Snippets

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...