Snippets

xxx In our view, the bigger narrative here is that Facebook will be able to implement a global identity scheme. From Calibra — Ask Not ‘What’ But, ‘Why’? – CoinShares – Medium . xxx

xxx If you really don't want to trust Facebook, then use another wallet. From Facebook’s Marcus Says Libra Association Will Be Independent ‘by Launch’ — The Information . xxx

When asked "Because you're going to be KYC-ing all these people… those two pieces, financial and identity, won't be shared at all with the rest of Facebook? Is that going to be something that can be proven beyond public statements?’, Mr. Marcus said "Yes. People will have the ability to look at how we're segregating data and how we're doing it”. From Facebook’s Marcus Says Libra Association Will Be Independent ‘by Launch’ — The Information . xxx

xxx Tearsheet Research polled a small sample of digital finance executives about the relative potential competitive impact of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA). The executives gave their readings in two categories: consumer banking and business banking, and over two time frames, over the next one-three years and the next three-ten years. In both banking categories, Amazon came in as the greatest threat overall, sometimes in a tie for the near-term time frame. The trend was strongest in business banking. From Amazon Forges Financial Alliances as Bank Execs Brace for Full Invasion . xxx

xxx While Gauthier did not exactly say that Libra was unnecessary, he doesn’t believe there’s a case for anything similar at Amazon. From Amazon Forges Financial Alliances as Bank Execs Brace for Full Invasion . xxx

xxx Neven says that Google’s best quantum chips have recently been improving at an exponential rate. (This rapid improvement has been driven by a reduction in the error rate in the quantum circuits. Reducing the error rate has allowed the engineers to build larger quantum processors, Neven said.) From Does Neven’s Law Describe Quantum Computing’s Rise? | Quanta Magazine . xxx

xxx A Chinese woman in Cangzhou, Hebei, bought a 190,000 yuan ($27,500) car with 66 bags of coins. Workers spent three days counting the coins, estimated to amount to around 130,000 yuan ($18,800). The remainder was paid electronically. From Buying a car with coins - Inkstone . xxx

As Ed Conway noted in The Times recently , Mark Zuckerberg once observed that “in a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company”. Indeed it is. And in fact it just got a lot more like a government. Companies have loyalty points, but governments have currencies, which are like loyalty points but with standing armies. You can hardly have failed to notice that Mr. Zuckerberg's highly successful advertising company Facebook is now planning to have a currency of its own.  The currency is called Libra and the media has been full of commentary about it the new blockchain that will support it (created by the Libra Network) and the new wallets that it will be stored in (created by Calibra, a Facebook subsidiary). Whatever you think about Facebook, or social media in general, or Bitcoin and its ilk, there’s no getting around that this is a big deal and it was unsurprising that it attracted such wide media coverage. Now, putting to one side whether it is a cur

xxx "Peak-to-peak growth – which measures the difference between peak levels of notes in circulation (usually in the run up to Christmas) each year – was just 0.58% in 2018 and 0.77% in 2017. This compares to 10% in 2016, and above 5% in the decade preceding. Are we at a turning point? The flat growth in recent years suggests that this may be the case, with banknote demand reflecting falling transactional use of cash for the first time." From "Bitesize: The end of a paradox? – Bank Underground" . xxx

xxx "it strikes a that, to use Jaron Lanier’s term in ‘Who owns the future?’, the ‘economic avatars’ that arise at the intersection of the mobile phone and the social network may well prove to be more useful to a great majority of the world’s population than their ‘official’ identities even if they have them and indispensable to them if they do not." From "Identity might work better bottom up | Consult Hyperion" . xxx

xxx "'Con man swindled more than £40million out of tycoons including the Aga Khan by wearing silicon masks to impersonate France's foreign minister'" From "'Con man swindled more than £40m out of tycoons by impersonating France's foreign minister' | Daily Mail Online" . xxx

xxx "‘In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company,’ said Mr. Zuckerberg." From "Opinion | Launching a Global Currency Is a Bold, Bad Move for Facebook - The New York Times" . xxx

xxx "I can announce this evening a Treasury-led review of the payments landscape bringing together policymakers and regulators to make sure that our regulation and infrastructure keeps pace with the dizzying array of new payments models." From "Mansion House dinner speech 2019 - Philip Hammond - GOV.UK" . xxx

xxx At a conference today, Carney warned that if any crypto asset does become widely adopted, it would become “instantly systemic” and have to be subject to strong regulation. From Facebook unveils new ‘currency’ - Central Banking . xxx

