 In the U.S., the government is at a stalemate. Trump is still no closer to getting his wall. And in the U.K., Theresa May is even further away from securing a Brexit deal. In short, the world is in turmoil. By contrast, the crypto world has been relatively stable. Popto Escobar's brother wants to impeach Trump with his new cryptocurrency, unintentionally paving the way for a more crypto-friendly 2020 candidate, John McAfee. Also this week, Russia has no plans to hodl. The Ethereum Constantinople hardfork is coming and the New Zealand crypto exchange goes down. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Molly Jane and this is your weekly HODLers digest. But first, let's have a look at the latest market updates. The long-awaited Ethereum Constantinople hardfork, scheduled for this past Wednesday, has been postponed due to vulnerabilities found in the upgrade. According to crypto audit firm Chain Security, it turned out that the Ethereum upgrade Constantinople might be vulnerable to re-entrancy attacks in which malicious actors can steal cryptocurrency from smart contracts on the network. The unexpected delay seems to contradict previous claims according to which the upcoming fork was going to happen smoothly. A day before the scheduled fork, Ethereum core developer Lane Redding told Bloomberg, I really can't imagine a less contentious hardfork to be honest. Of all the hardforks in the history of Ethereum, it's probably the least eventful one. Among other technical changes, the fork will significantly reduce rewards for miners from three to do Ethereum per mined block. This is considered a necessary adjustment in Ethereum's transition process from the current proof of work to a proof of state consensus algorithm. Unlike the controversial Bitcoin Cash hardfork, Constantinople should not result in the appearance of competing coins as the upgrade secured widespread approval in the Ethereum mining community. Also, major players such as Crack and Coinbase and Binance confirmed their support with upcoming fork. We reached out to Lane Redding and asked him what is going on with the upgrade. If we don't upgrade the network every so often, and that's, it could be eight months, 12 months, 18 months, somewhere in that timeframe, right? Then what happens is the block times actually begin to tick up. So we target 14 seconds, but it could go to 15 seconds, 18 seconds, and it increases exponentially. So what that means is if we don't hardfork and we still don't hardfork in six months, 12 months go by, the entire network just freezes and dies. I do think there is a level below which mining is not profitable, right? So for example, we're going from three to two. If we were to go down to like 0.1 each per block, then I think it's very likely a lot of miners would stop mining because at that point they're probably losing money on electricity or hardware or something. But we did math and we did analysis and we believe that two ether is still more than enough to cover the costs for most miners. The original roadmap that Vitalik shared was always a transition to proof of stake when it's ready. And to say slightly more, I mean, I think one of the big factors is that it's energy efficient, whereas proof of work wastes a lot of electricity, as you know. Another reason is that we believe it's more egalitarian and more decentralized and more fair because anybody who holds ether, the minimum is 32 ether, which today is something like 500 or 400 US dollars worth of ether can participate and stake and earn rewards, whereas in mining today, you need to invest thousands of dollars in hardware. The only thing in this hard fork, in this upgrade that could possibly be contentious is the reduction of block rewards. There's nothing else contentious about it. There's nothing, it's all just good stuff, like reducing gas, adding new cool, nifty things to the Ethereum virtual machine. And the reason I thought that the reduction in issuance would not lead to a contentious hard fork is basically the reason I already said, which is that we had all the large miners, we'd been in touch with them, we discussed it with them and we had their support. The specific technical issue that caused the postponement is, we know exactly what it is, it's very clear. And one thing we may decide to do, which is the simplest possible thing to do is we just go forward with Constantinople and we leave out that one EIP. That's not a big deal. I think that it would take us one day to prepare technically to do that. The thing is though, there's some bigger questions here that we may want to discuss, right? And these are questions like, we had six months, eight months to prepare for this and to review this EIP. How did we all miss this problem until the last minute? The first exchange hack in 2019 did not keep us waiting for too long. Earlier this week, New Zealand based exchange, Cryptopia halted all trading activities after detecting a security breach. Even though Cryptopia is yet to disclose the exact stolen amount, it has been reported that around $3.5 million worth of crypto was moved to unknown wallets a couple of days before the hack was detected. Later in the week, Binance CEO CZ claimed that as part of the stolen funds was moved to Binance, they were consequently frozen. The hack ignited an animated debate on social media with some blaming Cryptopia's weak security system and others voicing suspicions that the hack might have been an exit scam orchestrated by Cryptopia itself. We reached out to Cryptosecurity expert Anatoly Wolff and asked him to comment on the issue. So, 2018 was really disaster for crypto exchanges. We have seen over $1 billion stolen from the crypto exchanges. Just to name the coin check, Zaheef, nice hash. They do not pay enough attention to the cybersecurity. The answer is pretty