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As my former colleague Salome Parulava rather succinctly described last year, we must distinguish between two different areas of overlap between  First, “Identity for Blockchain”, assumes that if blockchain platforms… gain adoption that is at least 10% as widespread as the industry’s attention to them today, there will be a need for a robust andContinue reading “Why bother with the blockchain for identity?”

snippet 210000UK card payments continued upward trend in 201602 March 2017  |  1961 views  |  0Source: UK Cards AssociationConsumers spent £647 billion using payment cards in 2016, new figures show. There were 14.8 billion card transactions in 2016, equivalent to 40.5 million transactions a day or 469 a second, data from The UK Cards Association shows. Three-quarters of retailContinue reading “UK card payments continued upward trend in 2016”

snippet A Norwegian news site is now asking its readers to take a short reading comprehension quiz before allowing them to post comments below certain articles [From Commenters don’t read articles. Here’s how one site is fighting back. ] snippet

The news that somewhere in South Korea some sort of local government had some sort of election and recorded the votes on some sort of blockchain restarted some discussions about whether electronic voting might be just around the corner. As I have often suggested, the idea of using smartphones instead of ballot papers seems ratherContinue reading “New Blockchain Partnership Proposes Solution for Remote Voting – CryptoCoinsNews”

snippet Research has revealed that pensioners in the UK are now an average of £20 a week better off than working households. [From Pensioners incomes exceeds working families | Government Business] snippet snippet Median income among pensioners is projected to rise twice as quickly as that for the rest of the population [From Historically weak growthContinue reading “Pensioners incomes exceeds working families | Government Business”

xxx Users of WIRcard plus can pay at approximately 10,000 WIR acceptance points in Switzerland, but moreover, the card can be used worldwide through the V PAY network. From SIX to support WIR Bank in launch of SME payment card WIRcard plus – FX-MM xxx

Remember, the blockchain is uncensorable and resilient, a permanent record of transactions always available everywhere, so in cases of (for example) natural disasters then it can provide an identity infrastructure. In fact, the five-hour breakdown was so bad, Amazon couldn’t even update its own AWS status dashboard: its red warning icons were stranded, hosted onContinue reading “AWS’s S3 outage was so bad Amazon couldn’t get into its own dashboard to warn the world • The Register”

xxx It is a fair question to ask whether there should be state regulation of virtual currency. From Virtual currency needs one regulator, not 50 | American Banker It is, I would imagine,  a byproduct of state regulation of banks.

The good people at BBVA Research recently published a paper on central bank digital currencies (Central Bank Digital Currencies, Gouveia et al, March 2017) in which, amongst other conclusions, the authors say that “we also consider it likely that a scenario in which CBDC is anonymous, universal and non-yield bearing will be implemented”. But whyContinue reading “Money and intelligent design”