Snippets

xxx "Denmark’s Business Minister Rasmus Jarlov. ‘Fewer people use cash today, so we think there should be a balance between the difficulty and security risks placed on business owners and the benefits of accepting cash,’" From "Something rotten in the state of Denmark? Govt wants stores to stop accepting cash — RT Business News" . xxx

xxx "Generally, economists believe the surge is related to people around the world wanting to hoard cash, a similar force that’s driven the interest in cryptocurrencies. High denomination, high value currency notes have historically been a preferred form of payment for criminals, given the anonymity, lack of transaction record and relative ease with which they can be brought across borders." From "Surge in $100 bills in circulation may be linked to global corruption" . xxx

xxx "Armed with sledgehammers, the organised gangs have stolen £120,000 out of 70 machines in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in the past 12 months." From "Cleaning up: vacuum gang sucks money out of parking ticket machines" . xxx

xxx "Under the FSC's plans, established banks must open their payment network to all fintech payment service providers as well as other banks. That would enable customers to use a single application to access their accounts at different banks and make payments. Fees charged on fintech firms for using the network will be lowered to one tenth of the current level to ensure fair competition. Alongside this, amendments to the coutnry's Electronic Financial Transaction Act will mandate all banks to offer payment service providers with standardised APIs for money transfer. It will also prohibit banks from any discriminatory action against payment service providers using their payment system in processing money transfer and charging fees. In the medium to long term, the FSC says it will consider allowing qualified fintech payment service providers direct access to the payment system without relying on banks’ services." From "Korean banks ordered to open up payment

xxx Back in the 1930s, according to John Maynard Keynes, one of the jobs of a district commissioner in Uganda was to inspect and evaluate goats. The local unit of currency was the goat, so most goods were priced in goats. So when a local sought to discharge a debt by presenting an animal that was exceptionally sick, old or otherwise undesirable, the district commissioner would rule on whether that particular animal was fit to count as a “goat” for transactional purposes — whether it was, as it were, a negotiable goat. From Cryptocurrencies untether the goat of sovereign tender | Financial Times . xxx

xxx "New Jersey state Sen. Nellie Pou… added that she had asked Amazon, which is operating five pop-up stores and one bookstore in New Jersey, to come up with ideas for how they could serve those without a bank account, but that she did not hear back. Amazon declined to comment." From "Legislation could force stores to take your cash - SFGate" . If I was Amazon, I’d have sent her $10 in Amazon Cash together with recommendations for books about payments.

xxx "Business onboarding, it concluded, is predominantly a manual, paper-based process, which is costly for the bank and slow for the customer, with new regulations, such as AMLD5, only adding complexity. The average time to onboard a business banking customer has increased to 32 days, with the total cost of KYC processes forecasted to increase by nearly 20%." From "Customer onboarding is too costly and slow, concludes report – IBS Intelligence" . xxx

At the end of 2018 we put together our “live five” areas where we think our customers should be focusing on over the coming year. I think some people were surprised to see us put digital wallets on the list but we were sure, based on projects that we were already involved in, that wallets are set for a resurgence.We are hardly the only set of industry observers to think this (in fact Accenture made a similar prediction in February of this year, saying that "wallets for both e-commerce and in-store payments will start appearing in sectors such as supermarkets, fuel and quick-service restaurants, emulating the success of Starbucks and Walmart”.     (Accenture also post , and focused on a slick checkout process using biometric authentication.) From Payments predictions for 2019 | Accenture Banking Blog . xxx

xxx But his manager was able to checked an app which tracked the driver’s steps and showed that contrary to his claims he had walked around the outside of the house and garden. From Amazon driver stole customer's puppy while making a delivery, court hears . xxx

Here’s an absolutely typical fraud that we see in the UK on a daily basis. A Mr Pibworth instructed a firm of solicitors to pay money out of his client account at midday on January 25th of this year. It was a Friday (as is typical for these frauds). He asked for the money to be paid into a joint account that he and his brother have. However, a few hours later the solicitors received an email purporting to be from Mr Pibworth ( but which was actually from a fraudster ) with new instructions saying the money should be paid into a different account. Which they then did. And £60,000 was sent off to the fraudsters. (The same firm of solicitors, incidentally, lost £100K to a similar fraud in 2016 .) Still, no harm done. The compo will kick in, won’t it? Yes, there’s a compensation scheme. Under a new code of conduct for this sort of thing, you don’t have to bother checking that you are sending to the correct account any more because the banks have to pay up if you transfer cash to frauds

xxx The intention is that retailers will soon be able to offer cashback without the need for a purchase. From Lloyds looks to unlock access to cash . xxx

xxx British man flew from the Czech Republic to Newcastle on the wrong passport after accidentally taking his friend's and leaving him stranded. Allan Poole, 43, from Whitley Bay, travelled from Prague to Newcastle via Amsterdam on a KLM flight. The passport was checked at least four times during the journey, but the mistake was not picked up. From Whitley Bay man stranded in Prague after friend flew home on his passport - BBC News . xxx