simple. Most of them are young companies. They are not well-formed cyber security departments. Some of them simply don't have CISO, the chief information security officer. They don't have all the security solutions at place. They don't have proper application firewalls. They have plenty of misconfigurations. They are continuously developing. And this continuous development sometimes business goes higher priority than security. The security is getting better. For sure it's getting better. But the attacker, the actor model is getting more sophisticated as well. But while some crypto exchanges fear for their future, others seem to have learned their lesson. This week, Japanese exchange coin check obtained a license from the local financial authorities, thus joining the list of the regulated exchanges in Japan. Just one year ago, coin check lost around half a billion dollars in one of the biggest hacks in the history of crypto. After a long period of inactivity, coin check won back the trust of institutions by implementing a series of safety, governance, and risk management measures. Roberto Escobar, the brother of legendary Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, launched a new cryptocurrency as a fundraising effort to impeach US President Donald Trump. The new Escobar token is an Ethereum-based stablecoin, which will be pegged to the US dollar. Escobar is leveraging the controversial legacy of his brother to promote the impeachment efforts. I am afraid of Pablo Escobar reads a fictional quotation attributed to President Donald Trump and shared on the main page of the campaign. According to the campaign's website, raised funds will be used to gather intelligence and pay lawyers and lobbyists to go against Trump. Some of them will serve to develop further than Escobar, which is supposed to become Tether's direct competitor. Escobar decided to embrace crypto after the previous attempt to raise $50 million on the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe did not succeed as the campaign was blocked, allegedly by the Trump administration. Escobar Inc. CEO, Olive Gustavson, said, after raising $10 million in just 10 hours, we were shut down by GoFundMe and within 24 hours launched the Escobar stablecoin cryptocurrency to avoid anyone censoring us again. We believe the Trump administration or President Trump shut us down. We launched the Escobar stablecoin, Escobar Escobar token, and we sold out within five days, the whole ICO. We sold almost a billion coins and they're one-to-one through USD. So it was a very successful. We had a lot of big Democrats that came in, some congressmen that read everybody. This story kind of spread like wildfire here in the United States. A lot of people don't like Trump. And obviously Pablo Escobar has a pretty good history at getting rid of people that he doesn't like. So that's used to be one of his specialties. Trump doesn't like Mexicans and Latinos. And obviously this is a Latino-based company, South American-based company. So, and we stand up for those rights. Even though some people may think that our company is a little bit different than not such a nice company, we think we're nice and we think we're very nice. But one thing is for sure, we represent the Latinos and there's a lot of Latinos in America and that's why we got all this money. We launched this ICO, we sold out in five days. We thought it was gonna take three months. We had a ticker for 119 days, 120 days. And we sold out in five days. Now what happened is we did a code audit. We built the smart contract over a year ago. So we audited the smart contract. We found some vulnerabilities and we're reissuing. We did a deployed a new smart contract and we're rebranding the Escobar token and we're giving all those token holders a swap into the new coin, which is going to be called QUSD. We're gonna launch for trading on January 24th. We're launching the coin for trading QUSD and already we got listed on, we have multiple exchanges that we're getting listed on. The one that I'm allowed to say now is CoinTiger. They're doing a big campaign and they're gonna be crossing it against everything and we're gonna take over the tether market on CoinTiger. So it's very interesting, we had a good discussions with them and what we're trying to do is basically to remove QUSD tether, to remove all these other coins that are stable coins and go in and take over the market and we'll do it one exchange at a time. We are taking this quite seriously and we are really speaking with multiple attorneys with experience in this and also security contracting firms that have in other parts of the world actually removed presidents or replaced them or have been involved with the gentle switching of presidents in other countries. Now it's not gonna come to anything too crazy like that. It's gonna be a legal process. But of course, the more money we make, the more we're gonna put towards Trump. But let's say this way, if this was in the 1980s, we would have already impeached Trump. He would have already been impeached a long time ago. So, but now it's a little bit different. Now you have to do it the legal way. That's why it takes time. But we have the best lawyers and we know what we're doing. We're meeting these congressmen. We're meeting a congresswoman yesterday and everybody hates Trump, man. People don't like this guy. So let's get rid of him, but let's do it legally. It was falsely reported this week that the Russian state was considering buying $10 billion worth of Bitcoin ostensibly to circumvent sanctions. The story made it from the Twitter account of an obscure Russian economist to the daily hodl, and then all the way onto the pages of major UK newspaper, The Telegraph. It soon transpired that this economist, who was reported to have links to the Kremlin, had