 Another strange week in the world of crypto. We had predictions of market explosion and implosion. A giant Bitcoin rat on Wall Street. Vitalik Buteri joking about a financial crash and claiming he wasn't a billionaire. In addition to this, Google released a commercial for its call service which essentially doubled as a distract. Who is it? It's the electric company. They said your bill is super high. Right. Well, cryptocurrency mining takes a lot of energy. Cryptocurrency? That money's not real. Yeah, well, I got news for you. Money isn't real. You gonna live that lie? A plastic surgeon led group bought South Korean exchange BitHump. Start-up investor and surgeon Kim Byung-gun paid $350 million for 50% plus one share of BTC holding company, the largest investor in BitHump's operator. There was also a market fall. Following a sell-off on Thursday, over $6 billion was wiped off the market. Also this week, three blockchain startups are featured in CNBC's top 100 startup list. Roger Ver flirts with starting an exchange. Wales are not responsible for volatility. You are. And Dr. Doom fights someone from the Fantastic Four. Ladies and gentlemen, I am Mike and this is your weekly Hodler's Digest. The Upstart 100 CNBC's list of 100 promising young startups features not one, but three blockchain-based startups. Veeam, a global payments platform, Paystand, a company that deals with business-to-business payments, and of course, Shapeshift. The competition is tough. The startups were selected from over 500 nominees and evaluated based on equally-weighted quantitative metrics. The list features every kind of company, from blockchain to AI, and even electric toothbrushes. Oh, look up there. It's Bitcoin Jesus on a hill and he's got a big announcement. Oh, Bitcoin.com wants to start its own exchange. According to CEO Roger Ver, they plan to either buy an existing exchange or develop an exchange in-house. If we build it ourselves, we can do it really, really cheap, and we get exactly what we want. But we don't have the security of a battle-tested exchange that's been around for a while. Unsurprisingly, in an effort to boost adoption, Ver wants to make Bitcoin Cash the base currency as it faces its own hard fork. Ver plans to post the exchange on Bitcoin.com. So we'll have thousands or tens of thousands of new users every single day. But what's a quality exchange? Well, Twitter had some good suggestions. Two dramatic headlines caught our eye this week. One from crypto heaven and one from crypto hell. Firstly, Ron Neuner proclaiming that Bitcoin is about to explode. The second, new research with an alarmist warning. The crypto market is on the verge of imploding. If hodlers go to see First Man this weekend, they might not see Ryan Gosling play New Armstrong going to the moon, but rather Ryan Gosling playing Bitcoin going to the moon. Hodlers like Ron Neuner, for example, and his parents. His faith in a rally anticipates a successful Bitcoin ETF and is based on his analysis that the price surge last year was on the back of the expectation and launch of a cash settlement Bitcoin futures contract. Following the CME launch in December of last year, Bitcoin soon hit its historic high of 20k. Neuner sees parallels between Bitcoin futures and a Bitcoin ETF, but the latter is a way bigger deal. We spoke to Ron Neuner and why he's so positive about Bitcoin. The markets come down a hell of a lot. I'm not sure if it's the bottom. I think it may be near the bottom specifically for Bitcoin, though I don't think that most alts have bottomed out yet. You take that and you overlay it with all the institutional investment, unraps and offerings that have been built. Things like custodian solutions, things like institutional grade exchanges. You take all of that and you say, that plus the potential of an ETF, if you're a betting man, you have to say that in the long term it's safe. I'm not saying that Bitcoin is not going to go down. It could go down to 50, 800 and maybe even 5500, but I don't really care because I'm not buying it on a short-term horizon. The flip side of it is that if we look at the movement in Bitcoin last year and specifically I look at the period from November 11th when Bitcoin was trading at around about $6,500 to December 2017 where Bitcoin was trading at about $20,000 or just under, what we can see is that if the price does start running, if all these things do fall in place, then the price run is going to be very quickly. So the way I do the calculation is I say on the downside, my downside is pretty limited. Maybe Bitcoin goes to 55, maybe it goes to 45. On the upside, I've got all the upside in the world and I am a believer in blockchain and I am a believer in Bitcoin and it made sense to start investing some conservative money into Bitcoin. And now to crypto hell. Run for safety, Hoaglers. The market is about to implode. Well, that's if you believe Juniper Research who have just published a report, The Future of Cryptocurrency. Bitcoin and altcoin trends and challenges 2018 to 2023. The ominous warnings show numerous metrics that indicate market implosion. For example, falling transactions volume from late last year to now and the failure to rally following the impending trade war between China and the US and Brexit. We spoke to Dr. Windsor Holden who conducted the study for Juniper Research. To begin