Our new and hopefully to be regular window cleaner was due twenty quid. They asked for cash, which of course I do not have, or a cheque, which of course I could not be bothered to deal with as it would have meant finding the cheque book and I have no idea where it is. Instead, I asked them to get their office to call me with their bank details. The office phoned to give me a sort code and account number, so I went online and used the Faster Payment Service (FPS) to send them a quid. When they phoned a day or two later to tell me that they had the quid, then I sent the other nineteen. Now, every time I come home and find a compliment slip from them on the mat because they have cleaned the windows, it takes me about 10 seconds to use my Barclays mobile banking app to send them the twenty pounds that I owe them. I bought a new car last month. Well, it was an old car. But new to me. I went to look at the car and paid a deposit by credit card. Since it was going to take a couple of days to

xxx "Tech-savvy churches are bringing in 97 percent more donations as they turn to contactless technology for their collection plates. The Church of England has been rolling out contactless collection plates across the UK since last September with churches in London, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Peterborough at the front of the queue to try it out." From "Churches see rise in donations after introducing contactless collection plates - Keep The Faith ® The UK's Black and multi-ethnic Christian magazine" . xxx

So here’s a really interesting problem that perhaps new technology might be able to help with. The problem is this: how do you have a fair lottery that allows the winner to remain anonymous? This is a genuine problem. Look at the lucky chap who just won $160 MILLION DOLLARS in a Jamaican lottery. He turned up to collect his CHEQUE (hardly the best way to keep his identity secret - I really doubt it was made out to “cash”) dressed in a cloak and a “Scream” mask for fear of being identified.  

xxx Both houses of the New Jersey state legislature passed the bill Thursday, leaving only Gov. Phil Murphy to decide whether businesses must still accept cash payments. From Bill outlawing ‘cashless’ businesses passes New Jersey legislators | PhillyVoice . xxx

xxx "There's a lot of restaurants and other businesses that want to go cashless," said John Longstreet, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association. He said he sees an upside to going cashless. "Because places that handle cash are less safe than those that don't have cash on hand. Everything is reported directly into the accounting system, taxes are paid. Whereas in a cash society, taxes aren't always paid," Longstreet added. "And consumers are getting used to it too. And they're asking for it." From Cashless trend worries lawmakers: "If it's not discrimination, it's elitism" - CBS News . xxx

xxx It's well understood that shops that accept bitcoin are really trying to segment the market and get a more affluent tech savvy crowd just to come in and shop but they really don't want to spend bitcoin, they just want those people to enter the premises.” From Who uses the bitcoin ATMs popping up at delis across the U.S.? . xxx

xxx A former Walmart executive said shopper theft was a major reason why the company killed Scan & Go, a cashierless-checkout technology, several months after expanding it to more than 100 stores. From Ex-Walmart exec says theft helped kill Walmart's cashierless tech - Business Insider . xxx

xxx It’s not just a deteriorating Moore’s Law. The other driver toward specialized processors is a new set of applications that are not amenable to general-purpose computing. For starters, you have platforms like mobile devices and the internet of things (IoT) that are so demanding with regard to energy efficiency and cost, and are deployed in such large volumes, that they necessitated customized chips even with a relatively robust Moore’s Law in place.  Lower-volume applications with even more stringent requirements, such as in military and aviation hardware, are also conducive to special-purpose designs.  But the authors believe the real watershed moment for the industry is being enabled by deep learning, an application category that cuts across nearly every computing environment – mobile, desktop, embedded, cloud, and supercomputing. Deep learning and its preferred hardware platform, GPUs, represent the most visible example of how computing may travel down the path from general-p

xxx "the main source of electoral fraud in the UK is not personation at the polling station but fraudulently-completed postal ballots, a situation that led one British judge to call it ‘a system that would disgrace a banana republic’." From "Voter ID is back, and this time it’s in Woking – 15Mb" . xxx

xxx "Using a difference-in-differences design on a 1.3-billion-observations panel, we find the laws have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation. These results hold through a large number of specifications and cannot be attributed to mobilization against the laws, measured by campaign contributions and self-reported political engagement. ID requirements have no effect on fraud either – actual or perceived. Overall, our results suggest that efforts to reform voter ID laws may not have much impact on elections." From "Strict ID Laws Don't Stop Voters: Evidence from a U.S. Nationwide Panel - Marginal REVOLUTION" . xxx

xxx "In the latest research, 29% of adults don’t use any cash for weekly purchases, up from 24% in 2015. Those consumers who claim that they still make all or nearly all purchases for cash fell to 18%, versus 24% in 2015." From "More Americans Say Farewell to Cash" . xxx

