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xxxx Under-reporting of cash receipts also leads to under-reporting of self-employment tax: at US$39bn, this dwarfs the under-reporting of conventional wages and salaries of US$10bn, with an under-reporting rate of 52% compared to 4%. To put these numbers in context, Slemrod estimates large company corporation tax under-reporting, a topic that typically attracts much more attention, at US$25bn. xxx

xxx In October there were 1.27bn payment card transactions in the UK, a 10 per cent increase year-on-year, while online transactions rose 16 per cent to 160m, according to the UK Cards Association. Contactless card usage has risen even faster, more than doubling by number and trebling by value over the past year. From Cashless society makes bank statements longer xxx

xxx Peter Sands, the former chief executive of Standard Chartered bank, suggested last February that the main use of the 50 was illicit From An unloved banknote: is the £50 in danger? xxx

British Airways have instituted a new policy of annoying customers like me by making them pay for coffee. Although, to be fair, it was Marks & Spencer coffee and it was much nicer than the usual BA coffee. Naturally they didn't take cash. They are not unusual in the respect. Lots of airlines don’t take cash. What a nightmare it would be to try and manage cash on board a plane.  Time-consuming and pointless. Of course, it’s time-consuming and pointless in other retailers too. Perry Kramer, vice president and practice lead at consultant Boston Retail Partners, contends that as many as four-fifths  of retailers today are already largely cashless. “Retailers don’t really want to be banks. It’s not their sweet spot,” he says. “It is much less expensive to process credit and debit than it is cash, because cash has a lot of labor involved.” From  Cashing In or Cashing Out? | National Retail Federation Indeed it does. And that labour might be more profitably redeployed doing s

xxx The company says that employees can perform 5% to 15% more transactions every hour when they don’t have to handle money. From Sweetgreen Is Going Fully Cashless In 2017 | Fast Company | Business + Innovation xxx   xxx The move away from cash might also steer more people onto the Sweetgreen app. Over the last year, app use has grown 95%, says the company. Roughly a third of the business is run through the app From  Sweetgreen Is Going Fully Cashless In 2017 | Fast Company | Business + Innovation xxx

xxx Prosecutors said that beginning in April 2014, the trio obtained inside information by hacking two U.S. law firms and targeting the email accounts of law firm partners working on mergers and acquisitions. From U.S. accuses Chinese citizens of hacking law firms, insider trading | Reuters xxx

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xxx n 1822 Turner, a Bank clerk, stole £10,000 by altering the transfer book. The rascal, however, was too clever for the Bank, and escaped. From The Bank of England | British History Online xxx

xxx A regular occurrence in London, when asking for a fare receipt, is an offer of a couple of unsigned receipts or an offer to put any figure down. The taxi driver keeps no duplicate record of the transaction. This deprives the taxman of the cab driver’s tax and encourages the customer to cheat their employer and HM Revenue & Customs. This conspiracy to defraud has been going on for decades. An Uber receipt clearly states the origin and destination of a journey and the price paid. This eliminates fraud. As an employer I trust an Uber receipt, but view a licensed taxi receipt with suspicion. From How black cab drivers and passengers collude to cheat the taxman xxx

As my colleague Neil McEvoy and I wrote in the DEMOS Quarterly way back in 1996 Endogenous money is money created within a market whereas exogenous money is money created by some outside authority and imposed on a market. We’re used to the second – where the outside authority is the government – and have forgotten about the first, but pressures on the monetary system may have reached the point where a change is inevitable. xxx

xxx Developed by Carsten van Berkel and Stefan Leendertse of N = 5, an Amsterdam-based advertising agency, the contactless payment jacket allows people to donate 1€ to the wearer using their contactless smart card. From Amsterdam Introduces Contactless Payment Jackets for Beggars | Oddity Central - Collecting Oddities xxx   xxxx

xxx The fate of a defaulted $45 million Chinese corporate bond sold through an Alibaba-backed online wealth management platform was thrown into doubt on Monday… China Guangfa Bank Co Ltd (CGB) said guarantee documents, official seals and personal seals presented by the insurer of the bonds "are all fake" and that it has reported the matter to the police. From China bank calls documents fake after bond default on Alibaba-linked platform | Reuters xxx

xxx In a similar vein, Barclays customers will tap their PIN into a keypad mounted on the card which will create a range of security ciphers. The codes will be generated at a timed interval by a tiny clock and appear next to the signature strip. From Enigma technology to make new ultra-secure bank card This is pretty much what the card will look like I think.   Actually, I’m being a little naughty here. That picture is actually of the Visa SuperSmartCard, produced by Toshiba back in 1986, but I imagine the Barclays one will work in pretty much the same way.

