Snippings

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1. Two-thirds of central banks surveyed expect to issue a CBDC within 10 years.

2. Central banks are pursuing CBDC for various reasons, but none cited improving cross-border payments as the main motivation.

3. Nevertheless, many thought that inter-linking CBDCs offers a promising avenue for improving cross-border payments.

4. Banks will not have the exclusive right to distribute CBDC. Instead, they will be joined by new, regulated players.

5. Avoiding low adoption of CBDCs is a primary concern for central banks, while bank disintermediation is a secondary concern.

From Digital Monetary Institute Future of Payments 2022.

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Iven that both Apple and Google have fully tokenized browser solutions, and that these solutions are far in advance of SRC, I’m questioning the viability of SRC.  Browser OEMs would need to implement the payment provider spec for SRC to work, now it seems proprietary APIs have been created by Google which would supersede the w3C APIs.

From Google’s Browser Tokens Payments | Noyes Payments Blog.

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Establishing a reputation as an international currency issuer, like the US, is a slow and arduous process (Eichengreen et al. 2017). Throughout modern history, many would-be contenders, like Japan or the euro area, have failed to displace the dominance of the dollar. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Sargent (2012) stressed the importance and difficulty in building a reputation for the newly created US in the 1780s and the newly created euro area in the 2000s. Whether or not the Renminbi will become an international currency is also uncertain. Our model offers a cautionary tale to optimistic views that China might quickly or straightforwardly emerge as an international currency provider.

From Internationalising like China | CEPR.

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Russia and Iran are working together on a cryptocurrency backed by gold — a ‘stablecoin’ that could replace the dollar for payments in international trade.

The two countries, both of which have been hit by Western sanctions, want to issue a “token of the Persian region” for use in crossborder transactions, with a plan to launch it in a special economic enclave in Astrakhan in southern Russia, which already handles Iranian shipments.

From Dollar Dominance Under Threat: 5 New Challenges to the Greenback’s Reign.

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In the 2015 book Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day, former Harvard magazine editor Craig Lambert focused on the myriad tasks that used to be done by other people, which most of us now do for ourselves, usually with the help of digital devices. This includes everything from banking to travel bookings, ordering food in restaurants to bagging groceries, not to mention downloading and navigating the apps we need to pay parking tickets or track our children’s school assignments or even troubleshoot our own tech problems.

From The real cost of shadow work | Financial Times.

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British households cut more than 2m subscriptions to services such as Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ last year, as the cost of living crisis fuelled the first annual decline since the UK streaming revolution began a decade ago.

Despite a boost from the royal family, with viewers flocking to the Harry & Meghan documentary and enduring demand for episodes of The Crown, almost 900,000 UK households gave up on the streaming services last year, as the total number having at least one paid-for subscription fell from 17.12m in 2021 to 16.24m.

From UK homes cancelled 2m streaming services last year as cost of living soared | Netflix | The Guardian.

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Products like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, as well as the underlying AI models that power such systems (Stable Diffusion, DALL·E 2, GPT-3, to name a few), are taking technology into realms once thought to be reserved for humans. With generative AI, computers can now arguably exhibit creativity. They can produce original content in response to queries, drawing from data they’ve ingested and interactions with users. They can develop blogs, sketch package designs, write computer code, or even theorize on the reason for a production error.

From How generative AI & ChatGPT will change business | McKinsey.

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Hidden patterns purposely buried in AI-generated texts could help identify them as such, allowing us to tell whether the words we’re reading are written by a human or not.

These “watermarks” are invisible to the human eye but let computers detect that the text probably comes from an AI system. If embedded in large language models, they could help prevent some of the problems that these models have already caused.

From A watermark for chatbots can spot text written by an AI | MIT Technology Review.

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Recently, a fake LinkedIn profile with a computer-generated profile picture made the news because it successfully connected with US officials and other influential individuals on the networking platform, for example. Counter-intelligence experts even say that spies routinely create phantom profiles with such pictures to home in on foreign targets over social media.

From Why faces created with deepfake tools look more real than actual photographs.

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Digital challengers now have 8 per cent of the market for personal current accounts, according to the financial regulator. But the market remains very concentrated among the biggest institutions, with a share of more than 80 per cent.

From The UK led the world in open banking — and then got left behind | Financial Times:

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