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xxx "countries will form cryptocurrency unions to regulate currencies and platforms, standardise technology and maintain the stability of the system" From "When China and other big countries launch cryptocurrencies, it will kick off a global revolution" . xxx

xxx "Moscow’s support for Instex prompted a warning from US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, who attended a G7 financial meeting in France. ‘If you want to participate in the dollar system you abide by US sanctions,’ Mr Mnuchin said, after discussing Iran with his French counterpart Bruno Le Maire." From "(4) Kremlin throws weight behind EU effort to boost Iran trade | Financial Times" . xxx

xxx "Innocent people have been questioned by police, had computer equipment confiscated and faced arrest when suspected of serious crimes following errors made by internet service providers (ISPs), telecoms companies, police and other public bodies in gathering intelligence through electronic surveillance." From "Innocent people arrested following surveillance blunders, IPCO reveals" . xxx

xxx "In October an investigative report from BuzzFeed detailed how Ads Inc. paid to place deceptive ads on thousands of personal Facebook accounts. Ads Inc. reportedly paid Facebook users $15 to $30 per month for access to their account, then sold those accounts to other marketers for $800 each. By paying Facebook users to post ads on their personal page, Ads Inc. and other companies are able to circumvent Facebook's policies for paid advertisements. Facebook prohibits account rentals and deceptive advertisements, and Facebook has been actively banning accounts sharing posts for Ads Inc. However, Ads Inc. CEO Asher Burke and other employees offered multiple Facebook contractors payment in exchange for reversing the bans" From "Facebook contractor accepted bribes to restore banned accounts: report - Business Insider" . xxx

Oh man! 2017! This was the first public “live five” of technology-driven changes in the secure transactions field that we thought would have a real business impact over the previous year. We’d used the idea internally before, but in 2017 we made the predictions public in the spirit of openness and honesty that we are famed for, to see how the predictions held up. RegTech . I think we did pretty well with this prediction. Interest in regtech has grown throughout the year and the ability of regtech to make real differences in major markets is established. Digital Identity . As we noted, one of the key regtechs, if not the key regtech, is digital identity. It did shoot up the agenda over the year and some interesting initiatives opened up. PSD2 (still). No commentary is needed!. Paying on the Go . We thought that a key use of open APIs will be payments, and very likely mobile payments. MasterCard’s purchase of VocaLink would tend to support this view! Invisible POS .  The shift fro...

xxx Gibson first used the word “cyberspace” in 1981, in a short story called “Burning Chrome.” How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real | The New Yorker : xxx

xxx US officials are also concerned about the possibility that foreign countries will increasingly use mass-market digital currencies, such as Facebook’s planned Libra coin, to avoid sanctions. (1) FBI says blockchain expert aided North Korea | Financial Times : xxx

xxx Mr Couré recently praised an initiative by about 20 large European banks including BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank to create a new digital payments system — dubbed the Pan European Payment System Initiative, or Pepsi. The idea is to enable instant cashless payments through a European rival to ApplePay in the US and Alipay in China [but] the project is becoming bogged down with competition authorities in Brussels for being too much of a closed shop. (1) Central bank talk of launching cryptocurrencies is all bluff | Financial Times : xxx

Huang Qifan, vice chairman of CCIEE (China Center for International Economic Exchanges), speaking at the Inaugural Bund Financial Summit of 2019 in Shanghai, said that " in the current digital age, the payment and settlement methods between enterprises and countries need to be reshaped ”. He also went on to say that cross-border liquidation of China’s renminbi (RMB) is "highly dependent" on SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system and CHIPS (the US Clearing House Interbank Payments System). He added that the two financial instruments that are "gradually becoming effective tools for the US to exercise global hegemony and carry out widespread jurisdiction control”.

xxx Money has always been a powerful, blunt instrument. It’s an imposition not just of will, but of values. After World War II, the dollar became the foundation of the international monetary system. That gave the U.S. government a special tool. Brace for the Digital-Money Wars - WSJ : xxx

xxx This is not just a poor-world problem. Britain was recently rocked by the “Windrush” debacle, in which dozens of citizens were wrongly deported. But it is a particularly acute problem in sub-Saharan Africa, where one in two people cannot prove his or her identity. It is not for want of effort. Every country in the region has either established or plans to create a universal identity programme. Papers, please - African countries are struggling to build robust identity systems | Middle East and Africa | The Economist : xxx

xxx "The number of card payments in the euro area have more than doubled in a decade as consumers increasingly dispense with the hassle of carrying notes and coins, according to the latest statistics from the European Central Bank. In 2018, card payments accounted for almost half of the total number of non-cash payments across the single-currency area. Credit transfers and direct debits were the second and third most common non-cash payment methods, accounting for approximately 23% each, while e-money and cheques together made up around seven percent. However, the relative popularity of each type of payment service still varies widely across euro area countries. In 2018 card payments accounted for just over 70% of all non‑cash payments in Portugal, compared with around 23% in Germany. The stats show that the number of card payments made by consumers and businesses has more than doubled in the last decade, with an average of 121 card payments per capita in 2018, compared with...