xxx Unified Payment Interface, or UPI, provided by various banks could be considered safer than other modes in this respect. In case of UPI, one needs to enter only the Virtual Payment Address, or VPA, of the recipient, which is more secure and easy than sharing credentials such as account numbers and IFSC codes. From Digital payment: Post demonetisation, which digital payment method to use? Here’s how to choose - The Economic Times xxx

xxx Financial services companies, for example, are finding that the private blockchain networks they’ve set up with a limited number of trusted counterparties can significantly reduce transaction costs. From The Truth About Blockchain This is not at all clear to me. If anyone has any actual figures about this I would be genuinely interested in looking at them.

xxx “Miles and points are cash, that’s what we teach people, and it’s certainly nice when the credit card companies are giving you $1,000, $1,500, $2,000 for getting a single credit card" From Credit card providers fight to stay top of your wallet xxx

There was interesting discussion on Twitter the other day (as there often is) about the relationship between identity and reputation. The discussion was in the context of “fake news” but it raised a number of general points about reputation and the reputation economy that are worth reflecting on. One particular point was whether a reputation must link one-to-one with a confirmed identity in order for the reputation to be useful. I think it doesn’t, and I can point to a particular case study which I think triggered a lot of this kind of thinking in my own mind. Many many years ago in the early days of electronic commerce and digital money and online payments and all those good things, I came across a mailing list (I’m not sure what it was called it at the beginning but it later became known as the e$ list) that I found very useful. The list had links to interesting stories, discussions and very well-informed debate on the then very new topics of money and transactions in an interconnec

xxx One sticky-fingered thief managed to embezzle over $4.8 million from his employer, and then went on to spend $1 million of it on Game of War in-app purchases. From Man steals $1m, spends it on Game of War in-app purchases xxx

xxx At UBS we are looking at ways to make it easier to share identities within financial services, so that if you have been successfully on-boarded at our bank, you can use your UBS credentials to quickly open a relationship with another.  From xxx

xxx Rather, it would provide the internet resources for retail users to access utility central banking as banks already can rather as internet giants like Facebook and Google syndicate their services through application programming interfaces. From Why Central Banks Should Offer Bank Accounts to Everyone - Evonomics xxx

xxx The result would produce ‘narrow banking’ most efficiently delivered and guaranteed by the central bank, alongside a commercial banking system that was far more focused on taking and managing risk and managing with far less government support and the consequent regulation. From Why Central Banks Should Offer Bank Accounts to Everyone - Evonomics xxx

xxx On 23 December 2013, just before Christmas, Belgian merchants faced an outage of the domestic debit card scheme Bancontact for two and a half hours, costing them €51 million in sales.  From The Hidden Costs of Cards xxx

xxx if blockchains (in the sense of useful peer-to-peer databases) are ever going to emerge as a coherent product category, it’s important to distinguish between half-baked and real solutions From How to spot a half-baked blockchain | MultiChain xxx

xxx President Maduro said there were "entire warehouses full of 100-bolivar notes in the [Colombian cities of] Cucuta, Cartagena, Maicao and Buaramanga". From Venezuela pulls highest-value banknote 'to strike against mafia' - BBC News I was quite surprised to read this, given that the 100-bolivar note is worth about 10p, but whatever.

