Category Archives: Uncategorized

xxx Amazon.com Inc. is gearing up to challenge Apple Inc. in the mobile-payments race. The e-commerce giant is working to persuade brick-and-mortar stores to accept its Amazon Pay digital wallet. From Amazon Pay Accepted Here? Web Giant Aims to Put Digital Wallet in Stores – WSJ. xxx

xxx In 2015, GDS’s intention was to fund Verify through income generated by charging departments for using the system. The aim was to charge £1.20 per year, per user. GDS estimated that by 2018, this would generate £19m per year, but due to the low take-up of the system, only £1.3m was brought in duringContinue reading “GDS cut expected benefits of troubled Gov.uk Verify system by 75%”

As the Bank of England themselves put it, “legal tender has a narrow technical meaning which has no use in everyday life”. Quite.

The US is behind some other parts of the world, perhaps, but it is trending in the same direction. According to recent research, almost a third of American adults use no cash at all for their weekly purchases (it was a quarter back in 2015). Conversely, a fifth of Americans says that make nearly allContinue reading “POST Banning cashlessness”

The well-known commentator Seth Godin said on his blog (3rd March 2019) that bots should announce “I’m not a person, or if I am, I’m not allowed to act like one” which is a fair point but how would I know whether to believe it or not? Unless there is a digital identity infrastructure in place

xxx They compromise financial privacy and enable the prosecution of victimless crimes wherever banks are required to “know their customers” and to provide transaction records to government officials. From The Curse of the War on Cash | Cato Institute. Now, I am somewhat sympathetic to Larry’s view here but I wonder if national regulators wouldContinue reading “The Curse of the War on Cash | Cato Institute”

xxx That means that if the US is as law-abiding as, say, Norway, then there’s about $200 billion of cash in the US that is only used for tax evasion, crime, money laundering and so on. From Cash means a lot of baggage | Consult Hyperion. xxx xxx “Generally, economists believe the surge is related to peopleContinue reading “POST There’s a lot of it about”

Richard Brown, the CTO of R3 and someone who definitely knows what he is talking about, has some pretty harsh words to say about Ethereum as a platform for Enterprise Shared Ledger (ESL) applications. And yet consultants, some from reputable firms, are pushing this technology hard in to organisations that don’t always possess the technicalContinue reading “Busting the Myth of Public Blockchains for Business | Richard Gendal Brown”

A couple of generations on, and the New York Times reports (“Russian General Pitches ‘Information’ Operations as a Form of War”, 2nd March 2019) that the chief of Russia’s armed forces, General Valery V. Gerasimov, gave a speech at a conference on the future of Russian military strategy recapitulating a journal article he wrote inContinue reading “Russian General Pitches ‘Information’ Operations as a Form of War – The New York Times”

In fact, Amazon already has a service to allow customers to pay with cash. The e-commerce giant has rolled out a service that will allow customers to purchase goods and then pay for them at a local Western Union retail agent. During checkout, a special QR code will be generated that will be used to verify theContinue reading “Amazon targets Africans who would rather pay with cash | CGTN Africa”