Snippings

When people read about the scale of online deception—and there are new stories that illustrate the scale of the problem every single day—their antural reaction is to call for some form of internet passport and to demand that discussion need to show the real name of the participants. Even setting aside for a moment the problem of decided what “real” means in this context, this view is misguided. Real names don’t fix anything, but real reputations do.

 

 

 

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What matters, it seems, is not so much whether you are commenting anonymously, but whether you are invested in your persona and accountable for its behaviour in that particular forum. There seems to be value in enabling people to speak on forums without their comments being connected, via their real names, to other contexts. The online comment management company Disqus, in a similar vein, found that comments made under conditions of durable pseudonymity were rated by other users as having the highest quality.

From: Online anonymity: study found ‘stable pseudonyms’ created a more civil environment than real user names.

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I wrote this in 2007.

We need to build general-purpose identity solutions that can cope with these kinds of one-the-fly, transient and even pseudonymous identities as well as persistent identities.  That’s why I think the right digital identity models are those in which the industrial age one-to-one mapping between the person and an identity is understood as a niche and not as the paradigm.  As was well-put on Ideal Government recently, multiple identities are part of the solution, not part of the problem of information age identity.  As Sam Smith says, “one account and one account only for individuals mandates total transparency from the citizen. It requires complete faith in government. It discourages any transparency on the part of that Government. That’s not very balanced, is it?”

From Age vs. identities – Consult Hyperion.

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However, very large online platforms identified under the Digital Services Act, like Google and Facebook, will have to support the wallet for logging into their service.

From EU institutions prepare to negotiate the European Digital Identity – EURACTIV.com:

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The MEPs also clarified the relationship with the EU General Data Protection Regulation. They included the right for users to use pseudonyms to protect their personal data when there is no legal requirement for identification.

From EU institutions prepare to negotiate the European Digital Identity – EURACTIV.com:

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As technology advances, the metaverse is growing, offering immersive experiences, social connectivity, and economic opportunities.

Embracing the same sentiment, Spanish retailer Mango has entered the realm of Roblox, solidifying its dedication to innovation and the development of an ecosystem that provides customers with experiences, products, and services across physical, digital and virtual domains.

From: 216M Reasons Mango, LensCrafters, Worldline Bet on Metaverse.

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In October, $2.33 trillion worth of banknotes were in circulation, more than triple the amount two decades ago. This is a testament to the effectiveness and innovation of the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which runs the Fort Worth site. But in another way, this apparent success story is alarming, because it highlights how incurious officials (including lawmakers with oversight authority) have almost always failed to ask two key questions: Where are all these dollars going? And who’s using them? Because they’re not being used by ordinary Americans, and they’re not in the United States.

From: The Dark Side of the $100 Bill – Mother Jones.

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Bank officials have made various suggestions about who is using all these banknotes, normally derived from macroeconomic theories, but they rarely tackle the obvious explanation: The primary customers for their product are criminals, and the explanation for rising demand is a growing criminal economy.

From: The Dark Side of the $100 Bill – Mother Jones.

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The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) new report on “The Economic Implications of the Metaverse” (BIS Paper 144, February 2024) looks at a Metaverse economy, built in VR/AR immersive environments, where avatars can can engage in a broad range of activities. It notes that as their users spend more time (and attention) in metaverses there will undoubtedly be business opportunities from new services. Remember that the BIS is owned by the world’s central banks, so I take their output pretty seriously. And when their new report goes on to say that “an important foundation for such services is the ability to make instant payments, ideally across borders and currencies, and to create digital representations of assets (tokenisation)”, I could not agree more. Which is why I was so pleased to launch “Money in the Metaverse”, co-written with the brilliant digital strategist Victoria Richardson, at Money20/20 Asia in Bangkok.

The fact is that now is the right to be thinking about Metaverse stratregies for business. The MIT Technology Review listed the Apple Vision Pro as one of its “breakthrough technologies” for 2024 because the mixed-reality headset has a display that is radcially better than any that has come before. This device, together with Meta’s new VR headset (which Meta have just announced with also display Apple 3D video), will bring the spatial computing to the masses and drive the evolution of VR/AR metaverse across many different sectors. And now the injection of AI into smart glasses, another metaverse-related project, has suddenly made Meta’s AR products much more viable too.

There is a new ecosystem around the corner. Louis Rosenberg (CEO of Unanimous AI) recently predicted that by 2035 people will laugh at images from today that show people walking down the street staring down at a phone. He thinks that metaverses built on AR/VR technologies will replace mobile phones as the primary gateway to digital worlds, with the transition from mobile phones beginning in the middle of the 2020s and completing by 2035 or “possibly sooner” . If that sounds hyperbolic in the light of current technology, bear in mind that “Gen Z” already spends far more time in the proto-metaverses than they do in the web world familiar to you. The next generation of consumers are showing the way: there are roughly 3.4 billion gamers, or 1 in every 2.36 people.
90% of Gen Z, 80% of Millenials and 63% of Gen X already interact with games and/or the metaverse. Where games begin, commerce follows and commerce will come because those standard solutions of the trading of assets between digital identities will form the security layer that was missing from the Internet because and security is an integral part of what the metaverse actually is.