Perry Kramer, vice president and practice lead at consultant Boston Retail Partners, contends that as many as 80 percent of retailers today are already largely cashless “Retailers don’t really want to be banks. It’s not their sweet spot,” he says. “It is much less expensive to process credit and debit than it is cash, because cash has a lot of labor involved.” From Cashing In or Cashing Out? | National Retail Federation xxx

xxx Banks have said that providing such accounts to the financially vulnerable is a loss-making business for them From Lloyds fails on fee-free in no-frills bank accounts market | Reuters They are. Of course. What almost all of these finally vulnerable people need is a payment account, not a bank account. A simple, pre-paid account with a decent app able to nudge them to help them. And it needs to have a low regulatory overhead so that it works for all of the stakeholders.

  xxx Modi’s surprise announcement wiped out 86% of the nation’s currency overnight, leaving the vendors at Panjim’s fish market to suffer heavy losses. “Nobody has cash, so they’re not buying fish.” From  ‘Who buys fish with a credit card here?’ Traders scoff at Goa’s bid to ditch cash | World news | The Guardian xxx   xxx From January, Goa’s government has announced that the city will go “cashless”, meaning every street vendor, rickshaw driver and shopkeeper must offer their customers the option to pay using a debit card or mobile phone. From  ‘Who buys fish with a credit card here?’ Traders scoff at Goa’s bid to ditch cash | World news | The Guardian Is it possible to imagine Goans buying fish without cash? Well, yes. Look at Kenya, where there are now more than 33 million mobile money users and 174,000 mobile agent locations. The most recent figures from the Central Bank of Kenya (CBA) show an astonishing trend. From February 2013 until September 2016, the number of mo

xxx The surge in use, however, comes as the Treasury cautioned that the entrenched use of mobile money in the country posed fiscal risks to the economy if the service collapses. From Mobile Money Africa xxx

xxx Cybercriminals can already read information from the card chip  Artyom Sychev, Deputy Director, General Directorate of Security and Information Protection, Bank of Russia  From Cash circulation: from robotization to countering “black box” attacks against ATMs. First summary of PLUS-Forum 2016 xxx

xxx With the blockchain, you gain access to two things. On one hand, you could select only the pertinent information required for that transaction-and entering a bar through a bouncer is a transaction. In this case: name, picture, and age. On the other hand, the bouncer can rest easy knowing that once something is hashed into the blockchain, it can't be changed; new information can only be appended and there is a transparent record of all changes. From Blockchain: An Answer to Identity? - NASDAQ.com xxx

Starbucks has announced its new MyBarista service that will allow people to order (and pay, of course) using chat and voice interfaces. Starbucks Mobile App customers will be able to place their orders via voice command or messaging interface, From Starbucks Unveils Five-Year Growth Plan, Introduces Voice Payment Feature | Bank Innovation

I noticed an e-mail from Business Intelligence that says Mobile Peer-to-Peer payments in the U.S. are forecast to grow from $5.6 billion in 2014 to nearly $175 billion by 2019 as consumers increasingly skip the hassle of writing a check or going to an ATM. But smartphone vendors like Apple could cripple the dominant player of 2016 (Venmo) if they make a serious push to own the space. xxx

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xxx One result of this could be is that we see consumers starting to more and more use the Direct Debit system From Frictionless Payments: Will they become a Mirage | David Parker | Pulse | LinkedIn David is completely right to point out that SCA just doesn’t fly - it just doesn’t work in the modern world. But as it stands it means that you will have to re-authenticate when you get out of an Uber. There’s no concept in the legislation of the “cardholder was present” token-in-device options for payments. What the Commission wants, of course, is for you to opt out of the “proprietary” (i.e., American) card options and use the direct-to-account options instead.

xxx The transport secretary says that he wants all train companies to make available these Oyster-card style cards to commuters by the end of 2018 From Commuters to get smart cards to travel across country by 2018 and Network Rail to lose sole control of track network, Chris Grayling says xxx

xxx The man, despite being twice ruled a threat to national security, has defeated repeated attempts to deport him by illegally keeping his true identity secret. From Terror suspect dodges deportation by refusing to reveal his real identity for 23 years xxx

xxx Interior Minister Aryeh Deri published a memorandum on Thursday recommending that all Israeli citizens be required to obtain a biometric identity card, with personal details stored on a digital database. From Government plans mandatory biometric ID | The Times of Israel xxx

xxx The government is concurrently working on developing a common mobile phone app that can be used by shopkeepers and merchants for receiving Aadhaar-enabled payments bypassing credit and debit cards, PIN and password. From Govt plans Aadhaar-based app to replace debit, credit cards, PIN numbers - Livemint xxx

xxx The BBA, which represents 200 banks managing £7 trillion in UK assets, wants MPs to “lower the threshold” for intelligence-sharing and make it easier for institutions to help each other spot criminal transactions. From Bank chiefs demand new legal powers to help stop terrorists laundering money through London firms | London Evening Standard xxx

