Snippings

xxx

Payment networks do much more than facilitate value exchange, they intermediate and assume both risk and support. For example, a key challenge in multi-party intermediation is enforceable contracts AND the ability of a third party to assume/underwrite risk. This is the core of the “trust function”.. [and a key contract vehicle]

From Innovation in Networks – Part 4 | Noyes Payments Blog.

xxx

xxx

KEY POINT. Banks ENABLE commerce… they don’t create it. Banks do not “own” the consumer, merchant, platform, transaction, ….etc. Please forget about your super app dreams… you have a super card. V/MA networks enable bank financial intermediation

From Innovation in Networks – Part 4 | Noyes Payments Blog.

xxx

xxx

New flows are far more important than existing flows. Existing payment volume is tremendously sticky. A change in existing volume is like changing 5 contracts with 5 parties with each of them receiving a new incentive (a challenge). New payment flows are thus the core of growth. The sources of new flows typically include New Markets, Merchants, Markets, Platforms, Governments, Consumer Champions, and Fortune 100 companies.

From Innovation in Networks – Part 4 | Noyes Payments Blog.

xxx

xxx

Story – Connected Car (EV). Today Tesla has the best charging experience. My Tesla is connected to my car and my credit card. I pull into a Tesla supercharger and the station reads the ID of my car to activate the cable. Same thing happens when I activate Spotify.  Today all other EVs have a grand customer experience problem, with 100s of different charging stations. Payments will soon be integrated into all EVs to allow for a “Tesla like” experience, once integrated premium maps, parking, service calls, weather, music, … al will be “enabled” by integrated payment. This is not payment innovation.. This is the EV platform(s) driven by Fortune 100 companies.

From Innovation in Networks – Part 4 | Noyes Payments Blog.

xxx

xxx

European citizens will have the choice of a nationally-provided digital identity wallet for pan EU use, rather than simply commercially-provided products, after a vote on the proposed update of the European Digital Identity Framework at the Industry, Research and Energy Committee was won by a large margin, reports the European Parliament new service.
The changes also mean anyone not wanting to use a digital ID wallet at all cannot be treated differently.
At present, people have to rely on digital wallets provided by the private sector, typically linked to payment systems, which has raised security and privacy concerns. National wallets are expected to give users better control over their data.
Other amendments to the framework ensure the digital identity wallets will be able to read and verify electronic documents and execute peer-to-peer interactions. The system must also register all transactions to ensure third parties can be held accountable.

From EU countries must provide sophisticated, national versions of digital identity wallet | Biometric Update:

xxx

xxx

Madonna sang the praises of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, depicting cartoon portraits of bored apes. Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady appeared in commercials endorsing crypto exchange FTX, which collapsed suddenly in November. And Kim Kardashian gushed about EMAX tokens on Instagram.

Now they and other celebrities are facing civil lawsuits from investors who suffered losses on virtual assets, as well as scrutiny by regulators for allegedly duping the investing public.

From Celebrities Who Endorsed Crypto, NFTs Land in Legal Crosshairs After Investor Losses – WSJ:

xxx

Now, I am not a lawyer, but it sounds like promoting cryptocurrencies might get you into trouble. Therefore you can imagine my surprise when I started getting messages from friends asking me why I was advising them to buy some obscure cryptocurrency that I’d never heard of.

 

xxx

Increasingly, the best place to create a false identity and use it to identify, target and groom potential victims is on social media, via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission says 27 per cent of all reported fraud is initiated this way, declaring social media to be “a gold mine for scammers”.

From The UK’s weak digital bill will fail to deliver knockout blow to online fraudsters:

xxx

xxx

The USA is confronted with three epic-size problems: (1) the need for production of energy on a scale that meets the current and future needs of the nation, (2) the need to confront the climate crisis head-on by only producing renewable, green energy, that is 100% emission-free, and (3) the need to forever forestall the eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano. This paper offers both a provable practical, novel solution, and a thought experiment, to simultaneously solve all of the above stated problems. Through a new copper-based engineering approach on an unprecedented scale, this paper proposes a safe means to draw up the mighty energy reserve of the Yellowstone Supervolcano from within the Earth, to superheat steam for spinning turbines at sufficient speed and on a sufficient scale, in order to power the entire USA. The proposed, single, multi-redundant facility utilizes the star topology in a grid array pattern to accomplish this. Over time, bleed-off of sufficient energy could potentially forestall this Supervolcano from ever erupting again. With obvious importance to our planet and the research community alike, COMSOL simulation demonstrates and proves the solution proposed herein, to bring vast amounts of green, emission-free energy to the planet’s surface for utilization. Well over 11 Quadrillion Watt hours of electrical energy generated over the course of one full year, to meet the current and future needs of the USA is shown to be practical. Going beyond other current and past research efforts, this methodology offers tremendous benefits, potentially on a planetary scale.

From Yellowstone Caldera Volcanic Power Generation Facility: A new engineering approach for harvesting emission-free green volcanic energy on a national scale – ScienceDirect:

xxx

xxx

But OpenAI’s breakout hit did not come out of nowhere. The chatbot is the most polished iteration to date in a line of large language models going back years.

2017: Transformers
The breakthrough behind today’s generation of large language models came when a team of Google researchers invented transformers, a kind of neural network that can track where each word or phrase appears in a sequence. The meaning of words often depends on the meaning of other words that come before or after. By tracking this contextual information, transformers can handle longer strings of text and capture the meanings of words more accurately. For example, “hot dog” means very different things in the sentences “Hot dogs should be given plenty of water” and “Hot dogs should be eaten with mustard.”

From ChatGPT is everywhere. Here’s where it came from | MIT Technology Review:

xxx

xxx

Mark Hays, senior policy analyst with Americans for Financial Reform, said predatory inclusion comes from the overall cryptocurrency market being based on a form of extraction capitalism. The industry has yet to demonstrate a clear use-value, other than facilitating both blue-collar and white-collar crime.

From Bitcoin ATM Companies Are Preying on the Poor – Truthout:

xxx

xxx

There’s a laundromat in a working-class immigrant community on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. that is much more than a place to wash and dry clothes. The store offers alternative financial services — bill payment processing, money orders and check-cashing services — charging for many transactions that most banks perform for customers at no extra cost.

From Bitcoin ATM Companies Are Preying on the Poor – Truthout:

xxx