Snippings

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Among the 2024 bond issues on DLT, the World Bank’s CHF 200 million digital bond stands out as a significant milestone for several reasons.
– It is the first time an international issuer has issued a digital bond in Swiss Francs.
– This bond settles using the Swiss National Bank’s wCBDC, marking a significant step in integrating central bank digital currencies into capital markets.
– The issuance involved collaboration with the Swiss National Bank and the SIX Digital Exchange.

From: From VOC to Blockchain: The Evolution of Bond Markets | by Efi Pylarinou | Jul, 2024 | Medium.

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The head of Britain’s National Health Service recently said that it is seeing more people turn up in their specialised gambling clinics having become hooked on crypto trading. and British politicians some time ago urged the government to treat retail investment in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin as a form of gambling. Whether cryptocurreny trading is best characterised as a financial market, gambling or a new form of e-sport, it is undoubtedly causing problems.

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Writing in the Colombia Law School blog on capital markets, Todd Baker challenges the view that cryptocurrencies are financial assets, saying that this risks luring policymakers into a “potentially catastrophic category error” because their markets are not economically related to the financial system and do not serve the productive purposes of the financial system. He regards cryptocurrency players as finance LARPers* and calls their activities “gambling emulating finance”. Frankly, he has a point. In many ways, the cryptocurrency markets have more in common with electronic sports than e-finance.

From: Let’s Not Throw The Crypto Baby Out With The Crypto Bathwater.

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I remember hearing someone at an event (I can’t remember who was talking or whar the event was, unfortunately) say that buying cryptocurrency was just like playing roulette, which I suppose is sort of true if like playing a form of roulette where the richest players are controlling the wheel and have a stake in the casino.

In many ways, cryptocurrency investing (at the retail level) is much worse for individuals that gamling is. After all, if you go to Las Vegas for the weekend, you know exactly what is going on. The rules are clear. The odds are fixed. In Vegas, you know that you will have a fun time playing roulette with your friends, but you also know that you will lose because the house has 5.26% edge. My favourite casino game is blackjack, and I have enjoyed many late night sessions with friends, a few drinks and split eights. Blackjack happens to have the best odds of all of the casino games with a 0.5% edge to the house. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. But overall I lose, as does everyone else, and I’m happy to pay the half-a-percent fun tax down Fremont street.

In comparison, cryptocurrency markets are thin, opaque and manipulated. No-one knows what’s going on, especially as more and more trading heads into dark markets.

 

 

 

 

Nathan Davies and Simon Ferris from the University of Nottingham Medical School, writing in The Lancet, make a rather interesting (and to me, at least, rather compelling) argument that cryptocurrency trading harms public health in a similar way to gambling.

 

Although gambling harm is increasingly appraised through a public health lens, researchers and policy makers should also consider new financial instruments that have features of gamblification when seeking to research or reduce the burden of harm of gambling. Otherwise, new harmful products might fill the space left by public health and regulatory measures taken against traditional gambling products.

 

 Public Health England estimates societal gambling- related harm in England exceeds £1·27 billion. Australian research estimates that the years lost to disability from gambling exceeds that of diabetes.1 

 

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ECB board member Fabio Panneta says trading in unbacked digital assets should be treated by regulators like gambling.

In a blog post, Panetta describes crypto investments as a gamble disguised as an investment asset.

“They do not perform any socially or economically useful function,” he says. “They are rarely used for payments and do not fund consumption or investment. As a form of investment, unbacked cryptos lack any intrinsic value, too. They are speculative assets.”

From ECB executive says gambling rules should be applied to curb crypto speculation:

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I agree with David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who talks about using “smart” “contracts” with trade terms and settlement instructions written directly into the code to reduce risks and build confidence in the financial system. His view is that this new technology is about making the financial system more transparent and I think that is actually the core to a workable regulatory environment. In fact, as I have written before, a market built up from “glass banks” trading with each other, serving their customers, working with regulators in entirely new ways, is an attractive prospect and suggests that a new financial market infrastructure (FMI) may be on the horizon.