Forum friend Ian Grigg, who I always take very seriously indeed on any such topic, wrote about Corda on his blog and concluded with a powerful statement. Bitcoin told the users it wanted an unstoppable currency - sure, works for a small group but not for the mass market. Ethereum told their users they need an unstoppable machine - which worked how spectacularly with the DAO? Not. What. We. Wanted. Corda is the only game in town because it's the only one that asked the users. It's that simple. From Financial Cryptography: Corda Day - a new force xxx It seems to me, however, what Ian is pointing to as the greatest strength of their approach is also the greatest weakness. A staple feature of unimaginative management consultants presentations about innovation is some variation on the statement by Henry Ford that if you had asked users what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses coupled with some variation on the statement by Steve jobs that it was pointless ask

xxx In the UK, there have been robberies in which large quantities of gold and silver have been stolen from homes ( here’s some I wrote about a few years ago) xxx Why would anyone mess about with physical gold that you can drop, lose, have stolen etc. And I bet it’s hard to buy anything from Amazon with it. I’m more than happy for people to send me gold (you’re welcome to try the experiment) but generally speaking I’d prefer the dematerialised version sent to my Goldmoney account. From  Just popping out to get some gold | Consult Hyperion xxx Even i   xxx A return to the gold standard may be impractical or even undesirable, but the idea of new technology monetising the store of value that is gold seems altogether a different proposition. From  There have been worse ideas, surely? | Consult Hyperion xxx   xxx The Royal Mint and CME Group, the diverse derivatives marketplace, are collaborating on a “digitised gold offering" which will be traded on a blockchain –

 xxx Social media users should be forced to reveal their real names so police can track down jilted lovers who post “revenge porn”, a peer has said. [From  Revenge porn: Peer says Twitter users must reveal real names - Telegraph ]  xxxx

xxx Police later discovered Ghani and Mahmood carried out the fraud after stealing three utility bills from Mr To's mailbox. From Stockport identity fraud victim's £500k home put on market - BBC News xxx

xxx Even though many places now take credit cards, Apple Pay and other forms of cashless technology, the actual amount of notes and coins circulating in the country has doubled in 20 years. And that's while the economy and population has shrunk. More than 101 trillion yen (S$1.35 trillion) of cash was circulating at the end of October. It was used for more than 80 per cent of transactions by value in 2014. From Cash is still king in Japan, and that could be a problem for BOJ, Government & Economy - THE BUSINESS TIMES xxx

xxx With largest ATM network in the country under its wing, SBI handles on an average 10 million withdrawal transactions involving cash worth Rs 2,800 crore every day. From Banks to hire retired officials, extend working hours to stack up new currency notes in ATMs, branches | Business Standard News xxx

xxx “Re-configurations takes time so it has to be done one by one. Things should be normal in ten days. You have to understand there are 2 lakh ATMs in the country but there are only three to four vendors.” From Just 35,000 personnel to replenish ₹16 lakh crore in ATMs | business-news | Hindustan Times xxx

xxx What I expect most non-economists reading The Curse of Cash are confounded by is not the idea of abolishing physical notes and coins – on many levels this is appealing, particularly its consequences for criminal activity. No, what’s bizarre is his insistence on charging negative interest rates on cash to stimulate demand under deflation. From Blogoff - The Curse of Cash - Philosophy of Money xxx

A few days ago Ed. received a call from RBS – his bankers (well he assumed that it was the real RBS), asking if he was currently in Edinburgh trying to cash a dodgy cheque backed by a dodgy driver’s licence, all in Ed’s. name.  No said Ed. Thank you for your help, said RBS: we are here to safeguard your money.  Happy ending.  Well, except that  this morning  a cheque (on a different numbering sequence) for £7,332 was debited to the company bank account. Well done RBS fraud team for letting through a fake cheque with a fake signature, backed by a fake licence card, having already spotted the problem.

xxx Central banks could set one interest rate on digital cash held by households and another on banks’ excess reserves From Blogoff - The Curse of Cash - Philosophy of Money xxx

