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There are billions of identities coming online in coming years whether this be refugees and those in developing countries (as referenced heavily at Davos), or devices and things These identities all need to be secured, at massive scale...this requires innovative, flexible, future proof identity platforms that can handle this complexity Position on blockchain (which I need to verify with our internal experts that I am relaying correctly) We think it has a lot of potential value, but there's also a lot noise in the space We're taking a measured approach, have joined the Hyperledger Project to explore more around tracking of valuable assets (IoT, documents, KYC), active policies for authorization that are more dynamic, an immutable record of user consent and its withdrawal It was truly interesting, but not surprising, to see digital identity become a recurring theme throughout the agenda of this year’s Davos (or, more properly, the 48th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting...

xxx The most toxic consequence of social media manipulation [is] existential distrust. From Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans | Boston Review xxx

xxx The world where we communicate and interact at a distance is increasingly filled with algorithms that appear human, but are not—fake people generated by fake realities. From Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans | Boston Review xxx

xxx Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), the fourth largest bank in the world, will launch its own digital currency MUFG coin… The bank also plans to peg one MUFG coin to one Japanese yen in order to maintain people’s confidence in the new cryptocurrency. From World’s Fourth Largest Bank MUFG To Launch Own Cryptoc... | News | Cointelegraph xxx

xxx “We were hired for community management. We had their ceo passport as proof of identity. Comes out it is also fake”. From Benebit ICO Does a Runner with $2.7 Million of Investor Funds - Bitcoin News xxx

xxx victims turned on the group’s admins, who claimed to have been taken in by Benebit, alleging that they even used fake passports as proof of identity. Their images were plucked from a boys’ school website. From Benebit ICO Does a Runner with $2.7 Million of Investor Funds - Bitcoin News xxx

In the superb BBC Radio 4 documentary on Marshall McLuhan , by Douglas Copeland, one of McLuhan’s comments (from half a century ago) that really struck home with me was that in the electronic, networked, instant media age there will be “ways of being evil that we don’t understand yet”. How astonishingly prescient of the man who invented media studies. I think we are beginning to understand what at least one of those ways might be: destroying the trust that keeps a society together. We can see this happening all around us as the internet and social media are creating entirely new opportunities for “influence operations" (IO) and the mass manipulation of opinion . It seems that (yet again) McLuhan was spot on. The era of mass manipulation is indeed upon us and it is aided and abetted by social media. The well-known example of Jenna Abrams (@jenn_abrams) illustrates the general case perfectly well. Jenna was an “alt-right” blogger with 80,000 followers on Twitter, and her tweets we...

xxx Global digital payments volumes are predicted to increase by an average 10.9 percent through to 2020, reaching nearly 726 billion transactions, according to the World Payments Report 2017 (WPR 2017). From Digital payments volumes continue to rise globally xxx

xxx But coding and then deploying your own personal currency from scratch turns out to be a lot of heavy lifting. So Prodromou put his idea on hold. This year, when Ethereum took off, he realized Evancoin’s time had come. Ethereum is a platform that lets you use the same technology that underlies Bitcoin, a distributed ledger known as the blockchain, to power all sorts of other applications. As one of the most popular platforms, Ethereum provides a ready-made framework for projects to “tokenize” themselves via their own ICOs, selling cryptocoins or tokens to the public. From This Techie Is Using Blockchain to Monetize His Time | WIRED xxx

xxx Fan Yifei, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China recently wrote… that the central bank’s digital currency should adopt a double-tier delivery system. From 范一飞：对央行数字货币加载智能合约应保持审慎态度-新华网 xxx

xxx [Fan Yifei says] in order to maintain the legal status of unlimited legal liability, the central bank’s digital currency should not assume other social and administrative functions besides the four functions that money should have. From 范一飞：对央行数字货币加载智能合约应保持审慎态度-新华网 xxx

xxx Given that the industrial-scale manufacturing of fake social media accounts is already widespread, you might wonder exactly who the fake accounts are for? From Bots and pluggers | Consult Hyperion xxx

xxx When you don’t know who IS_A_PERSON and who IS_A_DOG and who is neither, you cannot interact online in a functional way. From The Turing Wars have begun | Consult Hyperion xxx

xxx When my fridge negotiates with Waitrose to buy some more milk, what is really happening is that the virtual identity of my fridge is interacting with the virtual identity of Waitrose. That seems perfectly reasonable to me, and working out ways for the these virtual identities to transact is going to be part of the business strategy for a fair few of our clients over the next couple of years. The virtual identity of the fridge may have a number of attributes associated with its identifier, such as a credit limit for a delivery address or whatever, but the one attribute that it will not have is “IS_A_PERSON”. As I have claimed many times before, this might well turn out to be the most valuable attribute of all. From On the internet, no-one knows you’re a fridge | Consult Hyperion xxx

xxx Although many transactions are still consummated on the basis of trust and truthfulness, this is done because these qualities are viewed as good for business, a way to make a profit. From Autopsy of Cooperation: Diamond Dealers and the Limits of Trust-Based Exchange | Journal of Legal Analysis | Oxford Academic xxx

