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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...