Well, that was the fun. The nice people at the Meaning Conference gave me 13 minutes to try to explain what a blockchain technology is, what blockchains might do, and what the implications might be, to an audience of largely creative people. Quite a challenge.   Since they were creative types, I thought I ought to frame my explanations with poetry rather than mathematics. I decided to start with the Ur-statement of ordered immutability, the Rubiyaat of Omar Khayyam: “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” You can see the revised version of the slide deck here (we accidentally sent the wrong version on the day, but it really didn’t matter). It sets out the revised “4x4x4” model of shared ledgers, so that there is context for talking about the blockchain, and then quickly works through how there are different kinds of blockchains (and bitcoin is only one

xxx Apple has signed a deal with credit card processing behemoth Cuscal, giving an additional 31 banks access to the Apple Pay contactless payment facility. From 31 more Australian banks have partnered with Apple Pay | finder.com.au xxx

xxx This security/usability trade-off is not inherent to Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), and in fact the opposite is more commonly true: in order for SCA to be secure it must also be usable “because if the security is usable, users will do the security tasks, rather than ignore or circumvent them”. From Strong Customer Authentication in the Payment Services Directive 2 – Bentham’s Gaze xxx

xxx Fashion brand Babyghost has partnered with Chinese blockchain-as-a-service company BitSE and its VeChain project to deliver a range of clothes incorporating NFC tags and verified using blockchain technology. From Fashion brand adds NFC and blockchain for authentic personal clothing • NFC World xxx

xxx McDonald’s is planning to launch a mobile order and pay service in up to 25,000 restaurants worldwide by the end of 2018, starting in the US next year From McDonald’s to launch mobile order and pay next year • NFC World xxx

In the US, the new NACHA same-day ACH will have a 5.2 cent per transaction fee that is paid by the originating institution to the receiving institution. It is up to the institutions whether they charge customers anything for it. But even if they were to pass that whole cost on to merchants, my guess is that the merchants will prefer the low-cost, same-day payment over the existing schemes (e.g., debit cards).

xxx A new Federal Reserve study finds while consumer habits around cash are changing, its popularity remains high From With a Flurry of New Ways to Pay, Cash Hangs On - Real Time Economics - WSJ I’m not sure I would say “high”. What the Fed study actually shows is that cash was 40% of all transactions in 2012, 32% of all transactions now. So it’s fallen from being used for less than half of all transactions to less than a third. That doesn’t sound like “hanging on” to be honest. What was most interesting, to my mind, was that fact that the use of cash for P2P transactions has gone up despite the advance of Venmo. My guess is that cash displaced checks.

xxx These costs might all be worth it if there were any proof that anti-money-laundering laws lowered crime rates. But the laws don't even put a dent in money laundering. A Brookings Institution scholar testified before Congress that 99.9% of dirty money in the United States is successfully laundered. [From The $7 Billion Laundry Bill - Forbes.com ] Perhaps there has been some progress, because a more recent study in the UK suggested that some 0.75% of the dodgy cash is being intercepted now. But the general point holds. Our mental model is all wrong. We shouln't be trying (and failing at great expense) to keep dirty money out of the system, we should be getting it into the system and then using the modern technologies at our disposal - data analytics, forensics, machine learning and artificial intelligence - to work out who is up to no good so that law enforcement resources can be properly targeted.

xxx The conman, known only as Adil, has been exposed for selling fake residency cards to immigrants in Birmingham – and charging up to £600 per ID card. From Undercover Criminal reveals 'Adil' who is selling fake IDs to illegal immigrants in Birmingham | Daily Mail Online xxx

xxx So is a blockchain based identity practical? I think the answer is “yes” but it needs to be designed very carefully. It may also need to start with the sort of areas that can manage it best and already need a virtual identity (such as land registration or financial services transactions). From Identity, verification and blockchains xxx

xxx But her company struggles with what she estimates to be an effective tax rate of nearly 50 percent, as well as having to deal almost exclusively in cash. Because marijuana remains illegal under federal law, access to banking services is severely restricted. From From Colorado, a glimpse at life after marijuana legalization - The Boston Globe xxx

xxx Each plant for sale must be tagged with a radio frequency identification chip From From Colorado, a glimpse at life after marijuana legalization - The Boston Globe xxx

I happened to be reading Instrument Change 2013-2018E Cash down 33% Check down 50% Credit Card up 64% Debit Card up 48% Electronic up 62% I think that as a longer-term guide these figures are misleading, because I am convinced they underestimate the impact of instant payments. If the US banks are sucessful with Zelle, I'd expect to see electronic payments grow more rapidly at the expense of cash, checks and cards as we shift to an app and API infrastructure for payments.

