Snippings

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More than half of the $1.3 billion contract budget is earmarked for offline payments development.

From: ECB Shows It’s Serious About Enabling Offline Use of Euro CBDC.

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It’s a far more modest plan than the grand design X touted a few months ago to build “a global payments system” within a year, but it’s a crucial — and most importantly, a realistic — first step.

From: Why Elon Musk’s X narrowed its focus to peer-to-peer payments | PaymentsSource | American Banker.

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I happened to be listening to the fascinating Patrick McKenzie talking with Tyler Cowan when he was asked the interesting quesiton “why is it you still have to sign the back of your credit card?”, a question that I used to enjoy teasing American audiences with. (Here’s a Talmudic take on the issue from a few years ago.)

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“The counterfeiter probably didn’t realize that that coin didn’t exist,” Dr. Ortega said.

From: The Mystery of the Coin That Shouldn’t Exist – The New York Times.

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Coins are so interesting, such an important element of cultural heritage, it will be a shame to see them go. But go they must. 

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A US lobby group representing the interests of Big Tech firms has hit out at proposals by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to regulate tech giants such as Apple and Google that offer digital payment apps and wallets.

In November, the Bureau published a proposed rule that would see non-bank financial companies that handle more than five million transactions per year face the same rules as large banks and credit unions.

The rule would cover around 17 companies, most notably Google, Apple, PayPal and CashApp operator Block. These firms would have to adhere to applicable funds transfer, privacy, and other consumer protection laws.

From: Big Tech firms begin fight back over regulatory oversight of digital wallets.

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ICL was created primarily from the merger of International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) and English Electric Computers, the latter of which had been formed by the union of Elliott Automation and English Electric Leo Marconi (EELM) computers.

This meant ICL inherited several different computers, the most notable of which  was the ICT 1900 Series of mainframes, while English Electric Computers (EEC) gave ICL the System 4, a range of IBM-compatible mainframe clones.

From: Tales In Tech History: ICL, The British Computing Giant.

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Shaanxi Coal Group’s Caojiatan Coal Mine is one of the largest mines in China, with an approved capacity of 25 million tons per year and recently upgraded to become the world’s first 5G-Advanced (5G-A / 5.5G) smart coal mine. With faster download speeds and low latency, 5G-A offers the potential for AI and to also make the Internet of Things a reality. On November 20 2023, through a joint collaboration with Shaanxi Coal Group, China Telecom, Huawei and TD Tech, Caojiatan Smart Mine was announced at the 2023 China 5G+ Industrial Internet Conference.

The project introduces key 5G-A technologies including low-frequency uplinks and REDCAP for the first time. On the production side, Caojiatan has built 6 smart coal mining working faces, two of which have reduced the number of personnel from 17 to 7, significantly improving coal production efficiency.

From: Shaanxi Coal Group Caojiatan: The World’s First 5G-A Smart Mine, powered by Huawei – Mobile World Live.

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You’re probably heard about The Missing Cryptoqueen. It was one of the best podcasts of all time, a BBC series that explored the story of Dr Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian-born German entrepreneur who founded a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme known as OneCoin, which The Times has described as “one of the biggest scams in history”. Since 2017 she has been on the run and in 2019 she was charged in absentia by U.S. authorities for wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering. Currently one of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted”, she also subject to an international Interpol warrant from the German authorities. In the podcast, Jamie Bartlett presents a story of greed, deceit and herd madness that is fascinating funny and frightening. I cannot recommened his book highly enough.

Jamie has written about how Dr Ruja was a genius at brand association. Knowing credibility was critical to her scam, she made sure to place herself next to trusted brands. She famously gave a speech hosted by The Economist in 2015, for example, where she gave a platitude filled “keynote” that you can watch online here. Well, as it transpires, there was another trusted brand that OneCoin was, as Jamie puts it, “looking to snag”: Consult Hyperion! Jamie writes that

In early 2017 OneCoin appointed someone to figure out what OneCoin needed to do to fix its growing technology mess. He asked Ruja’s London office, RavenR Capital, to come up with names. And the name suggested? ‘I would go for Consult Hyperion’ emailed one staffer, attaching a summary of the company.

 

When Jamie, an old friend, told me this, I was very pleased, as you can imagine. As one of the founders of Consult Hyperion, I have always been very proud of the culture of integrity that we built around our core deep subject matter expertise. We have such great people here and they have helped us to build a global reputation for being the best when it comes to helping scale players exploit new technology aroud secure electronic transactions. To be honest, even after all these years to still feels pretty good every time I see it confirmed and when I get a message on LinkedIn saying “hey , your team did a great job”, or someone says at a conference “those guys got us out of hole”, or a stranger in an airport loungue tells me what a superb analysis one of team delivered for them, I still get the same strange mixture of pleasure and pride that I did all those years ago! 

Jamie asked me what Consult Hyperion could have done for OneCoin, and I told him. We do due diligence on behalf of investors, we provide expert witnesses in lawsuits, we do risk analysis and penetration testing for some of the biggest names in financial services around the world. There are all sorts of ways that we could have helped them prove that their scheme was awesome, their teams was great and they would storm the market

But Dr. Ruja never called.

She never called for the obvious reason that we have some of the best electronic transactions consultants on the planet. It would have taken them at most around five minutes to discover that the supposed claimant to Bitcoin’s crown was nothing of the sort. As Global Ambassador for Consult Hyperion, it is henceforth my proudest claim that the cryptoqueen never called us and if we ever get a coat of arms, I intend to suggest “regina non vocavit” as our motto!

Here I am with Jamie and Erica Stanford (author of “Crypto Wars”, another great book!)

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In the United States, where the telegraph network was controlled by private companies rather than governments, there were no rules banning the use of codes, so they were adopted much earlier. In fact, the first known public codes for the electric telegraph date back to 1845, when two code books were published to provide businesses with a means of communicating secretly using the new technology.

Of course, such codes weren’t all that secret because the code books were widely available to everyone (though in some cases they could be customized). But before long another advantage of using such nonsecret codes, known as ”commercial” codes, soon became clear — to save money. By using a code that replaced several words with a single word, telegrams cost less to send.

By 1875, the use of commercial codes was starting to get out of hand. Some codes involved weird words, like ”CHINESISKSLUTNINGSDON.”

From: THINK TANK; The Granddaddies of All Hackers – The New York Times.

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The messaging business itself was mostly generated by business and institutional users, as the general public had yet fully to understand, let alone domesticate, telegraphy. In 1863, for example, Wynter illustrated the lack of understanding of telegraphy in an anecdotal article that told of a gentleman who had ‘seriously’ requested a telegraph clerk to send two dozen stamps to his wife in the country.

From: Victorian telegrams: the early development of the telegraphic despatch and its interplay with the letter post | Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science.

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