xxx Neither a true currency nor bearing all the hallmarks of a typical crypto asset, Libra will run on a system similar to a blockchain, without being decentralised in the same way as most crypto assets. It will be backed by a “reserve” of liquid assets. From Facebook unveils new ‘currency’ - Central Banking . xxx

xxx "The report — the largest-scale study of malicious bots in the EOS ecosystem — also found 51 percent of unique accounts and 75 percent of total transactions were driven by non-human accounts. Bot activity threatens the integrity of the blockchain industry, as user activity, transaction volume, and daily volume are among the most frequently called-upon metrics for determining technological validity, and precisely what is being faked, said Victor Fang, CEO of AnChain." From "Study: 75% of EOS Dapp Transactions Are Now Made By Bots - CoinDesk" . xxx

The opening keynote at Identity Week in London was given by Oliver Dowden, the Minister for implementation at the Cabinet office and therefore the person in charge of the digital transformation of government. To people like me, digital identity is central to digital transformation of government (and the digital transformation of everything else, for that matter) so I was looking forward to hearing the UK government's vision for digital identity. I got there early, and accompanied the Minister on his visit to the IDEMIA stand where he was shown a range of attractive burgundy passports. In his keynote, the Minister said that the UK is seen as being at the cutting edge of digital identity and that GOV.UK Verify is at the heart of that success.  (For foreign visitors, perhaps unfamiliar with this cutting edge position, a spirit of transparency require me to note that back on 9th October 2016, Mr. Dowden gave written statement HCWS978 to Parliament, announcing that ,the government w

xxx "Most existing digital identity solutions are either centralized (e.g., national identity cards) or individualistic (e.g., most ‘self-sovereign’ identity proposals). Outside of digital life, however, identity is typically social (for instance, ‘individual’ data such as birthdate is shared with parents) and intersectional (viz., different data and trust are shared with different others)." From "Verifying Identity as a Social Intersection by Nicole Immorlica, Matthew O. Jackson, E. Glen Weyl :: SSRN" . xxx

xxx "Another reason for caution over retail CBDC among central banks in advanced economies is the concern that commercial banks may suffer a loss in retail deposits to accounts at the central bank and, thus, lose a key funding source, potentially impacting credit provision." From "Motivations and prospects for central bank digital currency - Central Banking" . xxx

xxx "housands of taxi drivers in the Chinese city of Xi’an are now being verified by facial recognition technology when they get behind the wheel. And, true to the country’s security ethos, they’re also being monitored constantly by an AI system to ensure they aren’t engaging in prohibited activities such as smoking or using a smartphone while driving." From "Facial Recognition Verifies Taxi Drivers in China - Mobile ID World" . xxx

xxx "And in an even more dramatic measure, Apple's universal login will let you hide your email address from third-party services. Unlike Facebook and Google, Apple will randomly generate an email address on your behalf, which then forwards communications from companies and institutions to your real address." From "'Sign In With Apple' Protects You in Ways Google and Facebook Don't | WIRED" . xxx

Many years ago, I read David Edgerton’s “The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History Since 1900″ , which really got me thinking about think technological change. I’ve just finished Richard Baldwin’s “ The Globotics Upheaval—Globalisation, Robotics and The Future of Work ” and now I’m just getting started with the Carl Benedit Frey’s “ The Technology Trap—Capital, Labor and Power in the Age of Automation ”. All of these books make me think about the impact of new technology and the gap between new technologies appearing, and greatly benefiting their “owners” and the living standards of the majority improving because of the productivity improvements that these new technologies bring. Basically, people in England used to get paid for piss. Then, because of technological change, they didn’t. And it was just tough. It’s a good job this happened a couple of hundred years ago, because if it happened today then armies of lawyers would be getting injunctions against organic chemists for

The UK once had a substantial wool trade. In fact, England’s medieval prosperity was founded on wool. In the 13th century there were three sheep to every man, woman and child and wool was the biggest export. At this time, the job of the “fuller” was vital. The fuller was responsible for treating the wool with urine. Officially recognised as one of the worst jobs in history , the fuller spent all day trampling wool knee-deep in barrels of stale urine. It would take a good couple of hours of urine-soaked trampling to produce decent wool. Fulling went back to ancient times , but in medieval times England needed lots of fullers and lots of urine, a story that I have told countless times at countless events to make a point about technological change. Making another common clothing material, leather, was just as disgusting. Leather treatment needed something called “alum”. Alum is a fixing agent that was used in a number of different industrial processes, including leather and wool manufact

Madame Lagarde, the woman in charge of money, gave a speech in Japan recently in which she said that disruption in finance “is likely to come from the big tech firms, who will use their enormous customer bases and deep pockets to offer financial products based on big data and artificial intelligence”. But why will this be disruptive? After all, banks have big data and I don’t doubt that they could get hold of some intelligence from somewhere. So why is it disruptive?