As I have long maintained, taxis are the prosaic benchmark for a mass-market payment technology. If you can pay with it in a cab, then it’s a mass market technology. xxx From Monday 31 October, all black cabs will be required to have a contactless card payment reader, either fixed or handheld. Although from January 2017, cabs will need to have a card reader installed on the passenger side of the glass. From Black cabs to support contactless payments next week, no more stopping at cash machines - Pocket-lint xxx

xxx Today, information concerning the assets and liabilities of even “public” companies is obscured, widely dispersed and often untrustworthy. But imagine a future in which a target company’s internal financial and transactional history (including all substantive contracts with third parties) is readily accessible online to permissioned legal counsel and financial auditors, fully traceable back to their sources, immutable and completely trustworthy. From Smart Contracts and the Role of Lawyers (Part 3) – About Lawyering Transactions on Blockchains – Biglaw KM xxx

You’ve probably read about Zcash . It’s the new kid on the bitcoin block, a cryptocurrency with the added special sauce of genuine anonymity rather than the pseudonymity that got some people into trouble for using the Satoshi system for a variety of nefarious purposes. The claim of the founders is that Zcash is electronic cash because it shares the characteristics of cash, such as fungibility.  Transactions remain confidential unless the counterparties real their addresses by “selective weakening” of the cryptographic protection. Now, I am sceptical about whether confidential transactions will get much traction in the mass market, but that does not mean that do not have a point.  “If you start with a perfect electronic cash system building block, then you can build an electronic cash system with selective weakening in a way that makes sense for society.” From  ZCash Will Be a Truly Anonymous Blockchain-Based Currency - IEEE Spectrum Adam Back is, as you would expect, completely co

xxx Users can purchase Dunkin’ Donuts mGifts in Messages using Apple Pay, and once received, the mGifts can be moved into the Dunkin’ Mobile App and registered for use. From Dunkin’ Donuts Leverages Mobile Gifting | NACS Online – Media – News Archive xxx

Money2020 was pretty different this year. I’m glad I went, it remains one the most important events in our calendar and it’s a fantastic opportunity for Consult Hyperion folk to meet up with all of our key customers and soon-to-be customers. And I’ll go again next year. But… it’s not like in the old days. Money2020 has matured into a mainstream business event. It’s no longer a place where people go to see fascinating presentations on what a blockchain is or how P2P lending works. It’s not longer a place where people go to watch passionate debate on panels full of conflicting views of the future. It’s a place where people go to do serious business. Here I am, for example, engaging in an in-depth discussion about the business opportunities for Payment Service Providers (PSP) because of the European Commission’s Second Payment Services Directive (PSD) open API provisions on the retail payments ecosystem in the UK, in the light of the UK Treasury’s parallel initiative, the Open Banking W

xxx Half of adults in Britain now carry less than £5 in cash in their purses or wallets amid a surge in popularity for online shopping and contactless card payments, new research shows. From Cashless society: Average Briton now carries less than £5 Surprisingly, the same survey showed that 7% of Brits had more than £50 on them, which I thought surprising.

xxx This rising phenomenon of frustration is what executive general manager of Australia Post’s Trusted eCommerce Solutions division, Andrew Walduck calls “identity friction” From Would you trust a digital identity? | The Mandarin xxx

xxx Witness protection in the age of Facebook is a whole lot more complicated because protecting your privacy in an online age is a minefield From  Witness for the prosecution | Consult Hyperion xxx xxx An identity service founded on the principles of post-modern relativism thus has no problem dealing with the multiple identities. In essence, it would treat all identities as pseudonyms. The use of the pseudonym that happened to coincide with your “real” name would not be a special case. From Witness for the prosecution | Consult Hyperion xxx

xxx A few forward-thinking banks, such as U.S. Bank, BBVA and USAA, have been exploring opportunities to themselves act as identity providers. They have to know everything about their customers under anti-money-laundering regulations, but other businesses don't. Netflix, for example, may need to know that someone is old enough to view adult content, or located in a jurisdiction where certain material is not under copyright restrictions, but it doesn't need a birthdate or a street address. From Wells Fargo Fiasco Lays Bare a Broken Identity System | Bank Think xxx

xxx If you are a spy, or an undercover policeman, or in the witness protection programme, or perhaps even a restaurant critic, you may have perfectly legitimate reasons (in some cases very literally a matter of life and death) for wanting one identity asserted over another. From Witness for the prosecution | Consult Hyperion xxx

