Snippings

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“We’d really recommend you don’t use that method of payment.”

From: Taylor Swift fans scammed buying Eras Tour tickets – BBC News.

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ver the 340 hours and 28 minutes the cameras were doing live facial recognition over 62 separate deployments, they saw 417,730 faces, scanning an average of 20.4 people every minute.

The system was alerted to the presence of suspects 362 times – and only 10 of these were false – a false alert rate of 2.8 per cent.

From: How facial recognition cameras are catching rape, robbery and drug suspects: Interactive map shows where Met Police are making arrests thanks to the ‘biggest breakthrough in crime-fighting since DNA’ | Daily Mail Online.

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A drug dealing family have been jailed for more than 50 years after the mother was found by police sitting next to nearly £500,000 in cash on her bed.

From: Family behind £1.4m drugs cartel are jailed for more than 50 years after mother, 66, was busted by cops sitting next to a £500,000 pile of cash on her bed – with five people prosecuted | Daily Mail Online.

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But here’s the easy way to evaluate the settlement:  are merchants better off than before the litigation? It’s hard to conclude that they are.

When the litigation began in 2005, American merchants paid the highest interchange fees in the developed world. After the settlement, American merchants will still pay the highest interchange fees in the developed world.

When the litigation began in 2005, average interchange fees were 1.75%.  After the settlement, they will be at 2.19% and only held at that level for five years.
In other words, what do American merchants have to show for nearly 20 years of litigation? A nearly 25% (44 bp) increase in interchange fees. If that’s where things end up, then merchants’ litigation strategy has been a complete failure.

From: The Proposed Credit Card Interchange Settlement – Credit Slips.

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The surveillance industry is unified; the surveilled are not. The rewards from surveillance are concentrated. The costs of surveillance are diffused. This is as good a working definition of corruption as you could ask for: conduct that produces concentrated gains and diffuse losses.

From: The credit card fee victory is a defeat | by Cory Doctorow | Mar, 2024 | Medium.

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My sense is that most Salvadorans found this whole thing baffling. Not many had heard of Bitcoin, and far fewer could accurately describe what it was, let alone how it was going to function as a parallel currency and financial system. But Bukele somewhat brought them around through his innate popularity and by giving everyone in the country $30 worth of Bitcoin in the new government-backed Chivo Bitcoin wallet app. Hopefully, this would get the Bitcoin flowing in El Salvador’s economy.

To use another It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia analogy, this went a little like the gang’s Paddy’s Dollars scheme. Salvadorans eagerly got their 0.0000001 BTC or whatever and then immediately spent it anywhere it was accepted (which was not at every store despite the legal mandate), and then the vast majority of Salvadorans never purchased or received another BTC again. A few entrepreneurial types absorbed a lot of Bitcoin and held it, but most people just saw the endeavor as a weird government hand-out that annoyingly required them to wait in line at Bitcoin ATMs that have been gathering dust ever since.

This is how it was explained to me by a Salvadoran who lived through the event and spent all of his BTC on beer. For more concrete data, the New Yorker:

“a recent survey [presumed from mid-2022] by the Chamber of Commerce found that eighty-six per cent of the country’s commercial businesses have never conducted a bitcoin transaction.”
From Bitstamp.net:

“However, a year after the adoption of Bitcoin, economic surveys found that the cryptocurrency was not widely used. Only an estimated 20% of businesses accepted payment in bitcoin and less than a quarter of Salvadorians had made a purchase with the currency. According to the Central Reserve Bank, bitcoin was only used in 1.9% of remittance payments between September 2021 and April 2022. In a university survey, 71% of respondents said the Bitcoin Law did nothing to improve their finances.”
From Reuters:

“Some 88% of Salvadorans did not use [BTC] in 2023, according to a survey by the University of Central America’s public opinion institute. Just 1% of remittances were sent in bitcoin.”
So, Bitcoin as a legal tender has been a bust for Bukele. But other aspects of Bukele’s Bitcoin affection have been more successful.

Bukele is often derogatorily referred to as a “crypto bro” or a “tech bro” with a “startup” mentality of “move fast and break things.” In that spirit, his regime has made a series of BTC purchases seemingly as pure financial speculation. The first buy of 400 BTC was made in September 2021, the day before Bitcoin officially became legal tender. Unfortunately, within 48 hours, the price of BTC fell from about $52,000 to about $43,000, likely due to speculators buying on the news (that making BTC legal tender will increase BTC buys and price) and selling on the event.

Bukele’s financial fortunes only worsened from there as he happened to buy BTC at the height of a cycle, and prices continued falling and flatlining for about two years. Bukele responded by doubling down again and again until the government-owned (as of writing this) 2,845 BTC at an estimated total cost of $121 million.