In line with the Taskforce, we have categorised cryptoassets into three types of tokens; Exchange tokens: these are not issued or backed by any central authority and are intended and designed to be used as a means of exchange. They are, usually, a decentralised tool for buying and selling goods and services without traditional intermediaries. These tokens are usually outside the perimeter. These are what I like of as “money-like” digital assets and I have expanded my discussion of these in the revised paperback edition of my book “Before Bablyon, Beyond Bitcoin” that will be published in a couple of months. Security tokens: these are tokens with specific characteristics that mean they meet the definition of a Specified Investment like a share or a debt instrument (described in more detail in Chapter 3) as set out in the RAO, and are within the perimeter. Given the combined demands of investor protection and “system” protection, I think we are some way from seeing these in the mas

xxx "Due to the new 'dynamic linking' requirements for remote electronic payments, online retailers will no longer be able to charge an estimated amount to a customer's card where the final amount is yet to be confirmed. Instead, the retailer will need to look at alternative mechanisms, such as obtaining authorisation for a maximum amount, but charging the final amount when it is known." From "Preparing for Strong Customer Authentication and Open Banking (with or without Brexit) - Fieldfisher" . xxx

One of the European Central Bank (ECB) board members, Yves Mersch, recently said that “for merchants, instant payments at the POI (point of interaction) could be a cost-efficient alternative to cards”. This is hardly a new idea (I’ve written about it frequently) and I think that there is a general feeling in the cards business that credit transfers could take a third or so of the card volume in a post-PSD2 Europe. There are really three reasons for this: First of all,  Secondly, Finally I think that the reason why credit transfer will be big is that it won’t be only banks and merchants instructing these transfers. As I wrote for Wired magazine back in 2017, it will be the internet giants. As I said then, "Facebook will ask for (and get) direct access to your bank account and the payments infrastructure. Next time you need to send your friend a tenner, you'll instant-message them the money, rather than opening up your boring bank app, fiddling about finding their ban

xxx "This essay argues that ‘data ownership’ is a flawed, counterproductive way of thinking about data. It not only does not fix existing problems; it creates new ones. Instead, we need a framework that gives people rights to stipulate how their data is used without requiring them to take ownership of it themselves." From "It’s time for a Bill of Data Rights - MIT Technology Review" . xxx

xxx "That’s why many of the problems about unfair uses of data can’t be solved by controlling who has access to it." From "It’s time for a Bill of Data Rights - MIT Technology Review" . xxx

A young relative of mine was coerced into spending this last week end at an English holiday camp resort. When she got there she was shocked to discover that, for whatever reason, they were cash only for the weekend! All over the complex were "cash only” signs! Remember, these signs are completely unfamiliar to anyone under the age of 30, especially from the South East of the country where Transport for London triggered the contactless revolution, because this a debit card generation in a country where more than half of card transactions are already contactless. Signs like this one would be invisible to her! So here’s a normal young person, all of her money is in the bank and she never goes to ATMs, so imagine her further horror of having to use an ATM on site to get cash which then charged her £1.50 to get her own money. Even more punishing was the fact she had to go back to the ATM again for more cash so yet another £1.50 charge!!! The question she asked over and over a

While I was thinking about this, I happened on an article in The New Yorker that really made me think about the importance of virtual identities, the practical impact of personae. The article concerned X Anderson, the Chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a "champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent”. Her thinking encapsulates and enlightens some of my long-held view on the need for transactional interaction via multiple virtual identities. She says that “people now have the freedom to have crosscutting identities in different domains". What she refers to her as domains are the different contexts in which transactions occur. As she goes on to day, "At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home, or with my friends". The ability to manage these separate identities and partition their use across domains is, she argues, utterly vital. The ability "to be able to slip in an

xxx "At fifty-nine, Anderson is the chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent," From "The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker" . xxx xxx "‘People now have the freedom to have crosscutting identities in different domains. At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home, or with my friends. The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?’ She paused. ‘That is what it is to be free.’" From "The Philosopher Redefining Equality | The New Yorker" .   xxx

