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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