A library of snippets
xxx
The washout of bad actors and the bursting of financial bubbles affords the crypto industry an opportunity to focus on amending its mistakes and building better technology, without distractions from overblown yields. This is the time for self-discipline and a sharper focus on security, decentralisation (Aramonte et al. 2021), and scalability.
From Crypto and regulation: I can’t live with you, but I can’t live without you | CEPR.
xxx
xxx
The National Payments Corporation of India has asked payment apps to stop charging a platform fee for payments enabled on the Bharat Bill Payment Platform. This is in light of the RBI coming out with a discussion paper on payment charges in the country. The government also seems inclined to treat the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) as a public good that customers do not have to pay for.
From NPCI directs apps not to charge bill payment fees – Times of India.
xxx
xxx
The rollout of bitcoin in El Salvador so far is playing out like a car crash in slow motion.
From Will This Be the First Country Bankrupted by Crypto? – Rolling Stone.
xxx
xxx
The governor also predicted that the use of cash will “dissipate to zero” while the “use of digital currency will increase to become part of our lives.”
xxx
xxx
Sharply fewer U.S. adults report they use cash for making purchases now than say they were doing so five years ago. Thirteen percent say they make “all” or “most” of their purchases with cash, while 28% say they were using cash to the same extent five years ago. Six in 10 now say they make “only a few” or no purchases with cash today, nearly double the 32% saying they did so five years ago.
From Americans Using Cash Less Often; Foresee Cashless Society:
xxx
On 16 June 2022, the UK government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (“the DCMS”) published its response to its Data Reform consultation. The response sets out the UK government’s key data protection reform proposals which will be incorporated into the UK’s new Data Reform Bill.
xxx
The reforms appear to be focused on providing organisations with greater flexibility over their use of personal data while still committing to a high level of data protection. Organisations should be reassured that if they already comply with the UK’s current data protection regime, they will still comply with the new regime. If anything, the proposed Data Reform is designed to make the lives of businesses and organisations a little easier.
From UK Data: A New Direction – UK Government Responds to Consultation.
xxx
xxx
Under current law, the Comptroller of the Currency could authorize a national trust bank charter, organized as an operating subsidiary of an insured depository institution, to create stablecoins through the use of a dedicated trust vehicle. Under our proposal, the Comptroller would adopt standards limiting the investment of stablecoin reserves to high quality liquid assets and address redemptions and operational resilience, among other matters. Our approach could promote increased competition in payments services and potentially safeguard the role of the dollar in international finance. While our framework would not be mandatory, our approach would provide substantial benefits to stablecoin sponsors, thus increasing the likelihood that they would opt into the framework.
From How we can regulate stablecoins now—without congressional action.
xxx
So far so familiar to people I bore senseless about this stuff at parties. Then it got a lot more interesting when my old chum Izabella Kaminska from the FT stepped into the fray, pointing to something that Craig Wright (the man who may or may not be Satoshi Nakamoto) wrote on the topic.
It’s the first time anyone in the bitcoin world has actually made a compelling argument, with historical references. First, he describes bitcoin not as a currency or a commodity but as a security service.
I had not read the Wright piece before, so I had a very quick glance and then bookmarked it to read later. Unfortunately, there was no later as Mr. Wright has now canned his blog, but a correspondent found it
using the wayback machine . Dr. Wright says “The mining of bitcoin is a security service that alone creates no wealth”. So to return to the point above, the sheer volume of mining going on (provided it does not become concentrated) means that there is a very, very secure piece of infrastructure out there. This infrastructure may be used to “anchor” all sorts of new services that need security as I said above. Some of them may be payments (as the Lightning folks hope) but most of them will not be. Now, while I think it unlikely that the bitcoin blockchain will be the final form of this infrastructure, that’s no reason not to experiment with it, in which case bitcoins will continue to have value even if no-one is using them to buy mundane goods or services.
When I was a small boy growing up in 1960s Swindon, I loved my visits to the public library in Cavendish Square. My mum used to take me there regularly and I literally devoured the books that I borrowed. I was particularly taken with the chronicles of flying ace James “Biggles” Bigglesworth (the creation of actual Great War Royal Flying Corps. Pilot W.E. Johns) and I’m pretty sure I read every single Biggles adventure there ever was. I would often read my books in a couple of days then have to wait another week or whatever before I go back and change them so some of them were read multiple times. In the books, Biggles was born in India and grew up fluent in Hindi and I wonder now if this was what fascinated me because my grandfather had served in the Royal Signals in India in the 1930s and my mum, born in Catterick, spent her early years there.
Of course I read all kinds of other books as well. I loved science books on all subjects, focusing more on chemistry and physics as I got older. I read a variety of fiction, particularly adventure stories. I do not remember reading much in the way of history, which is odd because half the books I read now are history, but I do remember reading everything I could get my hands on otherwise. As for many other boys of my age, the Eagle comic was a staple and I couldn’t get enough of the Commando Picture Library and similar war stories. I often think about these now because when I was a kid and reading them, I had no real understanding of time. The Second World War was remote to me but recent memories to the adults around me. My mother had been evacuated to the country, her father had won the Distinguished Conduct Medal (at Dunkirk) and my father had served in the British Army in the Far East campaign.
My grandparents on my mum’s side subscribed to the Reader’s Digest and I read every one of these when we visited them (“It pays to increase your word power” and all that jazz) as well as my grandad’s Soldier magazine. My grandma used to take me to the public library near where she lived in south London when I stayed with her in the summer holidays and would buy me comics from the newsagent at the end of her street. I read and read and read.