I tend to agree with people who see privacy as a function of control over personal information. Not a thing, more like a trade off . It’s a big problem though that the trade-offs in any particular situation are multi-dimensional and nothing like as explicit as they should be. And what if you have no possibility of control? The always interesting Wendy Grossman made me think about this in her recent net.wars column about her neighbour’s doorbell camera .  As Wendy puts it “we have yet to develop social norms around these choices”. Indeed. Whether it is neighbours putting up doorbell cameras or municipalities installing camera for our comfort and safety, the infrastructure of cameras (much more cost effective and useful than the one imagined by George Orwell) and pervasive always-on networks is going to created a decentralised surveillance environment that is going to throw up no end of interesting ethical and privacy issues. Here’s an example. What happens if you set up a camera trap...

North Korea is, apparently, developing a digital currency of its own. According to Alejandro Cao de Benós , President of the Korean Friendship Association, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea intends to go down the Facebook route by creating an asset-backed digital currency rather than a digital fiat currency and then use some sort of blockchain with “Ethereum-style smart contracts” to do business and avoid sanctions. Why use a blockchain? Well, the regime sees such smart contracts as a way to enforce deals it makes with foreign counterparts. Since it doesn't trust the U.N., it relies on Chinese intermediaries to enforce deals abroad. But sometimes, so sources claim, those intermediaries cheat the North Koreans. Hence, they want to bypass intermediaries altogether by developing a  “token based on something with physical value” (eg, gold) in order to create a stable mechanism for payments in international trade between the regime and "other companies/individuals” (althou...

xxx Do you think it is inevitable that the U.S. Treasury will make the leap to the digital coin of the dollar? ‘Currently, Congress is set up in a way that matches the economy of 200 years ago.’ I think we are going to be in trouble if we don’t. The one good thing about the Libra proposal is that it [brought attention to] China, which has been working at some level for several years on central bank digital currencies. Why Libra Worries This Physicist-Turned-Congressman — The Information : xxx

xxx Providing citizens of advanced countries the ability to authenticate themselves online is something that will be essential for central bank digital currencies or any traceable currency. Even if Libra was perfectly traceable, if you are allowed to set up a fake identity and start trading Libra, it is meaningless. Why Libra Worries This Physicist-Turned-Congressman — The Information : xxx

xxx Currently, Congress is set up in a way that matches the economy of 200 years ago. For example, at the time of our Founding Fathers, 70% of our GDP was subsistence farming. Now agriculture is down to maybe 1½% of GDP, and yet the Agriculture Committee has all the good congressional office space, to put it in congressional terms. Congress should match itself to the economy as it exists. Why Libra Worries This Physicist-Turned-Congressman — The Information : xxx

xxx The European Central Bank has welcomed an initiative by some of Europe's top banks to explore the development of a rival payment system to challenge the dominance of Visa and Mastercard and the threat from Chinese and US Big Tech firms Backed by twenty French and German banks, the The Pan European Payment System Initiative (Pepsi) would seeks handle all forms of cashless transactions. ECB offers support to bank-backed alternative to Visa and Mastercar... : xxx

xxx In a speech, Banque de France first deputy governor Denis Beau says that his organisation is "quite open for experiments" with the ECB on a wholesale CBDC. French central bank floats European CBDC : Why  Speaking about the inefficiencies that still bedevil cross-border payments, Beau says: "The tokenisation of financial assets combined with the recourse to blockchain-based solutions and more broadly distributed ledger technologies to store and transfer those assets could help answering market’s demands." French central bank floats European CBDC : The tokenisation of financial assets is, of course, a much broader topic than CBDC and (as I have said for some time) and inevitable trend. In my mental model of the world, I look from that perspective. So we use the cryptocurrency platform to trade tokens, and one form of these tokens (homomorphic to, but necessarily built from, ERC-720) is digital currency and one option for implementing digital currency is ...

xxx "I need to know you and that’s based on data. Why should data be regulated in a different way if you’re called a bank and if you’re called something else" From "Ana Botin of Santander on FinTech and Blockchain - Chris Skinner's blog" . xxx