Snippings

As Dave Wallace points out, the indirect nature of offsets means that they are often difficult to validate and bad actors can exploit this.  For some form of carbon currency to succeed it must deal with these kinds of issues to build trust. A caron currency needs to be open, transparent and non-discriminatory. It needs to be money

xxx

Beginning in May 2023, individuals in Great Britain will be required to show photographic identification for the first time when voting in polling stations in some elections. This is because the Elections Act 2022, passed in April this year, has introduced the requirement of identification at polling stations for general elections across all of Great Britain, as well as local elections in England and Police and Crime Commissioner elections in both England and Wales.

From No ID? No vote! Voter ID comes to Great Britain | British Politics and Policy at LSE:

xxx

xxx

Equally striking is the dominance within the financial technology realm of billion-dollar companies that deal in some way with payments. They account for eight of Fintech Labs’ top 10 — PayPal, Ant, Stripe, Shopify, Adyen, Block (formerly Square), Checkout.com and Afterpay.

From Why Visa and Mastercard have yet to face their Kodak moment | Financial Times.

xxx

xxx

For most people outside China, the words “social credit system” conjure up an instant image: a Black Mirror–esque web of technologies that automatically score all Chinese citizens according to what they did right and wrong. But the reality is, that terrifying system doesn’t exist, and the central government doesn’t seem to have much appetite to build it, either.

Instead, the system that the central government has been slowly working on is a mix of attempts to regulate the financial credit industry, enable government agencies to share data with each other, and promote state-sanctioned moral values—however vague that last goal in particular sounds.

From China just announced a new social credit law. Here’s what it says. | MIT Technology Review.

xxx

xxx

Canadian banks and the country’s Interac debit network are heavily involved in the nation’s digital ID initiatives, working with telcos and tech companies to promote interoperability and thus reduce fraud.

Being able to verify customer identity digitally will be critical when Canadian financial institutions launch the Real-Time Rail instant payments service in 2023, followed within the next few years by open banking.

From How banks are shaping Canada’s digital ID infrastructure | PaymentsSource | American Banker.

xxx

xxx

For scalability the project will use an architecture compatible with distributed ledger technology, although not based on it

From BIS Innovation Hub launches new prototype CBDC:

xxx

xxx

Moreover, it is not clear the extent to which these platforms are truly decentralised. Behind these protocols typically sit firms and stakeholders who derive revenue from their operations. Moreover it is often unclear who, in practice, controls the governance of the protocols.

From Reflections on DeFi, digital currencies and regulation – speech by Jon Cunliffe | Bank of England:

xxx

xxx

Over the weekend, a verified account posing as FTX founder SBF posted dozens of copies of this deepfake video offering FTX users “compensation for the loss” in a phishing scam designed to drain their crypto wallets

From Jason Koebler on Twitter: “Over the weekend, a verified account posing as FTX founder SBF posted dozens of copies of this deepfake video offering FTX users “compensation for the loss” in a phishing scam designed to drain their crypto wallets https://t.co/3KoAPRJsya” / Twitter:

xxx

xxx

Boston Consulting Group

Tokenization of global illiquid assets estimated to be a $16 trillion business opportunity by 2030

A large chunk of the world’s wealth today is locked in illiquid assets. In a survey conducted in the U.S. in 1997, 56%+ of assets held by taxpayers with a net-worth of between $600,000 and $1 million were illiquid11. All else being equal, illiquid assets typically trade at a discount vs. liquid assets, and are characterized by a high stock-to-flow ratio, lower trading volumes and imperfect price discovery vs liquid assets.

From Post | Feed | LinkedIn:

xxx

xxx

It might be worth thinking of an industry wide financial services satellite connection, too. We need some serious sector wide technology leadership on this topic.

From Zuckeberg’s Board • AI Act 2022 • Bye Bye Blockchain • Your wifi is not OK:

xxx

It’s an interesting suggestion.

A diversion: I started my career in secure communications, on projects for (amongst others) GCHQ and the Royal Air Force. I also spent time at NATO working on radio and satellite communications planning. There was an actual Cold War in those days and working out how to bring up a functioning command and control network after a Russian nuclear first strike was, it has to be said, really rather interesting. I also worked on commercial satellite communications, including Palapa B1. This was the first regional satellite system and one of the main uses was going to be linking banking and other financial infrastructure across the vast Indonesia archipelago. (And here’s one for the teenagers: I wrote the X.25 and X.28 software to run over the Aloha satellite communications channels.)