Critics breathlessly followed the disaster with periodic news articles celebrating the latest loses of the Salvadoran government’s fiscal reserves. Bukele was derided as a moron suckered into the never-ending global scam that is cryptocurrency. In early 2022, as the BTC cycle neared its bottom, El Salvador’s sovereign debt bonds took a dive. In negotiations, the International Monetary Fund demanded that Bukele revoke Bitcoin’s legal tender status. Bukele refused and managed to muddle through the crisis by scraping together $560 million to buy distressed national debt bonds off the international market as a show of confidence.

Whether by determination or Wall Street Bets-style autism, the Salvadoran government’s Bitcoin investments officially entered the black on December 5, 2023 when the BTC price passed about $42,000. As of writing editing this in late February 2024 March 2024, the BTC portfolio stands at a $26 million or 21% $78 million or 64% profit. It’s not clear yet whether Bukele will hodl indefinitely or make some sales on behalf of the Salvadoran taxpayer, but Bukele continues to reiterate that 1 BTC = 1 BTC.

So Bukele may have the last laugh on Bitcoin speculation, but I’m less optimistic about the prospects of Bitcoin City.

From: Notes on El Salvador – Matt Lakeman.

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As a “friend with intellectual benefits” at Palo Alto Research Center from the start of the 1980s, I watched Xerox, PARC’s parent company, repeatedly reject business plans to take the lab’s phenomenal inventions to market. In doing so, it was unwittingly neglecting a unique opportunity to lead the personal-computer revolution. The problem was that PARC, a high-risk venture, had to compete with the near-certain returns from investing equivalent sums in extending Xerox’s patent-protected copier business (for example, by hiring more salespeople or field engineers).

From: Is Techno-Monopoly Inevitable? by William H. Janeway – Project Syndicate.

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Steve Eisman, who famous because of his bet against the US housing market before 2008, which led to his starring role in Michael Lewis’ “The Big Short” was recently asked about cryptocurrency and said that it is just another thing that people like to speculate on because they like to speculate and “That’s its only use. That and money laundering, which is a use“.

Myth 1: Financial inclusion reduces poverty Financial inclusion can have many positive impacts on people on low incomes, but they are not always what might be expected. Contrary to popular belief,

 

financial inclusion has little effect on poverty re- duction. In particular, access to credit – often touted as the most beneficial kind of financial inclusion – has mixed effects. An extensive review article (Duvendack and Mader, 2020) explains that while microcredit certainly provides benefits to some (such as allowing people to start a business or pay school fees) it rarely lifts people out of poverty, and indeed some people get trapped in debt cycles and end up poorer. Instead, decades of analysis reveal that microsavings (ac-counts designed for small deposits) provide the most consistently positive impact, since they provide benefits with few risks. Access to financial services can also help increase people’s incomes, either through receiving remittances or simply by making it easier for people to pay each other.

 

Moreover, the World Bank finds evidence that the use of financial accounts (with a bank, MFI or mobile money provider) supports the development towards broader use of financial tools including saving, borrowing and insurance. This helps people to increase their financial resilience and counteract issues of not being able to manage aspects such as unemployment, medical bills or school fees.

 

We would also add that financial inclusion can substantially reduce people’s stress and make their lives easier – two benefits whose importance cannot be understated. The benefits of financial inclusion for reducing ‘transaction costs’ (usually defined as the time a person spends completing a task) have been noted extensively by researchers working in many different countries. Our research participants in rural Brazil particularly appreciated the arrival of the payments platform Pix because it meant they did not have to travel to town to withdraw cash as frequently. Saving people time and effort can greatly reduce stress because people are often juggling many different activities and struggle to complete them all.

 

This is particularly evident among people who are very poor or lack basic infrastructure such as paved roads, reliable telecommunications

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The salacious WhatsApp messages were sent to Tory and Labour figures, both gay and straight, from a sender posing as ‘Abi’ or ‘Charlie’.

What would start out as claims the pair had met soon escalated to the sending of naked pictures and requesting pictures back.

At least two MPs are believed to have reciprocated by sending intimate pictures of themselves.

The Mail can reveal that the sender claimed to at least one victim that they had previously worked for Mr Wragg – a claim the MP denied.

Last night he revealed the details of his role in the scandal.

The 36-year-old MP for the Greater Manchester seat of Hazel Grove, who is openly gay, said he was ‘mortified’ and apologised for his ‘weakness’.

Mr Wragg, who is a vice chairman of the influential 1922 committee of Tory backbenchers, told The Times: ‘They had compromising things on me. They wouldn’t leave me alone. They would ask for people.

‘I gave them some numbers, not all of them. I told him to stop. He’s manipulated me and now I’ve hurt other people.

‘I got chatting to a guy on an app and we exchanged pictures. We were meant to meet up for drinks, but then didn’t.

From: MPs link Westminster honeytrap plot to Russia and China after leading Tory William Wragg admits giving MPs’ numbers to sex sting plotter he met on Grindr dating app | Daily Mail Online.

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