Around the Crypto World in 7 Days | Hodler's Digest

We're here at Cointelegraph's New York offices. Live from New York, it's Sunday night, and this is your weekly Hodler's Digest. As Hodlers become increasingly weary of the will they or won't they? The toing and froing of the SEC about the Bitcoin ETF decision, it's time to take a more global look. So hop into Cointelegraph's hot air balloon and we're going to do a Around the Crypto world in seven days, the Hodler's Digest edition this week. People are increasingly turning to cryptocurrencies when their economy is in turmoil. India is sending its officials to crypto college and Alibaba versus IBM in the quest to become the blockchain patent king.

Venezuela, Turkey, Iran and Zimbabwe are countries all facing economic turmoil, suffering high inflation. Increasingly, people living in such extreme situations are turning to crypto as a store of value and a means of exchange. The fanciful question is, can hyper bitcoinization ever happen? We spoke to a Venezuelan professor, Francisco Peniza, from the London School of Economics, and Alejandro Machado, a computer scientist in Caracas, to find out. More.

Inflation in the world. And according to some estimates, it can even reach a million percent by the end of the year. So it's basically a fiscal crisis, but it's just getting worse every year or every day.

The Bolivar is not a store of value. The government has taken these to extremes because they keep printing and printing more money, and if you want dollars, you need to go to the black market. In Venezuela, there's been an exchange control for 15 years, and it's not legal to actually exchange dollars. The hope, or the thought is that the majority of people will be able to access cryptocurrency instead, because it's something that doesn't require a bank account abroad. If you have any kind of savings or if you want to save any kind of money, it's much, much better to access cryptocurrency. I know, for example, people mining zcash inside of Venezuela that, you know, they're making much more money mining than in their, like, professions. And these, these people are like doctors, engineers, people with like, good jobs that they should have good salaries and. But they're making way more money mining because electricity is subsidized. If you travel with like, say $300 and that's like your life savings, they're probably going to check you out at the border. They're going to realize that you have a bunch of money on top and you are going to be harassed and like they're going to take a big cut of that. If instead you have cryptocurrency in your head or you have like a password down somewhere, it's much, much harder for them to first know that you have the money and second to actually be able to seize it because then they have to resort to physical violence to. I believe that cryptocurrency is a tool for the ordinary citizen to be able to challenge the state in this way. If cryptocurrency becomes very popular in Venezuela and the government finds that they no longer have access to monetary policy as they used to have, they can't make everyone poorer and themselves richer by debasing the currency. So it's going to create some trouble and they're going to try to ban it. I would like for us to have a little bit more time to develop it more so that we gain like a tactical advantage. Because in this way, if the government finds out that this is like a subversive tool, then it's likely that they'll crack down even harder on it.

Unlike Switzerland or Japan, India has been far from crypto friendly. In fact, you could easily describe them as crypto hostile. Strange then that according to a report, the securities and Exchange Board of India recently organized tours abroad for its officials to study both crypto and ICOs. Representatives from the regulator were sent on study tours to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of crypto. At Japan's Financial Services Agency, the UK Financial Conduct Authority and finally the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, the RBI is currently considering the viability of a rupee backed central bank digital currency. The so called study tour runs contrary to the recent RBI decision that effectively bans banks dealing with crypto businesses or individuals. Longtime crypto advocate Andreas Antonopoulos was very critical of the RBI's plans. Do you agree with him?

Tech giants Alibaba and IBM want to be top dogs when it comes to blockchain patents. An outlet specializing in intellectual property looked at data filings in the eu, the us, Japan, South Korea and China. They also consulted wipo, the World Intellectual Property Organization. And the results are in. China's Alibaba comes out on top, but only just with 90 blockchain related patents. IBM comes at a close second by just a whisker with 89 blockchain related patents. Further down on the list is MasterCard at 80, the bank of America at 53. And ranking in fifth is the People's bank of China with 44 patents for a central bank digital currency as cointelegraph previously reported. WIPO data showed that in 2017, China by far filed the most number of blockchain related patents at 225, America only filed 91 and Australia filed 13. China is certainly embracing the new tech, but on its own terms, and it is also taking an increasingly harsh stance against decentralized cryptocurrencies. As of late, Alibaba founder Jack Ma also walked this fine line as he's a strong proponent of blockchain and a pretty hard skeptic of crypto. Over 11,000 miles away in the US IBM recently signed a 5 year 740 million dollar deal with the Australian government to use blockchain and other new technologies in federal departments. Good news for all you Ethereum dataset fans out there. Google's cloud team has recently integrated Ethereum's dataset into its big Data Analytics Warehouse, BigQuery. Ethereum blockchain data is posted in the dataset and updated daily. It's included there in order to prioritize updates to the Ethereum blockchain and help make business decisions. Google explains that the ethereum blockchain contains APIs that can be used for random functions like checking transaction status and looking at wallet balances. However, these API endpoints cannot be easily reached. This is where BigQuery is really useful. It aggregates this data and turns it into a form where you can visualize it. Blockchain game Cryptokitties is also making use of Google's shiny new tool. BigQuery collects data on accounts that have more than 10 cryptokitties as well as their mascots size. This is all part of Google's wider expansion into the blockchain and crypto. In February, the company had created a similar tool for the bitcoin blockchain.

The market went into free fall on Tuesday, dropping $12 billion in an hour. But it turns out reports Goldman Sachs are abandoning plans for a crypto desk are fake news. This according to Goldman CFO Martin Chavez, who made the announcement at a conference in San Francisco in direct contradiction with an unnamed source speaking to Business Insider who would claim that trading desk plans were scrapped because of an unclear regulatory environment. However, Chavez did suggest that the excitement for a trading desk may have been premature. He said, when we talked about exploring digital assets, it was going to be exploration that would be evolving over time. Maybe someone who was thinking about our activities here got very excited that we would be making markets as principal and physical bitcoin, and as they got into it they realized part of the evolution.

But it's not here yet.

Earlier this year, a couple of Barclays employees caused similar confusion when they posted online about a trading desk for the bank, a claim which Barclays immediately denied.

And finally, we've been debating this tweet all week here at the Cointelegraph office. Bitcoin's best use case is Venezuela, not Starbucks. Post what you think below in the comments. I'm on Venezuela's side, and as always, don't forget to like subscribe Hodl cointelegraph like subscribe and Hodl.