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In the U.S., 43% of adults who have previously invested in cryptocurrencies said they are “not very or not at all confident” in the technology’s safety or reliability. Ouch! It’s surprising to see that, deep down, more than four in 10 of crypto’s early adopters—many of whom have been the ones trumpeting blockchain’s far-reaching and futuristic applications these past few years—aren’t actually all that comfortable with the technology in its current state.

The more sobering statistic, though, was this: The proportion of U.S. adults that have ever traded, invested in or used cryptocurrency has increased by just 1 percentage point to 17%, compared to September 2021, based on this survey and Pew’s prior research. Sure, the fact that bitcoin’s price has been trending upward means there are more buyers than sellers, but Pew’s findings suggest it’s just been the same people buying and selling over the past 18 months. Crypto adoption, which many blockchain startups will tell you is their main goal, isn’t getting any higher

From Here Comes the Startup Panic — The Information.

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Visa is teaming up with a host of firms, including PayPal and Western Union, to let people send each other money between different P2P payment apps.

The new Visa+ service means that, later this year, Venmo and PayPal users in the US will be able to start moving money seamlessly between the two platforms.

Visa+ will not require users to have a Visa card; instead, by setting up a personalized payment address linked to their Venmo or PayPal account, people using either app will be able to receive and send payment between the platforms.

From Visa partners PayPal for interoperable P2P payments:

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British people will have an app for all their financial data in the same way they can access all their health data on the National Health Service (NHS) app. This “economic digital identity super app” should come soon and be devised by government, otherwise the private sector will swoop in.
These are the thoughts of Bob Wigley, chair of UK Finance and member of Trade Advisory Group for Financial Services at the UK Department for International Trade and the UK’s Economic Crime Strategic Board, reports the Global Government Forum.
Wigley believes people should have an app to gather their economic footprint such as credit ratings, KYC and AML data. People should be able to connect it to whatever financial institution they operate with.
If the government does not create the economic digital identity, “the big tech platforms will do it,” the GGF quotes him as saying, while “we should be designing it.”

From UK digital identity moves department, financier demands ‘economic digital ID’ | Biometric Update:

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Balaji Srinivasan, for instance, suggests that FedNow could “facilitate Cyprus-style deposit seizure at the speed of light”:

From Moneyness: FedNow is not a tool for freezing money.

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“I can now focus on other customers while the payment is being made. I have installed two sound boxes … one from Paytm and the other one from PhonePe.”

From Paytm speakers help India’s merchants with digital payments – Rest of World:

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By the nineteen-thirties, the fantasy of technological supremacy had found its fullest expression in the Technocracy movement, which, during the Depression, vied with socialism and fascism as an alternative to capitalism and liberal democracy. “Technocracy, briefly stated, is the application of science to the social order,” a pamphlet called “Technocracy in Plain Terms” explained in 1939. Technocrats proposed the abolition of all existing economic and political arrangements—governments and banks, for instance—and their replacement by engineers, who would rule by numbers. “Money cannot be used, and its function of purchasing must be replaced by a scientific unit of measurement,” the pamphlet elaborated, assuring doubters that nearly everyone “would probably come to like living under a Technate.” Under the Technate, humans would no longer need names; they would have numbers. (One Technocrat called himself 1x1809x56.) They dressed in gray suits and drove gray cars. If this sounds familiar—tech bros and their gray hoodies and silver Teslas, cryptocurrency and the abolition of currency—it should. As a political movement, Technocracy fell out of favor in the nineteen-forties, but its logic stuck around. Elon Musk’s grandfather was a leader of the Technocracy movement in Canada; he was arrested for being a member, and then, soon after South Africa announced its new policy of apartheid, he moved to Pretoria, where Elon Musk was born, in 1971. One of Musk’s children is named x æ a-12. Welcome to the Technate.

From The Data Delusion | The New Yorker:

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Under the Technate, humans would no longer need names; they would have numbers. (One Technocrat called himself 1x1809x56.) They dressed in gray suits and drove gray cars. If this sounds familiar—tech bros and their gray hoodies and silver Teslas, cryptocurrency and the abolition of currency—it should. As a political movement, Technocracy fell out of favor in the nineteen-forties, but its logic stuck around. Elon Musk’s grandfather was a leader of the Technocracy movement in Canada; he was arrested for being a member, and then, soon after South Africa announced its new policy of apartheid, he moved to Pretoria, where Elon Musk was born, in 1971. One of Musk’s children is named x æ a-12. Welcome to the Technate.

From The Data Delusion | The New Yorker:

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No, seriously: On March 20, DeSantis, speaking from a podium bearing a sign reading “Big Brother’s Digital Dollar,” announced that he plans to introduce legislation that would ban Floridians from making use of a digital currency issued by the federal government. Such a digital currency, he asserted, would be used to “impose an E.S.G. agenda” and would, for example, prevent people from spending too much on gas or from buying rifles.

From Opinion | Why Is DeSantis Against Central Bank Digital Currencies? – The New York Times:

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Tinkoff — designated by the EU in its tenth round of sanctions at the end of February — has built a physical alternative to Apple Pay: a sticker with a near-field chip, which is connected to their accounts. Attached to the front of a phone, it turns it into a contactless device.

From Russians search for bootleg solutions to overcome payments sanctions | Financial Times:

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The need for creative payments solutions, at home and abroad, is obvious. Not only have Visa and Mastercard cut services in Russia but Mir, which has helped keep domestic payments flowing, is also now accepted in just a handful of countries, such as Belarus and the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

What is also obvious, say experts, is that one year since the invasion began Russia’s need to continuously innovate to keep payments flowing demonstrates just how hard it is to exist outside of the US financial system, let alone supplant it.

From Russians search for bootleg solutions to overcome payments sanctions | Financial Times:

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