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xxx [Money] may become as David Birch has suggested synonymous with identity itself. The value of such personalized forms of currency- which is really just a measure of individual power- will be in a state of constant flux. From The Future of Money is Liquid Robots This does not seem an unreasonable prediction. With everyone liked to some form of artificial intelligence prices will be in a constant state of permanent and rarely seen negotiation between bots. From  The Future of Money is Liquid Robots xxx

xxx [Venmo] noted that it just doesn’t have the resources to support the API anymore, as it’s too busy working on its new peer-to-peer platform and its in-app payment service From Mobile App Reviews: Venmo Kills Off API for New Developers xxx

xxx The market for media of exchange will gravitate towards those systems with the lowest transaction costs, and in the case of proof-of-work digital currencies, that means those protocols that forever subsidise hashing costs with the coin’s seigniorage From Some Crypto Quibbles with Threadneedle Street | cryptonomics xxx

xxx A network made up of a few large mining nodes is basically a centralised system with none of the benefits centralisation might bring. From Some Crypto Quibbles with Threadneedle Street | cryptonomics xxx

xxx This job has been largely been left to the European Banking Authority (EBA) who have been mandated to define the necessary guidelines and regulatory technical standards (aka RTS – although they won’t be defining anything ‘technical’ as technologists might understand that term) which are subject to their own timelines. From PSD2, why the confusion? Oh, that’s why! | Killian Clifford | LinkedIn xxx

xxx Let's say you like the look of a house that is for sale. You judge it is worth - for argument’s sake - 100 rupees. The chances are the seller will tell you he will only take, say, 50 rupees as a formal payment and demand the rest in cash… It means the seller can avoid a hefty capital gains tax bill. Buyers benefit too because the lower the declared value of the property, the lower the property tax they will be obliged to pay. From How 'black money' saved the Indian economy - BBC News This means that Indians tend to have much smaller mortgages compared to the real value of their properties than elsewhere in the world and hence the system is more resilient against shocks to the system. Of course, the system concentrates wealth with rich people who can afford to pay cash, but the point made in the article holds.

OK, so fair enough, I was a little disappointed. The Open Banking Working Group published its Open Banking Standard . The Open Banking Working Group, which undertook a review last year at the request of the Treasury, is calling for information on banks’ products and customers to be more easily accessed by digital services, including comparison sites. From  Banks urged to share data so customers can shop around - FT.com Right underneath the heading "Open Banking Standard", the document says that its goal "in publishing this Framework today is to enable the accelerated building of an Open Banking Standard in the UK". Wait, what? We went from a “standard” to “a framework to accelerate the building of a standard"? This is why I was disappointed, to say the least. I thought the document might set out some actual APIs so that that both banks, fintechs, regulators and entrepreneurs could plan new products and services but the truth is  it reflects the political r...

xxx The API-fication of payments will continue to gather momentum, and has the potential to lead to a significant increase in new payment services and functionalities From Visa initiative fuels API-fication of payments xxx

xxx Bitcoin is more expensive and inconvenient than regular banking is, and far more expensive and inconvenient than regular banking could be if it starts supporting smart transactions on public ledgers without bothering with the baggage of mining. From Bram Cohen's answer to Bram Cohen: What is the state of Bitcoin in 2016? - Quora The robust (and accurate) remark from Bram Cohen (the chap who invented BitTorrent).

xxx Another neighbor and co-owner of the building, Sandeep Hingorani, lives in the top-floor studio — and for the past 10 months he has also rented Huang's unit, despite her not wanting him to live there. The problems started when an Airbnb user, "Jim Tako," asked to rent Huang's apartment. From Airbnb renter fooled neighbor, refused to leave - Business Insider xxx

xxx A consultation from the Department for Culture Media and Sport said "commercial providers" of porn should have verification controls to stop under 18s viewing the content. Companies that don't comply may face fines from a new porn regulator, or have their websites shut down. From UK's porn age checks set 'dangerous' precedent (Wired UK) xxx

xxx Whether that’s listing a spare room on Airbnb, driving for a few hours a week on Uber, completing a few DIY jobs on TaskRabbit or cleaning someone’s flat via Hassle. And as a customer of these services you’re required to trust that the individual you let into your house is as trustworthy as the stranger driving your car. From Onfido: Figuring out who perfect strangers are xxx Onfido run this data through an instant checking system, pulling the numbers and writing straight off your passport to check it is genuine and not stolen, and then cross-referencing this data with other databases. From  Onfido: Figuring out who perfect strangers are Ah. But this isn’t quite the same thing. If you are my Uber driver, there are lots of things I want to know about you, but who you are isn’t one of them. I want to know you a have clean driving licence, that the car is insured, that you don’t play loud music and annoy people with it. All sorts of things. Who you really are?  Whatever. Th...