with, you've got the macro indicators and it's lost about two thirds of its value. At the same time, you've seen significant reductions in overall Bitcoin transactions. At Bitcoin's peak activity, it was straining the network to the point where you were close to 500,000 transactions a day at one point and you were seeing an average of well over 360,000. You're now seeing transaction volumes around about 230,000 a day. A large number of the casual users of the cryptocurrency have moved out of the space. There isn't any intrinsic value in Bitcoin and this is the crux of the matter. It has no value outside that small ecosystem and at some point, that bubble which has been created is going to implode. Now, it might take a year, it might take two years, it might take slightly longer, but do I see it going back to the peaks that it's experienced before? The opportunities are there for blockchain technology across a whole host of verticals, but when it comes to replacing fiat currency, that's a significant job. You've got a huge behavioral shift to drive there. Getting people to pay with something that they're not accustomed to, there's a whole heap of trust issues there that you have to overcome and when it comes to payment and something that isn't necessarily backed or recommended by governments, by retailers, that's a big ask. In an attempt to effectively force feed the Pedro to ordinary Venezuelans, the Maduro government now requires passport fees to be exclusively paid in crypto, the cost, two Petros for a new passport and one Petro for an extension. To put that in perspective, the average wage in Venezuela is four times less than the cost of a passport fee. Venezuelans abroad are not expected to pay in Petros. Vice President Delcey Rodriguez announced in a press conference in the case of Venezuelans who are abroad until the first day of November, the cost will be $200 for issuance and $100 for extensions. It is estimated that about 5,000 Venezuelans flee the country every day, some of them with their life savings in crypto to avoid violence, extortion and the effects of hyperinflation. One way to create demand for a currency is to force people to pay in that currency. I mean, one thing is to index something to the currency, right? But I don't see how there is no payment mechanism in Petros. It doesn't exist. So you might say, look, the price of a Petro is X and so you owe me X, but you would pay with your debit card, your bank account. Whales are not the killers they appear to be. According to new research, they are not responsible for price volatility. Blockchain research firm Chainalysis looked at the 32 of the largest Bitcoin wallets representing 1 million Bitcoin or $6.3 billion. Whales, who own a considerable sum of crypto, are often blamed for price volatility. But what the data is showing is that only a third of whales are active traders. While these trading whales certainly have the capability of executing transactions large enough to move the market, they have, on net, traded against the herd, buying on price declines. The research team divided the whales into four groups. Number one, traders. They were the most active with over $2 billion in Bitcoin. The majority entered the market in 2017. Number two, miners. Trading activity extremely low, but they did sell in late 2017 when prices hit record highs. 15 investors currently hold the same amount as the traders. Number three, criminals. They hold about $790 million in Bitcoin. Number four, loss. $1.3 billion in loss and no transactions have been identified since 2011. Ultimately, the study found that whales did not intensify volatility, in fact, quite the opposite. Whales were, in aggregate, buying on declines and consequently were stabilizing rather than destabilizing factor on the market. Dum dum dum. Dr. Doom is back. Dr. Doom, also known as economist Noriel Rubini, famed for predicting the 2008 crash, delivered an appropriately doom-laden speech to the U.S. Senate, completely trashing crypto. In his testimony for a hearing on crypto and blockchain, he referred to it as the mother of all scams. Blockchain also wasn't safe from his wrath. Blockchain is the most overhyped technology ever. It is nothing better than a glorified spreadsheet or database. He did not stop there. The name shitcoins, Rubini believes, is a grave insult to manure. If Rubini is Dr. Doom in this situation, coin centers Peter von Valkenberg is his nemesis. So pretty much anyone from the Fantastic Four. The director of research at the crypto lobbyist group defended blockchain from Rubini's multiple jobs. Networks powered by public consensus mechanisms mirror the early Internet and may one day become as indispensable as the Internet in facilitating free speech, competition, and innovation in computing services. He went on. Public consensus mechanisms demand that users place trust in unknown third parties who are economically motivated to behave honestly because they have skin in the game and face competitive pressures. Who will win the battle for blockchain, the evil Dr. Doom, or the noble Peter von Valkenberg, also known as someone from the Fantastic Four? For you, what are the most important metrics when considering a market implosion or market explosion? Let us know in the comments below. And as always, like, subscribe, and hodl. Cointelegraph. Like, subscribe, and hodl.