xxx "The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just not true." From "There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology | WIRED" . xxx

xxx "I think it’s useful to distinguish two kinds of crypto-asset. Let us call these ‘imitative’ and ‘entitative’ respectively. An entitative crypto-asset (ECA) is an asset that only exists on a blockchain e.g. ‘bitcoins’ themselves (UTXO), or cryptokitties. An imitative crypto-asset (ICA) is an asset that exists on a blockchain, but which is intended to represent an asset that has an existence outside of the Blockchain e.g. a tokenised ‘e-key’ that controls a car." From "Bitcoin and the Promise of Independent Property Rights — a reply" . xxx

xxx "The proposal is for a central bank to divide the monetary base into two separate local currencies—cash and electronic money (e-money). E-money would be issued only electronically and would pay the policy rate of interest, and cash would have an exchange rate—the conversion rate—against e-money." From "Cashing In: How to Make Negative Interest Rates Work – IMF Blog" . xxx

When I was in New York a couple of weeks ago I had to visit a couple of different buildings for various meetings. At the first building, I was asked for identification . As I am English and not North Korean, I don't carry identification papers with me when I walk down the street and my British passport and British driving licence (neither of which the security guard could have verified even I had shown them to him) were locked up securely back in the hotel safe, so I presented my standard US identification document. This an old building pass from the previous Consult Hyperion office in midtown. It expired a couple of years ago, but it has my picture on it and it says David Birch it was accepted without question and I was allowed in. When I went into second building, I was asked to scan my driver's license ! They had a scanner on the counter to read the barcode on the back of US driver's licenses. Obviously I don't have a US driver's license, so I showed them my exp

A web reprint of the article "What is Cyberspace" by David Birch and Peter Buck. This article appeared in the Computer Law and Security Report, Volume X, Number Y (Date). Here it is, updated with hyperlinks and pictures for a new generation of readers... Introduction In a recent issue of the Computer Law & Security Report  [Zajac. Ethics & Computing (Part II) in Computer Law and Security Report, )] , Bernard Zajac suggested that readers might want to peruse some of the “cyberpunk” novels—in particular the works of William Gibson—in order to gain an insight into the organisation and behaviour of hackers. While wholly commending the incitement to read Gibson’s work, we feel that this view understates the breadth of vision of the cyberpunk genre and could mislead, because the “console men” and “keyboard cowboys” of Gibson’s works are not really the same people as the hackers of today. We thought it might therefore be both entertaining and stimulating to provide reader

xxx Substantial numbers still rely heavily on cash: 3.4 million people in the UK rarely use cash, but 2.2 million people rely almost wholly on cash, up from only 1.6 million people in 2014. From Cashing Out: The hidden costs and consequences of moving to a cashless society - RSA . It struck me as quite interesting that the number of people relying almost wholly on cash has gone up. I assumed that this was something to with “austerity"

xxx She added that Cotten held “sole responsibility for handling the funds and coins,” and the remaining team members have had no luck accessing the exchange’s cold wallets since. From QuadrigaCX Owes Customers $190 Million, Court Filing Shows - CoinDesk . Cold wallets, as I was just reading in a new book “ Blockchain and Decentralised Systems ” by Pavel Kravchenko (et al), A cold wallet is a digital wallet where private keys are stored and processed only on devices that do not have the ability to directly connect to the global internet. A simple example of deep cold storage is opening a safe deposit box and putting a USB stick containing an encrypted wallet file in it. The public (sending) addresses can be used any time to send additional bitcoins to the wallet, but spending the bitcoins would require physical access to the box (in addition to knowledge of the encryption password).

xxx Celebrated physicist Geoffrey West once observed that cities exhibit superlinear growth, meaning that as a city gets bigger, every person there becomes more productive. However, companies exhibit the opposite trend. Companies are nearly always killed by bureaucracy and administration crowding out creativity and innovation. Because, inside a company, "someone has got to take care of the taxes and the bills and the cleaning the floors and the maintenance of the building and all the rest of that stuff". Which is why, in the aftermath of the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911 into what became Exxon, Mobil, Chevron and other spinoffs, the value of what had been Standard Oil doubled within a year From Imperica - New knowledge for creative polymaths - Google and Facebook: the real reason they should be broken up is China . xxx There’s a very interesting NPR Planet Money podcast about this, explaining how far from impoverishing Rockefeller, the break up greatly enriched him