The BIS report suggests that if it becomes mass market, it could mean  (i) a blurring of lines between the tradable and non-tradable sectors, (ii) greater cross-border economic integration and (iii) new demands on payment services. That latter point means pressure for innovation around instant payment systems, retail central bank digital currencies or tokenised bank deposits to support services in the metaverse. An old friend of ours (and very experienced Apple iOS developer), Andrew Ebling wrote about this on LinkedIn recently. He talked about the “pain of trying to pay” using a VR headset…

Take off the headset, authorise your payment or banking app (using FaceID, which means the headset must be fully removed, wait for a while until your overloaded computer groans and quits and then you have to start all over again while fretting over double charging.

Not the best experience, especially when you compare it to a near-future Apple “blink and pay” in virtual worlds. Especially when that blink-and-pay means the exchange of fungible and non-fungible tokens using decentralised finance protocols that never go anywhere the existing banking infrastructure. Or, for that matter, banks. No wonder Andrew says that

As an app developer who jumped on the iPhone day-one, I absolutely can’t wait to get started with the Vision Pro.

Victoria and I could not agree more the need to take metaverse commerce seriosuly and we think that web3 has a role to play here, which is why our book covers the exchange of fungible (ie, money) and non-fungible (ie, property) tokens in metaverse economies: In other words, money in the metaverse may take the form of fungible tokens that exhibit the characteristics of money in certain circumstances. The obvious candidate is what people refer to as “stablecoins”. In the not–too-distant future central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) or private sector tokens with reserves in either central bank money or perhaps other assets such as gold (or oil, or electricity or who knows what else) will step in to fulfil this role for most jurisdictions.

Whether private or  public payment mechansisms gain traction, there is no doubt that financial services strategists have to take the potential for Metaverse services very seriously. With demand from the entertainment, education, and defence industries and a forecast CAGR of more than 40% through 2030, the finance sector will look on as the opportunities for transactions proliferate and then be forced to respond because all of those transactions will require rails to move value around, to effect payments whether that value is fiat currency, game tokens or things that have not been invented yet. The transactions may be virtual, but the business implications are very real, and the Metaverse – in fact, a multitude of metaverses – is the next evolution of the internet. This will power new business models that, crucially, demand reimagined financial services.

The BIS report also specifically points to the relationship between digital scarcity and value as the basis for new business opportunities, which is why our book links the virtual, augmented and mixed reality space where transactions can take place, the digital assets that will be exchanged in those transactions, and the ownership of those assets. The book sets out a consistent and we think helpful model of the Metaverse to help all organisation to begin working on their scenario planning and strategies for this inevitable future. We hope that you enjoy it and that it helps you to develop practical strategies for this new transactional space.

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Robocalls have been a plague on society for years, but they made headlines recently when an AI-generated robocall imitating President Joe Biden’s voice told New Hampshire Democrats not to vote in the presidential primary.

Days later, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel proposed the commission should recognize calls made with AI-generated voices as “artificial” under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), thus making them illegal. On Thursday, February 8, the FCC unanimously adopted that Declaratory Ruling, formally making AI robocalls illegal.

From: Robocalls that use AI-generated voices are now illegal, rules FCC.

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The Reserve Bank of Australia’s latest estimates

Against the backdrop of declining cash use for day-to-day transactions, it is useful to understand how banknote use has changed in recent years. We estimate that of all the banknotes currently in circulation:
9–26 per cent are used for transactional purposes
5–9 per cent are lost
7–11 per cent are used in the shadow economy
55–80 per cent are hoarded domestically or internationally.
The estimated share of banknotes used for transactions has declined by around 5 percentage points since the onset of the pandemic and is consistent with the decline in cash payments, as shown in the Bank’s latest CPS.

From: Understanding the Post-pandemic Demand for Australia’s Banknotes | Bulletin – January 2024 | RBA.

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When businesses stop accepting cash, the unbanked are forced to use payment methods like prepaid debit cards. However, these prepaid cards are costly. For example, Walmart, one of the largest U.S. retailers, offers a reloadable basic debit card. The card costs $1 to buy and charges $6 per month in fees, in addition to $3 each time someone wants to load the card with cash at Walmart’s registers. Paying a minimum of $10 just to set up a debit card for a few purchases is a steep price.

From: ‘No cash accepted’ signs are bad news for millions of unbanked Americans.

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America is an outlier from its Western peers in one crucial respect. In Britain, the largest share of the outstanding currency is made up of 20-pound notes, which are widely used; in the eurozone, likewise, it’s the omnipresent 50 euro banknote that is most often printed. In the United States, however, it’s the $100 bill, which most Americans rarely encounter. ATMs typically don’t dispense them; shopkeepers regard them with suspicion. Whoever is using them, it’s not ordinary Americans.

From: The Dark Side of the $100 Bill – Mother Jones.

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While libertarian president Javier Milei slashes spending in Buenos Aires to tackle Argentina’s severe economic crisis, 600 miles away the northern province of La Rioja is trying a different approach: printing its own currency.

From: Milei clashes with Argentine province over plans to issue its own currency.

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There is, however, one industry that can be considered Big Tech’s ultimate target, an industry that has spurred their imagination more than any other: financial services. It is among the largest economic sectors by and of itself. The global financial market will reach 37.34 trillion USD in 2026, with a compound annual growth rate of 9,6%. In short, entry into finance is the only way that Big Tech’s balance sheets have a chance to continue to swell the way they did in the past. This is particularly important as their corporate valuations are still suffering from the correction of the pandemic-induced overvaluation of tech stocks.

From: Big Tech’s interest in your financial data – the strategy and the dangers behind it.

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