The Curse of the War on Cash

The Curse of the War on Cash | Cato Institute

As Larry White, someone who I always take very seriously in any such discussion, says in the Cato Journal “Some other writers and officials… do seek a cashless society. They want to drive all transactions into forms that leave an audit trail for the law enforcement and tax authorities”. I think I’m probably in this category. While I appreciate the arguments of Larry and others about anonymity, I do not agree with them. This is because I do not see that the only two options as being anonymous physical cash or unconditionally traceable digital money. We have a wide variety of tools available to us to construct the next generation of digital money and

As Larry notes in one of his examples, the Swiss National Bank is "the most important central bank still bucking the trend". It has said that it has no plans to withdraw its 1,000 Swiss Franc note. But what are these notes used for? I read the Swiss National Bank’s payment survey for 2017, the most recent available, and it reports that

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Financial Cryptography: Corda Day - a new force

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We could fix mobile security, you know. We don't, but we could

Earlier in the week I blogged about mobile banking security , and I said that in design terms it is best to assume that the internet is in the hands of your enemies. In case you think I was exaggerating… The thieves also provided “free” wireless connections in public places to secretly mine users’ personal information. From Gone in minutes: Chinese cybertheft gangs mine smartphones for bank card data | South China Morning Post Personally, I always use an SSL VPN when connected by wifi (even at home!) but I doubt that most people would ever go to this trouble or take the time to configure a VPN and such like. Anyway, the point is that the internet isn’t secure. And actually SMS isn’t much better, which is why it shouldn’t really be used for securing anything as important as home banking. The report also described how gangs stole mobile security codes – which banks automatically send to card holders’ registered mobile phones to verify online transactions – by using either a Trojan...

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