no other sources besides himself and the figure of $10 billion, that's anybody's guess. However, as is the case with a lot of misreporting, there is a grain of truth to these claims. Russia has significantly cut its dollar holdings to lessen the impact of sanctions. There are rumblings of a crypto bill in parliament, and Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian prime minister, has recently come out in support of crypto. Lower down from the Kremlin, the Russian state Duma is planning to discuss a crypto bill most likely in February. Despite the fact that there was no mention of a $10 billion investment in Bitcoin, this is a positive indicator that the Russian state is finally warming to crypto. A further sign of this was Medvedev's recent comments that a bear market is not a reason to bury crypto, adding that there is both a bright side and a dark side here, as well as in any social phenomena and any economic institution. We should monitor carefully what is going on in the space. Finally, while it is not possible for the Russian state to convert its dollar holdings into Bitcoin, there is a precedent in other states, like Iran is Venezuela, who have made efforts or at least discussed circumventing sanctions with crypto. We spoke to Kayla Isenman from the World United States Institute for Defense and Security Studies about the sanctions against Russia and cryptocurrency. It obviously makes sense that Russia would want to circumvent sanctions in general so that they can transact with people, not only in the US specifically, but in the global international financial system without relying on the use of a dollar or relying on whoever they're transacting with to be okay with potentially being subject to secondary sanctions or anything like that. These comments have come out saying Bitcoin cryptocurrency is the best way for us to circumvent the financial system to not rely on dollars, all these things. So in that sense, the intent is there. They've said they want to do it. They've also shown initiative regarding blockchain. Putin has met with Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum. So they're very aware of crypto. The way that you would need to circumvent sanctions on a state level isn't necessarily through a national cryptocurrency. Basically, the way you would need to do it isn't through a national cryptocurrency, but more through replacing or coming up with a parallel to the financial system, where you can settle accounts only through crypto, which is a scale of adoption that as of right now is unprecedented, but would make it you able to transact without dollars. The trouble with cryptocurrency is that it's not inherently not subject to sanctions because if it's used as a transfer of value, then it's sort of inherently subject to sanctions. The better case study in that case is looking at North Korea, which I've done a lot of research into for this sort of thing. And North Korea is hacking Southeast Asian cryptocurrency exchanges. They've had at least five or so within the past two years have been confirmed as North Korea, and then more have been suspected. And if you look at that, they're hacking for massive amounts of money. They get this money, obviously we don't know what they're doing with it. They could fundraise, they could spot stockpile, all of these things, but they're getting that money. Granted, the difficulty comes with, do you then, can you pay people and have the financial system move around like that, or are you cashing out into your currency, which makes it more difficult? But either way, that would mean that you're getting a certain amount of money from illicit activities and that money isn't subject to sanctions. If Trump avoids impeachment, he could eventually face getting primaried. On the Democratic side, Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard, and Richard Ojeda have thrown their hat into the ring to become the next president of the United States. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and a whole host of others are yet to declare their intentions. One man who announced his candidacy last year, a man who in his own words, no one in their right minds would vote for, is none other than libertarian crypto wild man, John McAfee. His platform, he claims, would fit on the back of a matchbox. The sole item is freedom for the people. Don't ask him about education, immigration, or formulations because, again, in his own words, he knows nothing about them. This week, he teamed up with little-known YouTube rappers, Coin Bros, to release his campaign song, McAfee 2020. McAfee for voters, power to the voters. White House, about to get that e-viction notice. Though that bank shit is over, Pentagon and foreclosure. Crypto to the forefront, we are one step closer, voting McAfee 2020. In the song, the bros described the presidential candidate as the realest f*** they ever met and made claims he would fight corruption. The Coin Bros, whose goals to eventually go 100% crypto, believed that McAfee is the man to achieve this. In their own words, crypto to the forefront were one step closer. This is the second time the YouTubers have worked with McAfee. Previously, they made a music video with him where they wrapped and warned people not to mess with his dogs. The lyrics reference allegations that he murdered his neighbor in Belize after his dogs were found poisoned. Other allegations from his time in Belize include rape. Outside of the crypto world, it is unlikely that the McAfee 2020 campaign will gain much traction. But if it does, we can see the media taking another look at his time in Belize. Would you buy the Escobar stablecoin if you knew that it would impeach Donald Trump? Comment below. And as always, remember to like, subscribe, and hodl. Coin Telegraph, like, subscribe, and hodl.