From: Let’s Not Throw The Crypto Baby Out With The Crypto Bathwater.

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Over the next few months, the authorities would learn that the audio wasn’t genuine—Eiswert hadn’t said those hateful things—and in time they would learn who had framed him. Their investigation would show both how easy it is for someone today to use artificial intelligence tools to mimic someone else’s voice, and the swift damage a viral fake can wrought:

From: Welcome to Fakesville: Inside an AI Nightmare That Tore Apart a School — The Information.

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ROBOT ROMANCE REVEALED: Women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025
That’s according to a professional, who also thinks robot sex will be more common than human intercourse by 2050

From: REVEALED: Women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025 – The Sun | The Sun.

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Private transactions, which are sent directly to validators or block proposers, instead of public mempools, now account for about half of the total on Ethereum, in terms of the total gas usage – reflecting the computational power required to process transactions. The percentage was about 7% in September 2022 when Ethereum transitioned into a proof-of-stake network, but it’s taken off this year, jumping from about 15% since the start of 2024.

From: Dark Pools Dominate Ethereum as Private Transactions Surge – at Least by One Measure.

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With AI getting this good, we’re moving past memeification and toward severe harm for everyone but the scammer. In the Aniston example, her business relationships are potentially harmed, as is her reputation with fans. Consumers might waste money or compromise their identity, and the proliferation of fake content could cause people to question the validity of real endorsements, which hurts legitimate brands. Worse, all this “AI slop” further erodes our collective ability to believe anything.

From: ‘Whack-a-Mole’: Agents and Lawyers Scramble to Fight AI Celeb Ad Scams.

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Aylo says it’s blocking access to its websites over privacy concerns around the new laws. The laws generally require adults to upload some form of government ID to prove they’re 18 or older. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticized the laws as “surveillance systems” that could lead to misuse or theft of sensitive data.

From: Pornhub blocks Indiana, Kentucky, and more over age verification laws – The Verge.

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Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, is the ultimate tech insider, and his insights around AI reveal a landscape changing so quickly that even he is struggling to keep up the pace.

 

 

Schmidt is specifically talking about the combination of large context windows, AI agents that can learn and improve themselves, and text-to-action capabilities. He says that these will have an impact on the world at a scale that no-one understands, yet much bigger than what he calls the “the horrific impact we’ve had by social media”. If we look at each of these factors in turn, we can see why Schmidt is making such a forecast.

First of all, large context windows, the working memory of large language models, are solidly on their way. My day-to-day model, Claude, can already hold 200k tokens (approximately 150k words) in its working memory. Millions or more are coming.

Secondly, agent-based systems, which autonomously execute multi-step tasks and adapt to environmental feedback, are poised to unlock significant economic value next.

Finally text-to-action capabilities will emerge, translating natural language into specific, working programs. Imagine your own personal programmer at your fingertips, ready to create whatever you envision. A dating app that matches people based on their Netflix viewing history and Spotify playlists?2 A prototype within minutes.

With these three capabilities in place, the 

 

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n this paper, we study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from 5,179 customer support agents. Access to the tool increases productivity, as measured by issues resolved per hour, by 14% on average, including a 34% improvement for novice and low-skilled workers but with minimal impact on experienced and highly skilled workers. We provide suggestive evidence that the AI model disseminates the best practices of more able workers and helps newer workers move down the experience curve.

From: Generative AI at Work | NBER.

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Disseminating best practice is what management consultants were for.

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By moving from information to action—think virtual coworkers able to complete complex workflows—the technology promises a new wave of productivity and innovation.

From: Why agents are the next frontier of generative AI | McKinsey.

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Use case 1: Loan underwriting

Use case 2: Code documentation and modernization

Use case 3: Online marketing campaign creation

 

I turns out that my friend is not the only who was conned into contacting  airline scammers.

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Holidaymakers are being warned about a rise in scams where fake social media accounts are used to impersonate airlines.

From: Scammers use fake social media accounts to impersonate airlines.

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