For many, many years I have had a John Lewis MasterCard. It gives cash back in John Lewis vouchers and is our preferred card for household spend. For what seems like the last century, when I sit down to check the credit card bills once per month I have paid    So, I logged in and sent a few grand to my John Lewis account, logged out and went on my way. I got a text message from my bank saying that the few grand had been transferred and forgot all about it. A couple of days later, I logged in to 

It’s an old meme on this blog, but I think it is essentially true that the Big Brother of Orwellian nightmare isn’t really the government, who do their best to spy on us all the time in order to track down people who post abusive tweets and such like, but us. We are Big Brother. The mobile phone and the Internet have combined to I’m sure most people, as I do, assume that if they are in a business meeting them someone will be recording them on a pen with a movie camera in it or through their glasses or whatever. But what is to be done?. I remember a super story about this that I saw in a newspaper a while ago. Some Austrian wildlife photographers had set up cameras in a forest in order to capture exotic forest creatures going about their business, but instead caught an Austrian politician up to his Members of the Carinthian Hunting Society in southern Austria are accustomed to observing animals in the wild, such as the western European red deer or wild boar, with the help of cameras

xxx In an interview with Nikkei news agency, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company intends to use its products – Apple Pay, iPhone, and Apple Watch – to become “a catalyst for taking cash out of the system.” “We don’t think the consumer particularly likes cash,” he said. Cook also said From Apple Promotes A Cashless Society In Japan (AAPL, SNE) | Investopedia xxx

xxx The blockchain does not solve this problem. It records a decision, but it does not record the circumstances. From Distributed proof of jerk – Medium xxx

xxx I've talked before about how privacy is not a "thing," it's a tradeoff. From Privacy Is About Tradeoffs... And Things Go Wrong When Those Tradeoffs Are Not Clear | Techdirt xxx xxx a big problem is that the tradeoffs aren't as clear or as explicit as they should be. From  Privacy Is About Tradeoffs... And Things Go Wrong When Those Tradeoffs Are Not Clear | Techdirt xxx

xxx “We would like to be a catalyst for taking cash out of the system,” Cook said. “We don’t think the consumer particularly likes cash.” From Apple's Next Goal: Killing Paper Money Once and For All xxx

xxx Chris Grayling said by the end of 2018 everyone should be able to travel with a ‘flick of a card’ or the ‘touch of a mobile phone’. He said passengers should never have to queue again for a ticket, and should be able to buy them from the comfort of their home or while enjoying a coffee at the train station. From Transport Secretary says passengers should be able to pay with a 'flick of a card' | Daily Mail Online xxx

xxx Criminals blew up 492 cash machines across Europe in the first half of 2016, an 80% increase on the same period the previous year, according to figures from the European ATM Security Team (East). Most of the attacks used gas, although 110 involved solid explosives, says East, with hits causing an average loss of EUR16,600, although this does not take into account the significant collateral damage done to equipment and buildings. From Surge in explosive attacks on European ATMs xxx

xxx As of today Seqr customers in the UK are now able to quickly and simply link their bank account to the Seqr app and make payments directly from their bank account. From Seqr launches contactless payments service in the UK xxx

snippet Speaking of the direction where the disruption will come from, Yermack sees three potential players. These include challengers (complete outsiders looking for disruption); collaborators (like Overstock and R3); and regulators (countries like the UK, Australia, and Canada). He was optimistic that regulators might be the most active agents of change, even going so far as to mandate changes that enable the technology to be used more broadly. [From | Could Bitcoin Be the Future of Blockchain Post Trade? ] snippet

