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Klarna saw revenue rise 27% in the first half of 2024, buoyed by its aggressive use of AI, which CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski says could help the BNPL giant halve its workforce.

From: Klarna to use AI to halve workforce.

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“The fundamental purpose of financial inclusion is to improve the overall economic well-being of low-income individuals, and encouraging people to use their hard-earned paychecks or savings to buy highly risky assets could do just the opposite,” Todd Phillips, CAP’s former director of financial regulation and corporate governance, wrote in 2022.

From: Trump announces The DeFiant Ones, a new cryptocurrency platform – The Verge.

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The notion that crypto can help unbanked people better access financial services is a rampant one in the industry — but reports suggest otherwise.

From: Trump announces The DeFiant Ones, a new cryptocurrency platform – The Verge.

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Mr James said in some sites, especially in central London, more than 50 per cent of customers were already choosing to pay digitally.

From: Gen-Z don’t want to speak to waiters in restaurants: Cafe boss claims young diners prefer to order and pay via mobile apps | Daily Mail Online.

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The furious wife was on holiday at the time with the couple’s young children then checked the family Ring app – and found footage of her husband returning home with the female companion.

From: Premier League star love rat dumped by wife after she catches him sneaking mistress into family home on Ring doorbell camera | Daily Mail Online.

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Meta has created a system that can embed hidden signals, known as watermarks, in AI-generated audio clips, which could help in detecting AI-generated content online.

From: Meta has created a way to watermark AI-generated speech | MIT Technology Review.

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Research from the Reserve Bank Australia (Fairweather et al, Valuing Safety and Privacy in Retail Central Bank Digital Currency. 2024) shows up some interesting consumer attitudes around a digital fiat currency. At high level it tells us that consumers do not care about safety (they do not distinguish between commercial bank money and central bank money as nerds like me do) but they do care about privacy, to the extent that they are willing to pay for it. Interesting.

I used Reserve Bank’s research to create a useful thought experiment. Their paper explores the merits of a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) in Australia, focusing on the extent to which consumers would value having access to a digital form of money that is even safer and potentially more private than commercial bank deposits.  This is consistent with bank deposits in Australia already being perceived as a safe form of money (because of a deposit protection scheme) and physical cash continuing to be available as an alternative option. So therefore you cannot charge consumers for a CBDC on the basis of safety.

When it comes to privacy though, there is a different perception. Consumers say that they value transaction anonymity and that they care about who transaction data is shared with, to the extrent that they are prepared to pay A$5 more for an account that shares transaction data with the central bank instead of wich commercial banks, assuming that Australia’s financial crime authority, AUSTRAC (Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre), can access the transaction data in ierther case.That would generate around $60m per annum to contrbute to the running of the system.

So could we fund a CBDC this way?

 

 

 

I was flattered to be invited to join a panel of luminaries to discuss the issue of money and privacy at the European Forum Alpbach 2024 and in attempt to show the audience that there are some interesting discussions to be had around business model, I talked about the need for privacy, but not for anonymity.

Policymakers probably could not introduce a retail CBDC with complete anonymity, on account of the financial crime implications. But it could be designed in such a way that it restricts data sharing to different entities compared to existing forms of digital money, or even allow for anonymity for small transactions (European Central Bank 2023).

 

I was flattered to be ask to take part in a discussion about privacy and CBDC at the 

Leading cryptographers have concerns about the way that the European Digtial Identity Wallet is put together. The current reference architecture (the ARF) in their view does not use the state-of-the-art technologies such as anonymous credentials that have been developed over the last couple of decades and, of course, once the wallets is rolled out on a large scale, it will become exceedingly difficult to make further changes.

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In this document, we propose to use a different cryptographic mechanism instead; namely, anonymous credentials. Anonymous credentials were designed specifically to achieve authentication and identification that are both secure and privacy-preserving. As a result, they fully meet the requirements put forth in the eiDAS 2.0 regulation. Moreover, they are by now a mature technology. This technology was developed more than twenty years ago, and extensive efforts have been expended to analyze, improve, implement, standardize, test, and deploy it. Anonymous credentials are well understood by the scientific community.

Our specific recommendation is to use the BBS family of anonymous credentials. For BBS, thanks to prior work by the W3C, the Decentralized Identity Foundation, IETF/IRTF, ISO, and other standardization bodies, as well as the availability of open-source software libraries, the EC can develop a standard and reference implementation with only a modest effort. We additionally recommend that the EUDI be designed following the principle of crypto-agility, meaning that its underlying technologies can be upgraded quickly in the future if the need arises.

From: Cryptographers’ Feedback on the EU Digital Identity’s ARF · Issue #200 · eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-architecture-and-reference-framework · GitHub.

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Now it could get more difficult under a proposal by China’s internet regulators: The government wants to take over the job of verification from the companies and give people a single ID to use across the internet.

The Ministry of Public Security and the Cyberspace Administration of China say the proposal is meant to protect privacy and prevent online fraud.

From: China Wants to Start a National Internet ID System – DNyuz.

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