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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 and 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 785 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 meeting 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 the stock market is down.

Bitcoin held above 4K until tuesday, but by the end of the week slumped to under $3.3K.

Weekly, the leading crypto was down about 20%, monthly losses are just over 47%.

Ripple was down over 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 Peirce, aka “Crypto Mom” 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 Petro fire, Binance launches its own blockchain,

ErisX has a big funding round, and Bitcoin builds schools in Rwanda.Venezuela’s

national currency, the Bolivar aka the Bolivar Sobreno, 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 Bolivar]

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 10,000,000%

by 2019.

In a foolish but typically misguided effort to circumnavigate the hyperinflation and crippling

sanctions, the Maduro government opted to launch a national cryptocurrency--an effort

that was widely deemed D.O.A.

Each Petro is meant to be backed by a barrel of oil, but in fact, Reuters reported earlier

this year that 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 U.S citizens from

dealing with it.

Despite all this Maduro plods on, recently increasing the reference value of the Petro

from over 3,000 bolivars to 9,000 bolivars in a desperate response to tackle the economic

turmoil currently engulfing his administration.

Hot on the heels of this announcement was on e that, on the face of it, would turn even

Bernie Sanders conservative; Maduro raised the minimum wage a whopping 150%.

Venezuelan economist Leonardo Buniak believes the wage increase will only lead to further

hyperinflations and was highly critical of the national crypto:

“To anchor the bolivar to Petro is equal to anchoring it to nothing,”

One way of beating hyperinflation is dealing in a currency that is 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.

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 5000, 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 #Builtwithbitcoin campaign was launched last year, Paxful raised the relatively modest

sum of 15 BTC and yet still managed to open two primary schools.

“We encourage the cryptocurrency sector to contribute more to humanitarian projects.

The #BuiltWithBitcoin initiative is an example of bitcoin being used as more than a speculative

tool, but a testament to the usefulness of cryptocurrency,” said Ray Youseff, the CEO

and co-founder of Paxful.

Paxful plans to build 100 more schools across 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 local currency.

Potentially useful knowledge in a country with a burgeoning blockchain community, the

local government have been showing particular interest in the space.

We asked Paxful CEO Ray Yousseff to give us more insight into the project.

So Paxful went all in.

We built the school, we went there, to the school we built and actually had children

there and we said: ‘hey, this is amazing.

Let's take it a step further’.

We actually started upgrading the school, providing lunches for the kids, giving them

uniforms, paying their teachers salaries, even got them health insurance for a year.

And we thought about ways we could expand the project further.

Build, build.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 be the focal point of this.

So if you can name two things that you wish you learned in school that you did not, what

would they be?

For me it was always finance, learning how to use my money and nutrition.

So for me the big payoff is, now 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 to invest,

to save it.

The peer to peer finance, that's going to help the emerging world.

Why?

Actually the emerging world is doing it themselves.

We're giving them crypto and we're teaching them how to take that crypto, sell it in their

local economies.

So we donated a hundred thousand to the second school.

And we gave them bitcoin and they took bitcoin and then we showed them how to sell it on

Paxful for Rwandan francs.

And they got, I think, an additional 5 percent off of that so we sent them hundred thousand

but they actually got one hundred and five.

And with that we could pay for health insurance to the kids and by giving you really nice

cute little blue uniforms, toys etc..

But the point was, it's peer to peer finance.

We educated them on how to use crypto.

Crypto by itself is not enough.

We are talking people there that hey, cryptocurrency is a real thing.

You can turn this into money.

And then some of them have to start their own business doing it as well.

Very simple import export way, where they could play on the arbitrage of the difference

in their local economies.

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 the creation of new cryptocurrencies.

As the company revealed in a Tweet, on the platform “millions of tokens can easily

issue projects”.

Speaking at 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 the Binance Chain.

We reached out to CZ and asked him more details on his upcoming project.

The Binance DEX is a decentralized exchange that allows you to trade one token to another

token on the Binance Chain.

So very similar to Ethereum, ERC-20 token.

But the Binance Chain also allows you to send and receive the Binance Coin, which is the

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 allows you to trade in a decentralized manner.

Crypto currency is supposed to be cheaper to transfer, It is supposed to be instantaneous.

Initially it did that but given the popularity of crypto now that the two main popular networks

are very saturated.

So we're kind of losing that, now transferring on Bitcoin network sometimes takes five to

ten dollars or more so we want to go back to a fast and cheap transactions.

So 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 we 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

Binanace Coin as the coin in the ecosystem for payments.

Including many large travel booking sites or platforms.

We want to see a situation where the merchants can accept whichever currency they choose

and the payer can pay with whatever currency they have.

And then we do the conversion in between.

And 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 Chippas, 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

Ether on spot markets, plus will run Bitcoin future 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 Chippas.

We reached out to James Putra, Director of Digital Asset Product Strategy at TradeStation

- a brokerage firm that participated in the funding round - to talk about the reasons

behind such a major deal.

the players that have interest and concern in this ecosystem are starting to congregate

on platforms like ErisX and it starts to create an environment an ecosystem that we are much

more familiar with operating with and we can bring that level let's say certainty or lower

risk to the mass market.

We really like our 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 put together

a really unique set of partners that bring together partners that are brokerage firms

partners that are custodians partners that are liquidity providers partners that also

provide cash management custody and they really start to round out a market structure that

looks and feels more mature and makes it more accessible for institutions like Tradestation

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 in terms of making it accessible more for the mass market which is really interesting

and I guess just getting the work done and trying to fulfill the promises and not having

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 dollars 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 buy buy, 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 at Imperial College London have developed an algorithm to spot when these

schemes might occur--the ramifications of this are huge for much needed crypto-investment

protection.

Over 200 of these schemes were studied between July 21 and November 18.

They focused on one particular pump on November 14 at 19.30 GMT announced to several Telegram

groups, the largest of which was McAfee Pump Signals, with 12,000 members.

Researchers Xu and Livshits found that anybody who got in on the action 18 seconds after

a 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 in obscure coins and recently found 6 schemes when it was implemented on live

data.

Criminals will always adapt, but these pair of researchers have found a way of increasing

trust in a market that badly needs it.

So it's possible to develop an investment strategy based on our machine learning model.

we have very conservative assumptions such as you only get half of of the gain and even

with that assumption it's likely that it's proved to be robust that you can get a gain

of 80 percent within three weeks.

So that's the return that we are able to demonstrate.

Investors still need to be very careful because again those coins are arbitrarily selected

by the group organizers they are handpicked by the group organizers.

So if you are too greedy and if you invest too much money in those coins in the illiquid

coins they are by nature very illiquid.

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 awareness.

Obviously, that's that's one thing that we wish to convey through the paper.

hopefully you know other researchers will come into 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 1 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?

Comments below. And, as always, like subscribe and hodl!