As I always tell everyone, the fastest way to learn is by arguing with smart people. So I particularly enjoyed arguing with old chum Ian Grigg about the relationship between cash use and tax evasion. I decided to take the time to go and research some up-to-date figures. The average bank spends £40m a year on KYC Compliance, according to a recent Thomson Reuters Survey, which also revealed that some banks spend up to £300M annually on KYC (Know Your Customer) Compliance and Customer Due Diligence (CDD). [From  The spiralling costs of KYC for banks and how FinTech can help | ITProPortal ] So let’s say a £1 billion for the big four and another £1 billion for the rest. So £2 billion in KYC. And that doesn’t include (obviously) the £5 billion that the UK Treasury estimates that UK banks spend on "financial crime compliance" (which I assume means AML, CTF and PEP). So… that’s something like £7 billion on compliance and presumably tax evasion is one of the main crimes that it i

snippet Big questions remain for all these guys about security. How much of the data used for verification will be kept? How will the data be protected? To what standard? [From net.wars ] snippet

Some people really can seen into the future. 50 years ago this was already clear In 1968, Paul Armer of the RAND Corporation testified in front of a U.S. Senate subcommittee about his concerns for privacy in the future. [From The Privacy Dangers of a Cashless Society Were Clear Over 40 Years Ago ] snippet snippet The first is that computer technology is introducing order-of-magnitude reductions in the cost of collecting, transmitting, and processing information. [From  The Privacy Dangers of a Cashless Society Were Clear Over 40 Years Ago ] snippet snippet Second, centralization of data is usually a concomitant of computer use. The payoff to successful snooping is much greater when all the facts are stored in one place. Though most of the data to complete a dossier on every citizen already exists in the hands of the government today, it is normally so dispersed that the cost of collecting it and assembling it would be very high. [From  The Privacy Dangers of a Cashl

xxx The technology that repelled the hackers was a style of software programming known as formal verification. From Computer Scientists Close In On Perfect, Hack-Proof Code | Huffington Post xxx

xxx American money is private. Sweden has embraced cashlessness more readily in part because it finds the value of currency in the transfer and velocity, the social path it follows, the bonds it traces. It’s social: a network conception of wealth. From Imagining a Cashless World - The New Yorker xxx

xxx Last summer brought Sweden’s first Swish mugging, when two thugs beat up a man and forced him to Swish them. The criminals were rapidly identified by their account. From Imagining a Cashless World - The New Yorker This has to be a candidate for the most stupid crime of the year. I realise it is up against some pretty stiff competition - I absolutely love Drew Curtis’ Fark and some of the crimes curated there are jaw-dropping but, I mean… come on.   xxx The commission is on its third day of vetting traffic police officers in Mombasa where most have been found with huge M-Pesa transactions. From  Police officer on Sh45,000 salary moves Sh100m via Mpesa - Politics and policy Who knew a life in public service could be so rewarding?  xxx In other cases, rogue officers open mobile money outlets where an alleged offender is given the agent’s number and told to withdraw bribe money from their accounts — instead of sending. One does not need to be anywhere near the agent’s ph

xxx Swish, a peer-to-peer service like Venmo, launched in December, 2012. Less than four years later, it is used by half the Swedish population and by ninety per cent of adults under thirty. From Imagining a Cashless World - The New Yorker xxx

xxx Credit and debit cards and e-money make up only 17 percent of the Japan’s retail consumption, versus 85 percent in Korea, 56 percent in Singapore and 35 percent in India, according to a 2015 report by the credit association. Usage in the U.S., which includes data only for credit and debit cards, exceeds 40 percent. From Music Fans Start to Rock Japan's Cash-Loving Economy - Bloomberg I thought about a couple of things on reading this. First, it’s interesting how Japan (like Germany) is very cash dependent. The second is that the US doesn’t have e-money.

While I was behind enemy lines at  Security Printers 2016 , I picked a copy of a report from Guillame Lepecq’s Cash Essentials . One section of the report talks about the European Commission’s 2010 recommendation on Legal Tender, which I’ve written about before. A bank person mentioned to me that they think the European Commission’s recommendation on legal tender (22nd March 2010) is, as he put it, “strange and undesirable”. From  Tender moments | Consult Hyperion After I’d taken the time to read and reflect on the recommendation, I posted a more sober and balanced perspective, explaining why the recommendations are wrong. the European commission published a bonkers recommendation concerning the legal tender status of the euro From  Electronic legal tender | Consult Hyperion One of the main reasons that I thought that the recommendations were bonkers is because they have no strategic context and no economic purpose. They are wholly political. As Norbert Bielefeld of the E