The opening keynote at this year’s London Identity Week was given by Oliver Dowden , the Minister for Implementation at the Cabinet Office. Mr. Dowden is the Minister in charge of the digital transformation of government. To people like me, digital identity is central to digital transformation of government (and the digital transformation of everything else, for that matter) so I was looking forward to hearing the UK government's vision for digital identity.  In his keynote, the Minister said that the UK is seen as being at the cutting edge of digital identity and that GOV.UK Verify is at the heart of that success.  (On 9th October 2016, Mr. Dowden gave written statement HCWS978 to Parliament, announcing that the government was going to stop funding GOV.UK Verify after 18 months with the private sector responsible for funding after that.) Right now you can't use a  GOV.UK Verify  identity provider to log into your bank or any other private sector service provider. But

xxx "The Common Business-Oriented Language was developed nearly 60 years ago and has been gradually replaced by newer, more versatile languages such as Java, C and Python. Although few universities still offer COBOL courses, the language remains crucial to businesses and institutions around the world. In the United States, the financial sector, major corporations and parts of the federal government still largely rely on it because it underpins powerful systems that were built in the 70s or 80s and never fully replaced. (GRAPHIC: tmsnrt.rs/2nMf18G) And here lies the problem: if something goes wrong, few people know how to fix it. The stakes are especially high for the financial industry, where an estimated $3 trillion in daily commerce flows through COBOL systems. The language underpins deposit accounts, check-clearing services, card networks, ATMs, mortgage servicing, loan ledgers and other services." From "Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys'

xxx In practice, your hoard of digital data can cause endless complications for loved ones, particularly when they don’t have access to your passwords. “I cursed my father every step of the way,” says Richard, a 34-year-old engineer from Ontario who was made executor of his father’s estate four years ago. Although Richard’s father left him a list of passwords, not one remained valid by the time of his death. Richard couldn’t access his father’s online government accounts, his email (to inform his contacts about the funeral), or even log on to his computer. For privacy reasons, Microsoft refused to help Richard access his father’s computer. From What happens to our online identities when we die? | Television & radio | The Guardian . xxx

I genuinely did not know this, having never been to either of the noted lap-dancing clubs Secrets or Platinum Lace, but such establishments require customers to buy vouchers, a private currency, to pay the dancers. The dancers do not, as you might expect in the modern world, accept credit cards (even contactless fnar fnar). The customers are charged an entirely reasonable commission on the exchange of fiat currencies for the private currency. Presumably there are safety and security issues that drive the use of the private currency but I do remember reading about problems that occur in transactions of a similar context where the recipient, generally a marginalised woman, is presented with a collapsing currency (eg, Sterling) and cannot be sure of the value and therefore whether to accept the cash of note. Anyway, for whatever reason, there is a private currency is circulation. As a result, the clubs are in a dispute with HM Revenue & Customs over whether they should pay VAT on th

xxx We found that an SMS code sent to a recovery phone number helped block 100% of automated bots, 96% of bulk phishing attacks, and 76% of targeted attacks. On-device prompts, a more secure replacement for SMS, helped prevent 100% of automated bots, 99% of bulk phishing attacks and 90% of targeted attacks. From Google Online Security Blog: New research: How effective is basic account hygiene at preventing hijacking . xxx

National Institute for Standards  and Technology (NIST) 8105 Report on Post-Quantum Cryptography (April 2016) frames the situation nicely, noting that in recent years there has been a substantial amount of research on quantum computers – machines that exploit quantum mechanical phenomena to solve mathematical problems that are difficult or intractable for conventional computers. If large-scale quantum computers are ever built, they will be able to break many of the public-key cryptosystems currently in use. This would seriously compromise the confidentiality and integrity of digital communications on the Internet and elsewhere. The UK National Cyber Security Centre concurs that the security of current approaches to asymmetric cryptography, as deployed in real-world systems that usually rely on either the difficulty of factoring integers (RSA) or calculating discrete logarithms (Diffie-Hellman, Elliptic Curve) is compromised in the presence of quantum computers. Today, there are two k