When I was around 10, and I think this must have come via my grandparents, although I don’t remember exactly how, the Reader’s Digest World Atlas arrived in our house. I still have it today. I adored this atlas and pored over the pages again and again and again. I can still picture the book taken out of its cardboard sleeve (I still have this too) and spread open our the dining room table.
Growing up in a council house in a post-war London overspill new estate, the pages of that atlas were a wonder to me. I read about Biggles’ adventures in Africa and Latin America, the Baltic and the Mediterranean, dreaming of these places but not in the expectation I would visit them. Bearing in mind that I never went out of England until I was at university (and then only to France) and that the first time I flew anywhere was when I first flew on business when was 23, the pages of that atlas had a profound effect on me.
I now look at the pages covering the Soviet Union and think about how I had studied them as a boy, fascinated by St. Petersburg but never imagining that one day I would actually go there and visit The Hermitage, fascinated by the pages with the Caspian Sea and Lake Baikal on them, fascinated by the pages covering China while assuming that I would never get to see the Great Wall for myself (which still nudges the Grand Canyon into second place for the most astonishing thing I’ve seen with my own eyes.)
(When I was a little older, beginning to think about going to University — I’m part of that boomer generation whose forebears had never been to university: Not only was it free, but because my parents were poor I was given a local authority grant which paid for my living costs! — and what sort of career I might have as a scientist, I began to focus more and more on America. In the 1970s, America was Kojak and CHiPS and I really wanted to live in California, a dream that I did finally achieve in the 1980s.)
Anyway, I’m telling you this for a couple of reasons. I’ve just finished reading Jack Weatherford’s “The Secret History of the Mongol Queens”, a follow-on from his excellent “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World”, and I’m now reading Marie Favereau’s “The Horde: How the Mongols changed the world” and it brings back the memory of a small boy looking at the central Asian steppe in that world atlas from half a century ago and never for one moment thinking I would set foot on it. Having read Peter Frankopan’s fantastic “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” a few years ago, I’ve become ever more interested in the history of Central Asia that I never learned at school. As for setting foot there… Well, last week I was in Almaty, the biggest city in Kazakhstan, and I had a wonderful time.
Many years ago, I wrote a blog post about Kazakhstan because it had the the highest penetration of EMV terminals in the CIS and environs (at that time more than nine in ten POS terminals had already been upgraded to chip) and I couldn’t resist making fun of America by posting a picture of a chip and PIN terminal for the well-known fictional character “Borat” to take with him on his next visit to America…
Yes, it was a chip and PIN terminal. Anyway, some 16 years after I wrote that blog post, I finally got to make a chip and PIN transaction in Kazakhstan for myself. I never got any local currency, I just used my cards everywhere I went and they worked perfectly every time. For example, I stopped in for a coffee whilst having a wander around the leafy streets near my hotel. It had an excellent menu:
It also had excellent coffee, which I paid for by tapping a contactless card on one of the ubiquitous contactless terminals.
I was the only person who did this, by the way, because everyone else who bought coffee used QR. QR was everywhere, from the main streets to the tourist attractions to the mountain tops.
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has chosen the first group of encryption tools that are designed to withstand the assault of a future quantum computer. The four selected Quantum-Resistant Cryptographic (QRC) algorithms will become part of NIST’s post-quantum cryptographic standard which is due out a couple of years from now. Their announcement follows a six-year effort to devise encryption methods that could resist an attack from a future quantum computer that is more powerful than the comparatively limited machines available today.
xxx
you can actually be at risk from a quantum computer, even though a quantum computer does not yet exist. This is often called “harvest now, decrypt later.” It’s the idea that your enemy could copy your data, which is encrypted, and they can hold onto it right now. They can’t read it. But maybe a quantum computer comes out in 10 years, and then they can get access to your data. If the information you’re protecting is valuable enough, then you’re already in trouble because of that threat.
From What Is the Future of Quantum-Proof Encryption? – IEEE Spectrum.
xxx
xxx
Assuming these quantum circuits were competing against supercomputers capable of up to a quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), the researchers calculated that quantum supremacy could be reached with 208 qubits with IQP circuits, 420 qubits with QAOA circuits and 98 photons with boson sampling circuits.
From How Many Qubits Are Needed for Quantum Supremacy? – IEEE Spectrum:
xxx
xxx
Finally, we calculate the number of physical qubits required to break the 256-bit elliptic curve encryption of keys in the Bitcoin network within the small available time frame in which it would actually pose a threat to do so. It would require 317 × 106 physical qubits to break the encryption within one hour using the surface code, a code cycle time of 1 μs, a reaction time of 10 μs, and a physical gate error of 10−3
10
−
3
. To instead break the encryption within one day, it would require 13 × 106 physical qubits.
xxx
In a study, the researchers suggest that quantum computers would need millions of physical qubits to be a threat to Bitcoin. Currently, engineers are working toward quantum computers that have about 100 physical qubits, according to Mark Webber, of the University of Sussex.
xxx
The department for digital, culture media and sport is due to publish a digital strategy that draws together many of the government’s existing tech policies into one document, according to people familiar with the contents of the 50 page paper.
The strategy is expected to say the UK needs to strengthen its position as a global science and tech superpower, highlighting areas including AI, quantum computing and next generation semiconductors.
From UK to unveil new digital strategy to nurture technology sector | Financial Times.
xxx
Snippings