Snippings

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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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The problem is that the flood of ad spam, as insiders refer to it, has coincided with a surge in credit card firms asking X for refunds on unauthorized transactions. That indicates that at least some of the spam ads are paid for with stolen cards, say people familiar with the situation, which means X doesn’t get to keep any money generated from the ads.

From: Musk’s X is Flooded With Ad Spam—Stolen Credit Cards May Be Key — The Information.

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What better way to give the thumbs down to biometrics than with AEVI’s suggestion of gesture based payments? The concept seems to involve waving at the payment device with a pre-registered hand signal. Presumably, not a rude one.

From: Business of Payments – February 2024.

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Gesture-based payments

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Irish customers will be delighted they can now use their Revolut card to buy a ticket on the Aer Lingus website. Revolut Pay,  a new product, transforms what looks to the cardholder like a debit card transaction into an account transfer. Aer Lingus is reporting impressive performance. Cart abandonment rates are sub 10% and authorisation rates at 98.5% which is pretty good for the airline industry. Published merchant fees for Revolut Pay start at 1% + 20c.

From: Business of Payments – February 2024.

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The age group most likely to prefer cash is those aged 55 and over. Nearly a quarter (22%) of Over 55s said that cash was their preferred payment method, compared with just 1 in 10 (10%) 18-24s

From: Study reveals Apple Pay and contactless payments have overtaken cash payments as favourite ways to pay in-store.

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As we wrote last year, KOSA’s original language would have effectively required covered platforms to verify the age and thus the identity of every user.

From: Congress Pretends It’s Fixed All The Problems With KOSA; It Hasn’t | Techdirt.

I can see why people would be uncomfortable with having to reveal their real name, address, social security number and goodness know what other personally identifiable information to to a porn site, or having their children provide their personal details to some online messaging service. But there is a world of difference between requiring age verification and requiring identification.

Remember that the porn site doesn’t need to know your age or anything else: It only needs to know that you are over 18. Your bank, amongst a great many other institutions, could easily provide your with a verifiable credential to achieve this. Similarly, the messaging site might need to know that your child is aged from 13-18 and some other site might need to know that the user is under 13 or over 65. It doesn’t matter: the point is that age verification does not need identification.

If you are wondering how this might work in practice, consider the practical example of a smart wallet. You want to obtain the IS_OVER_18 credential, so your smart wallet generates a key pair. The private key remains hidden in the secure element of your mobile phone, which it never leaves. The public key is sent to your bank where it is turned into a verifiable credential by adding the IS_OVER_18 credential that is then signed by the bank. The credentail contains nothing else. No personal information. Nothing.

Now, you show up at a porn site and the site needs to know that you are over 18, so it requests a credential that it can verify. Your present the credential from your bank, the porn site checks the digital signature (easy, because the bank’s public key is, well, public). But how does the porn site know that it is your certificate? Well, the credential (as noted above) contains a public key. So the porn site encrypts soem random data using that public key and sends it to your phone. Since your phone, and only your phone, contains the corresponding private key then the porn site knows that it was your phone that created the public key and (since the smart wallet must send the encrypted to the secure element to be decrypted, because that’s where the private key is, and the phone won’t decrypt the data unless you authenticate yourself (with FaceID or whatever) it knows and you are using the phone.

If you are launching nuclear missiles, you might want to add a biometric liveness check, but for OnlyFans that kind of 2FA is adequate. If you let a minor access porn using your phone, then you are comitting a criminal offence and deserve to be punished.

It is time to stop shying away from demanding full age verification, all the time.

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When I take it off, every other device feels flat and boring: My 75-inch OLED TV feels like a CRT from the ’90s; my iPhone feels like a flip phone from yesteryear, and even the real world around me feels surprisingly flat. And this is the problem. In the same way that I can’t imagine driving a car without a stereo, in the same way I can’t imagine not having a phone to communicate with people or take pictures of my children, in the same way I can’t imagine trying to work without a computer, I can see a day when we all can’t imagine living without an augmented reality. When we’re enveloped more and more by technology, to the point that we crave these glasses like a drug, like we crave our iPhones today but with more desire for the dopamine hit this resolution of AR can deliver.

From: Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro | Vanity Fair.

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