Snippings

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ASX has dumped its controversial blockchain project that would have replaced its ageing CHESS settlement and clearing system, after a devastating report from Accenture identified a range of major problems, including uncertain timelines, communication issues with technology vendor Digital Asset and excessive complexity.
ASX will write off $245 million to $255 million pre-tax in costs associated with the project, which has been dragging on for seven years.

From Technology: ASX kills its blockchain project, will write off $250 million:

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People buying, exchanging or printing train tickets at automatic SNCF ticket machines are being warned by the Police nationale about a scam involving their contactless payment devices.

Fake boxes which look like they could be legitimate have been installed in some stations to trick customers into touching their card to a machine that will steal their money.

From Scam alert in France: watch out for fake train ticket payment devices:

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Similarly, as recently mentioned, ISDA has also considered the issue of fungibility in the context of voluntary carbon credits (which might themselves be tokenised into ‘NFTs’). To aid liquidity, it is likely that two or more VCCs would be interchangeable for the purposes of satisfying VCC transfer obligations between traders, even if it was originally critical that the VCCs were uniquely generated in relation to different, specific projects/owners. In essence, the traders are likely only really interested in the fact that a VCC represents a tonne of CO2 reduced or removed (tCO2e). An airline might acquire VCCs generated from a forestry project to offset fuel emissions. Fungibility is therefore not a feature of the asset itself but a matter of context. As ISDA points out by way of example, banknotes are fungible to satisfy payment obligations, but are not fungible for tracing purposes (each note is serialized). Equally, therefore, a unique serial number does not preclude a VCC from being fungible. Accordingly, the issue is whether and in what circumstances different VCCs (or NFTs for that matter) will be treated as interchangeable.

From The Fine Print: Are NFTs Really Non-Fungible?:

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A Californian software company that helps people to launch tokens, Tokensoft (whose investors include Coinbase Ventures, Headline, and Meltem Demirors), has released personal information on more than 4,000 users after accusing them of “gaming” the company’s DAO airdrop. (A company representative said that they had only intended to release wallet addresses.)

Why did they have all of this personal information? Because of KYC, of course. The company is registered with the SEC and, I don’t doubt, was required to collect users’ sensitive personal data for compliance purposes.

This is what Elon Musk told Twitter staff.

I think there’s this transformative opportunity in payments. And payments really are just the exchange of information. From an information standpoint, not a huge difference between, say, just sending a direct message and sending a payment. They are basically the same thing. In principle, you can use a direct messaging stack for payments. And so that’s definitely a direction we’re going to go in, enabling people on Twitter to be able to send money anywhere in the world instantly and in real time. We just want to make it as useful as possible.
And later offered more detail:

If you can simply have one balance on Twitter that can simply go positive or a negative, and when it goes positive, the interest rate is better than what you could receive elsewhere, and when it goes negative, the interest rate is lower than what you see elsewhere, now you have a much simpler system.

Then you attach a debit card to the Twitter account so that you have backward compatibility into the payments system because not everyone will accept Twitter. So if they have above a certain balance, you automatically send people a debit card. You want backward compatibility to the existing financial infrastructure.

In the US, there’s still a small number of checks that are used. So if your landlord is demanding that you send a check, you have to have some non-zero number of checks. Then we would send a small number of checks to those that need to have checks. Then you add automatic payment. Then over time, you basically address what are all the things that you’d want from a finance standpoint. And if you address all things that you want from a finance standpoint, then we will be the people’s financial institution.

From Everything Elon Musk told Twitter employees in his first company meeting – The Verge:

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Fake QR codes had been stuck to parking meters, disguised as ‘quick pay’ options.

Motorists were asked to scan the code and enter credit card details, but any who did were directed to a fake website.

From Isle of Wight QR parking code scam warning from council | Isle of Wight County Press:

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“The reason novogratz was able to cash out of so much Bitcoin and other crypto related assets was that CNBC gave him and other crypto insiders a one-sided platfrom to constantly pump exactly what he needed to dump. The whales sold as they suckered the minnows to buy and HODL.

From $BTC: Why Peter Schiff Believes You Should ‘Sell Your Bitcoin if You Can’ — TradingView News:

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Robinson described Chen’s concept as creating a carbon standard the way there used to be a gold standard, with units of CO2 serving as the infrastructural underpinning of the economy. One unit would be equivalent to, say, a metric ton of mitigated carbon dioxide (equivalent) for a century. The global currency would be a standard and national currencies’ exchange rates with it would vary. It’s not a “coin” that individuals would bank and shop with.

The idea flips a tax or price on carbon on its head, standardizing carbon as a reward or “carrot” rather than a “stick.”

In theory, a carbon coin would enable businesses and policymakers to place a price on carbon removal efforts that are otherwise hard to quantify. In addition, there’s no need for carbon offsets because direct CO2 removals are happening left and right.

From Can a ‘carbon coin’ save the world? It may be put to the test | Greenbiz:

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When AA Traveller Travel and Tourism (a New Zealand company) reported that hackers stole personal information of customers, their General Manager Greg Leighton said that “much of the data was not needed anymore and should have been deleted“.

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the historic link between rising prosperity and carbon emissions has been broken. Today Britain is a member of a large and growing group of rich and middle-income countries that has severed it. This decoupling has been achieved not through the large-scale deployment of renewable energy—or, indeed, by exporting emissions to poorer countries—but by a change in the relationship between economic growth and energy that is perhaps as significant as those first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution three centuries ago.

From Economic growth no longer means higher carbon emissions | The Economist:

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