As I mentioned when I was discussing crime a couple of weeks ago , I’m surprised that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often. Armed robbers broke into a cryptocurrency trader’s house in England and threatened him and his family until he transferred his Bitcoin to a wallet under their control. Now, if robbers broke into my house and threatened my family and made me PingIt my overdraft to them, I’d have some hope that a combination of Barclays Bank and Surrey Police might do something about it.

xxx Tether, in partnership with the Ethereum trading and information community hub Ethfinex, announced the launch of ERC20 Tether tokens on September 11th, allowing tokenized USD to be exchanged on the Ethereum network, From You Can Now Trade "Tokenized" U.S. Dollars on the Ethereum Network xxx

I think we are about to see some more unexpected consequences of government technology strategy. It starts with the new requirement for age verification for access to adult services. I mean services that grown up people might want to use that they do not necessarily want other people to know about: gambling, fantasy football leagues, Daily Mail comments, Dungeons and Dragons discussions groups and so on. The focus is naturally on porn, which is understandable, but in a way it is also useful. If we can fix the “identity problem” for porn then we can fix it for most other things. But let’s start at the beginning. The government wanted age verification for adult services to start earlier in the year but announced a nine month delay in the proposed introduction because they are still consulting (not with me, incidentally) on how to do it. In fact they’ve never known how to do it. When the government first came up with the idea to require age verification, they had no real idea how to imp...

When I was kindly invited to be part of the panel at Scotchain 17 in Edinburgh, I have to say I did not anticipate such a big, interesting and stimulating event. So, once again, well done to all of those involved.  @dgwbirch takes the stage #ScotChain17 pic.twitter.com/6nd4U6XPa1 — Scottish Blockchain (@blockchain_scot) October 13, 2017 My talk on the blockchain was recorded and you can watch it here . I was also invited to take part in a great panel session and I just want to pick up on one particularly interesting point that came up. During the panel, we were asked where blockchain might gain traction in a mass market. I said that I was sceptical about financial services being the first, for two reasons: most “blockchain” efforts I have seen involve shoehorning some form of shared ledger solution into the shape created by an existing (optimised) system and second because it is, thankfully, a heavily regulated sector and therefore marketplace participants will be naturally war...

xxx "Facebook has confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s acquired… Confirm.io. The startup offered an API that let other companies quickly verify someone’s government-issued identification card, like a driver’s license, was authentic." From "Facebook acquires biometric ID verification startup Confirm.io – TechCrunch" . xxx

snippet In 2015, the call-blocking app YouMail estimated that close to a billion robo-calls were being placed every month. Two years later, that number has leapt to 2.5 billion. At best, these calls annoy. At worst, they defraud. By far, they constitute the top consumer complaint received by the FTC. [From How robo-call moguls outwitted the government and completely wrecked the Do Not Call list ] snippet

snippet In the past, it has taken generations for humans to develop political, cultural, and institutional antibodies to the novelty and upheaval of previous information revolutions. [From It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech | WIRED ] snippet

As the UK enters the new era of Open Banking, we are all familiar with the opportunities for new financial services providers to use the new infrastructure to provide new products and services. As Ken Wattana pointed out, open banking depends on having identity services as part of that infrastructure. Third parties using the bank APIs to obtain customer data and to instruct payments on their behalf must have confidence in that infrastructure, just as customers must. One way to do this is to use standard, tried and tested approaches and have good reference implementations for thorough testing. In the UK, for example, the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE, the body funded by the banks to deliver open banking) chose ForgeRock to build the reference banking application that will be used by the banks and the third parties to build and test their applications. It’s important to note, though, that the opportunities for third parties extend way beyond financial services. To pick just...

xxx A Starbucks shop in Seattle, Washington has gone completely cashless in its transactions as part of the global coffee chain's test to scrap bills and coins in the long run. From Starbucks store goes completely cashless: Will more branches follow suit? xxx xxx A newly-opened café in Singapore has been the centre of attention for being the first restaurant in the city-state to go completely zero cash. Aside from credit cards and Nets, the café highlights its additional payment method---virtual currencies like bitcoin. From  Singapore's first cashless café allows you to pay in bitcoin xxx

I once went out to lunch with an old schoolfriend of mine (we went to University together as well) who ended up in a very senior position in finance in a telecommunications company. Toward the end of a pleasant meal, some sort of alarm went off on his phone. He glanced at the device and then jumped up and ran out, shouting over his shoulder as he went words to the effect of “damn and blast, I’d quite forgotten that I had to buy £25 million in euros before 2pm, I must return to the office post haste”. Well, that sort of interruption of the port and cheese is no more. The biggest trade on the bank’s mobile FX trading app exceeded $400 million, and it’s not uncommon to see $100 million deals go through the app, whose biggest users are hedge funds and other financial institutions. From FX Traders Do $100 Million Deals on Mobile Phones - Bloomberg So people are instructing transfers of hundreds of millions of dollar using their phones and, presumably, their faces or fingerprints, or at...

