefits and drawbacks of CBDCs. Last week, the Swedish central bank announced the proposed 2019 launch of the E-Krona and Lagarde pointed out other jurisdictions were considering their own versions as well. For her, the benefits include satisfying public policy goals, financial inclusion, security and consumer protection and privacy and payments. The latter is perhaps the hardest to believe because the very reason that consumers are guaranteed privacy is that payments are not private. Governments and central banks can see everything. It is unlikely that IMF will ever come out in favor of crypto. If they do, Hodlers, be worried. Very worried. Bitcoin believers want control over the levers of monetary policy, not to seek the approval of the hegemonic institutions that control it. After such a stressful few days in the crypto market, now even going to your favorite US fast casual salad bar won't let you escape the crypto hype. Sweetgreen, every American's favorite for a quick and overpriced healthy lunch, announced a new $200 million funding round with the goal of introducing blockchain for bringing transparency to their food chain. Which would you rather have? The blockchain Brussels Sprouts Bowl or the crypto Cobb Salad? Let us know in the comments. And as always, like, subscribe and hodl.