So we went to the pub. For lunch. Seven of us. Say £20 per head. £100+ quid. Say £50 quid gross for the pub. Colleague goes to order food and drinks and pay at the bar. Apologetic barmaid comes over to explain that their “card machine” is down, so she can only accept cash. Under normal circumstances I would have simply walked out, feeling it wholly inappropriate to reward such a poorly managed establishment and, as a functioning actor in a capitalist economy, done my duty to depress their lunchtime takings. Here’s what we wanted to say: This is absurd. This is 2016 not 1916. Your card machine is down? Well, so what! Are you seriously telling me that mein host has no mobile phone number capable of registering for PingIt or PayM? That none of the staff or the pub itself have a PayPal account that I can send the money to? That neither the owners nor managers not contingency planners thought to tuck an iZettle behind the bar to use when the clunky and expensive GPRS terminal fails for o...

xxx Customers also use the same PIN on several cards to reduce the burden of remembering PINs From Are Payment Card Contracts Unfair? | Bentham's Gaze This is exactly what I do. I have one PIN for all of my credit cards and one PIN for all of my debit/prepaid cards.

xxx My own decidedly unscientific survey involved a shopping spree one recent morning to no fewer than seven different retail locations, which revealed exactly seven different chip-capable payment terminals instructing customers to “Please Swipe Card.” From The Great EMV Fake-Out: No Chip For You! — Krebs on Security xxx

xxx Allow users to not show their tweets to unauthenticated users.  From Putting out the Twitter trashfire — Medium xxx

Are central banks artefacts of the Industrial Revolution, like canal networks or newspapers, or are they indispensable? To be honest, I tend to the more revolutionary perspective. National currency and central banks were of their time. We didn’t used to have them and we won’t have them in the future. But in the short term, should these relics of a bygone monetary embrace digital cash? Here’s why I’m asking, as summarised nicely in the Deutsche Bank Research note on “ Instant Revolution of Payments ”. They say: When looking at the potential long-term effects of payment market evolution, a new question arises: which money will we pay with? Today, we mostly pay with commercial bank money. Nevertheless if the prevailing type of payment service providers were to change in the future, this would have an impact on the type of money transferred. Current EU regulation recognises bank deposits and electronic money for non-cash payment services. Given the wide range of potential instant payment...

xxx Parents who did not know the letters had been tampered with then paid the school fees into the crooks' bank accounts without realising. From Crooks put their own bank details on stolen school fee letters to steal 1000s of pounds | Daily Mail Online

I know, I know, they're not smart and they're not contracts. But in the well-known Birch-Pannifer-Parulava model for thinking about shared ledgers from a business perspective (a model that continues to be refined, even as I type), we've stuck with the term "contract" on our 4C layer, more for marketing reasons that anything else (clients like the "4C" model and find it easy to remember).   So I’m happy to continue to use the word contract But it does bother people, and I think we need to discuss it. I think folks know this and that’s why there’s been a subtle effort lately to avoid “contract” and “smart contract” in favor of more use-specific labels like “Distributed Application” or “DAO.” From Upacking the term ‘Smart Contract’ — Medium From Upacking the term ‘Smart Contract’ — Medium I did have an effort to introduce the new term LAPPS (i.e., Ledger APPlicationS) so as to have a simple and natural term, but it doesn't seem have gained muc...

xxx EBA Clearing and SIA have signed a letter of intent for the delivery of a pan-European infrastructure for instant payments by Q4 2017. From EBA Clearing and SIA team up for pan-European payments infrastructure - IBS Intelligence xxx

The the U.K.’s Faster Payments Service (FPS) has been very successful. The ability to send money from one account to another account instantly is actually quite transformational, but I still think that the full impact has yet to be felt. As we move into 2018 and the world of the newly-published Open Banking Standard , PSD2 and APIs then we will see instant payments built in to the applications that support our everyday lives. This morning when I caught the bus to work the cost of the bus ticket was charged to one of my credit cards, which meant that the bus company had to store my card information and that I had to remember the three digit code on the back of the card to complete the purchase. In the future, I will tell the bus company I want a ticket and put my thumb on the home button of my iPhone and that will be that. The money will be sent from my bank account to the bus company’s bank account with no delays, intermediaries or additional friction. As I said before, there will be a...

Well, once again, Kazakhstan shows leadership in the secure retail transactions field with the launch of an HCE app for contactless mobile payments. Customers of Kazkommertsbank (KKB) in Kazakhstan can now make host card emulation (HCE) based NFC mobile payments using a new service launched in partnership with Visa. From Kazakhstan gets HCE payments • NFC World+ They have always been in the forefront of these developments. In fact, as I wrote a decade ago… So here is a picture for Borat to take with him next time he visits America. It’s an EMV terminal. From  Cultural learnings of Kazakhstan for make benefit glorious nation of America. The reason I bring this up here is more about the technology than the location. We’re very interested in the potential for HCE in the mass market, not only for payments but also for ticketing, loyalty and other applications. But I just wanted to remind everyone, again, that while the association with NFC is forefront in industry thinking, the v...

xxx The Open Banking Working Group, which undertook a review last year at the request of the Treasury, is calling for information on banks’ products and customers to be more easily accessed by digital services, including comparison sites. From Banks urged to share data so customers can shop around - FT.com xxx

snippet There was, however, one crucial component missing in our virtual office: a decent tool for online payments. And we had to do a lot of online payment processing; paying staff and accepting payments from our sponsors being the two most important. The closest we got to a viable tool was PayPal, but we quickly learned to avoid it. PayPal's fees for international payments were (and still are) exorbitant. What we ended up using was the international banking system, SWIFT. It was full of red tape, the bank's online software was buggy, and often we found that one or more intermediary banks had taken a chunk of money during the process. In short, the banking system was opaque and frustrating… but even then it was better than PayPal. [From Bitcoin, Online Payments and the Scourge of PayPal - BayPay Members Blogs ] snippet

xxx The EU Commission on Tuesday will pledge to investigate the suspiciously high number of the notes in circulation in the eurozone as part of a plan to choke-off financing for terrorists in the wake of November’s attacks in Paris. From EU to probe €500 notes’ links to terrorism - FT.com xxx