xxx "the ban does not include fees that are not linked to the payment method" From "Ban on shops charging to use cards is now in force - this is what it means - Plymouth Herald" . xxx

xxx Born in Canada in 1911, McLuhan studied at the University of Manitoba and University of Cambridge before becoming a lecturer at the University of Toronto. He rose to prominence in the 1960s for his work as a media theorist and for coining the term "global village", which was a prescient vision of the internet age. From Who was Marshall McLuhan and how did he predict the internet? xxx xxx “In the new electric world, where everybody is involved with everybody, where everybody is involved in complex processes, the old identity cards, the old means of finding out who am I, will not work. (1968) From  Marshall McLuhan: Prophet of the Internet Age | McLuhan Galaxy xxx

xxx "MALONE: What Levin is saying is that bitcoin private keys are designed to be un-guessable even by the most powerful computers we have right now. But if Turner happened to write down part of this key at some point, there are companies that will use that information to help him break into his account... LEVIN: For the people that have lost their bitcoins, I say tough luck. (Laughter)." From "Finding Your Lost Bitcoins : NPR" . xxx

    Latin lesson at Winchester College.

An Accenture report on the topic from 2017 notes (accurately, in my opinion) that “trusted social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and tech companies (Google, Apple) will capture a significant slice of the [AISP/PISP] market".

We think a major focus for the whole merchant payments ecosystem in the coming year will be the new threats, opportunities and players in the emerging open banking world. Starting with the U.K.’s move to open banking in January (the implementation of the Competition and Market Authority's “remedies”, or the “CM9”) and moving ahead with PSD2 across Europe, the ability for trusted organisations to access consumer bank accounts and to not only obtain transaction information but also to instruct payments will inevitably change the landscape. There are new opportunities for acquirers to become broad-spectrum merchant service providers (MSPs) to facilitate interaction between the open banking infrastructure and the merchant community. This very appealing vision of the future (for merchants) will draw them towards a once in a generation change at point of sale. Merchants can easily afford to incentivise customers to switch to account-to-account “instant payments” and at the same time o...

LegalFling is the first blockchain based app to verify explicit consent before having sex. - via legalfling.io LegalFling is the first blockchain based app to verify explicit consent before having sex. - via legalfling.io To look at the blockchain in practice, I am delighted that we have been able to put together a distinguished panel with real-world experience of what the illuminati call “blockchain solutions”: Keith Pritchard completed a secondment from JPMorgan to the DTCC in 2017, where he was responsible for building a blockchain-based platform to support the credit derivatives market. He is currently with the consultancy Base60 where he is helping ISDA with the groundwork for a wider distributed ledger strategy. Martin Walker is currently head of product management at Broadridge for securities finance and collateral management, and worked on capital markets product development at R3 – the firm behind the Corda distributed ledger platform; Haydn Jones is founder and MD of Blockc...

xxx The truth is, biometrics are collapsing all round. The figures for biometric failure have been staggering. In Rajasthan, in the PDS, exclusion because of fingerprint failure has been close to 36 per cent — which means not even one person from 36 per cent households are able to authenticate using their fingerprints. - via The Indian Express xxx That biometrics are not working as hoped is made evident in the Watal Committee report on digital transactions, in December 2016… the committee asks that for digital transactions, the “OTP sent on registered mobile number of Aadhaar holder” be allowed, thereby downgrading biometrics. - via The Indian Express xxx

snippet Neither banks nor are our material (like sugar, flour, etc) suppliers accepting coins. Even, workers are not accepting wages in coins. Many of us stopped manufacturing cakes, [From Bakeries struggle as banks refuse to take coins - OTHER STATES - The Hindu ] snippet

I don’t have the exact figures to hand, but as I understand it the Bitcoin coinbase breaks down roughly into thirds…  A third of them are lost (well, last year 23% but I think it will get worse as more people forget their passwords). This is because (like me) someone wiped their old phone wallet away and forgot to transfer it over to their new phone wallet first or because they accidentally threw away the old hard disk with all the Bitcoins on them or because the dog ate the Bicoin cold wallet or because they died or whatever. As Jonathan Levin of Chainalysis, who I regard as the “go to guy” for tracing Bitcoins, told NPR in January: “ For the people that have lost their bitcoins, I say tough luck ”. (These lost Bitcoins, as my good friend Steve Bowbrick rather eloquently observed, are like treasure in sunken galleons waiting to be discovered by an intrepid explorer in the very latest kind of submarine. Which, in this instance, would be a quantum computer. It’s not only Bitcoin tuc...

Whilst on the topic of Islamic banking, I can’t help but note that the Grand Mufti of Egypt has issued a fatwa banning trading in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.