A library of snippets
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In other words, we are witnessing a monetary bifurcation. The US is building a financial system anchored in code and credit—Bitcoin and dollar-backed stablecoins. China is returning to metal—gold as the foundation for a dedollarized order.
From: The Great Bifurcation.
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a friend who was filming me for a documentary yesterday told me of a Canadian friend of his who was scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by a deepfaked video of Mark Carney.
From: We URGENTLY need a federal law forbidding AI from impersonating humans.
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Early Warning pushed heavily for a new auth solution (ZelleID) 8 yrs ago (by my good friend Eric Woodward) only to have JPM smash it.
From: Keeping Up With Chaos: A Payments Stakeholder Reality Check | Noyes Payments Blog.
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Registration works similarly to minting an ERC-721 NFT. Agents sign transactions using a wallet, and each registration incurs gas fees.
The process generates an agent-registration.json file. This file includes the agent’s name and image, along with the service description and payment addresses. Contact endpoints allow users to communicate with agents.
From: ERC-8004 Mainnet Launch: What This Agent Protocol Actually Does | Live Bitcoin News.
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The Validation Registry manages cryptographic attestations of agent behavior. This element is currently under technical due diligence, and users cannot access it yet.
From: ERC-8004 Mainnet Launch: What This Agent Protocol Actually Does | Live Bitcoin News.
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This week, ERC-8004 officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet. The protocol allows independent agents to register verifiable identities. Developers can now build applications based on on-chain reputation.
From: ERC-8004 Mainnet Launch: What This Agent Protocol Actually Does | Live Bitcoin News.
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PSP VAS – Processors need to fundamentally rethink how they create value for merchants beyond just moving money. AI gives them a shot at becoming merchant growth partners (conversion optimization, demand forecasting, inventory management) but they’re still stuck selling payment rails when merchants want business outcomes. The ones who figure out how to tie AI-driven VAS to actual merchant revenue growth will win the next decade. Fir example, can they evolve beyond back-office plumbing to build a Shopify-style demand side agentic connector (ex Google UCP)?
From: Keeping Up With Chaos: A Payments Stakeholder Reality Check | Noyes Payments Blog.
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There used to be a Journal of E-Finance and Payments Law and Policy (that later became Payments & Fintech Lawyer). Way back in 2009, I wrote a piece on micropayments for them (Vol. 3, No 2, p.11-13, February 2009).
While watching Jon Stewart’s Daily Show recently, my interest was re-kindled by his interview with Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute who had written a story about this for Time magazine, in which he (Isaacson) had referred to an odd paradox of content2:
Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast
I said at the time that the technological determinist saw a straightforward explanation: people won’t pay 10 cents for stuff on the Internet because they cannot, whereas they will spend $1 for a ringtone on their phone because they can. I remember thinking “well, I can load ringtones to my iPhone for free if I want to mess around, but I can’t be bothered to, so I just pay in iTunes”. It is cheaper and quick for me to pay than for me not to pay. Therefore, perhaps the technology as much as the business model is to blame. Isaacson goes on to say just that.
We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.
This was seen as a fundamental problem at the very dawn of the web and I’ve been thinking about it again this week because of a comment on saw on social media. Alex Pilar was talking about the tsunami of AI-generated slop that is about to wash away the internet as we know and he said that this might drive something that the spam of old could not: the use of Hashcash.
Hashcash was an idea of Adam Back and was influential in the evolution of Bitcoin. The idea was simple: come up with a problem that is hard to solve but has a solution that is easy to check. It was originally developed to counter spam, with the basic operation as follow..
To send an email the sender must find a value (called a nonce) such that when some information (like the recipient’s address, the date, the nonce and a counter) is hashed, the hash has a certain number of leading zeros. The sender hashes the string and looks to see if the hash output begins with a certain number of zeros. If it doesn’t, the sender changes the counter and tries again. The sender repeats this until a suitable hash is found and then attaches this “stamp” to the message. The receipient stamp, hashes it, and checks whether the hash meets the required difficulty (ie, correct number of leading zeros).
(Yes, you are right, this is at the heart of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work.)
Hashcash thus delivers stamp that is fast to check but slow to generate which in turns means that spammers must do a lot of work for every message, making scale abuse expensive, whereas normal people sending emails now and then wouldn’t notice thre overhead.
Alex’s suggestion was that something like this be attached to all content
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And if that LLM has access to any of its user’s private information, the consequences could be dire. “Using something like OpenClaw is like giving your wallet to a stranger in the street,” says Nicolas Papernot, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto.
From: Is a secure AI assistant possible? | MIT Technology Review.
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An IDF reservist and a civilian have been indicted for using classified information to place bets regarding military operations on the popular Polymarket prediction market, authorities announce.
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Snippings