A library of snippets
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The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) said in a statement on Tuesday it would carry out a year-long pilot project to explore “innovative use cases and business models” for a CBDC and gain a better understanding of technological, legal and regulatory considerations.
From Australia’s central bank launches digital currency pilot | Crypto | Al Jazeera:
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The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), a watchdog agency tasked with preventing sanctions violations, on Monday added Tornado Cash to its Specially Designated Nationals list, a running tally of blacklisted people, entities and cryptocurrency addresses. As a result, all U.S. persons and entities are prohibited from interacting with Tornado Cash or any of the Ethereum wallet addresses tied to the protocol. Those who do may face criminal penalties.
From Crypto-Mixing Service Tornado Cash Blacklisted by US Treasury:
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A former T-Mobile store owner has been found guilty of using stolen credentials to hack into “hundreds of thousands of cellphones” in a multiyear scheme that netted him roughly $25 million that he spent on cars and properties in California.
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Post offices handled £801m in personal cash withdrawals in July, the most since records began five years ago.
That’s up more than 20% from a year earlier.
Natalie Ceeney, chair of the Cash Action Group, said it showed people are “literally counting the pennies” as they grapple with rising prices.From Cost of living: People turning back to cash as prices rise – BBC News.
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This may well be true but there’s at least another contributing factor in my opinion. On one of our local neighbourhood message Boards the other day I saw a plaintive appeal from a man who had withdrawn a few thousand pounds in cash and then gone shopping. On his return home he discovered he’d lost the envelope with the cash on it. I doubt he’ll see it again, but what interested me most was why anyone would be walking round with an envelope with thousands of pounds in cash on it in 2022. I wasn’t the only person to wonder this because there was several posts asking him the same question. He replied that he was having some building work done on his house and needed to pay the builders.
Now, you know as well as I do, that the only reason for paying builders in cash is to avoid tax. This goes on all the time of course, and something like half of what the Inland Revenue refer to as the “tax gap” (that is the difference between their estimate of the tax that should be remitted given the scale of economic activity and the size of the population and the actual amount of tax remitted) is down to small businesses not reporting transactions. (One of the reasons why I get so upset about my enormous corporation tax bill is that I know other people aren’t paying their fair share.)
I am sure some of the use of cash is “jam jarring” (that is, hypothecating income to assign it to specific expenditure but in times of hardship, I am sure that some of it is to avoid value-added tax and payroll taxes.
It’s not clear to me that cash is indeed the best way to manage the hypothecation. For one thing, people are trapped in a cash economy other people who are mugged, shaken down and excluded from the best deals for goods and services. They are also the people who lack insurance and are vulnerable if cash goes missing. Also, cash leaves no accounting trail so you can’t sit down at the end of the week and see where your money went. Some years ago I remember taking part in an experi an experiment in the north of England to look at the use of mobile wallets to manage welfare payments and as I recall, the participants were greatly in favour of this way of handling their limited resources. A great many people have smart phones and hypothecation through a smart phone app can deliver much better financial health results than cash on the kitchen counter in jam jars.
Although my memories of growing up on a working class council estate in Swindon are sufficient to allow me to refute any charge that I do not understand what it’s like to be poor or to be in a position of hardship, no
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I had no idea that there was something called the Tinkerbell Effect, but there is. The term describes things that are thought to exist only because people believe in them.
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Step 1. Create a fake account for a real local union: ILWU Local 8 based in Portland
Step 2. Buy followers. 50 followers were bought from Brazil. Brazilians obv v. attuned to Portland labor relations
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Thus, any programmable money scheme that relies on smart contracts not only creates economic difficulties but, more importantly, poses risks to national security. For regulators, this should mean discouraging the use of such architectures and even banning them until any unintended consequences can be understood. This does not mean that CBDCs should be discouraged but that any economic or technical architecture that opens a currency to attack should be ruled out as a candidate for implementation.
Patrick McConnell has taught Strategic, Operational and Technology Risk Management at Macquarie University, Sydney and Trinity College, Dublin.
From CBDC – How Dangerous is Programmability? – The FinReg Blog.
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Do Not Expect Durbin Amendment 2.0 to Work for Credit https://buff.ly/3BLFn4g
“While issuers have lost billions in revenue, the costs of accepting debit cards have not gone down for many merchants in the survey, and for some merchants, the costs have even increased”
“Durbin 2.0 will not work…. Banks will lose. Most merchants will not gain. And, the consumer credit holder will feel the pain in the long run as banks contract lending because legislators failed to pay heed to the dynamics of consumer credit.”
Surely if legislators want to reduce costs, they need to introduce more competition. But what could the competition to cards be? Well, there’s open banking, instant payments and digital currency right around the corner…
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Cryptocurrency market-capitalization measures are distorted by misleading trades, double counting and lost coins
From Why Crypto’s Market Cap Never Booms, or Busts, as Much as You Think – WSJ.
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Three fake tradies tricked pubgoers into thinking they were busy working away as the afternoon rush kicked in when they were actually robbing the joint.
Wearing hi-vis shorts, caps and and masks, the thieves walked into the Junction Hotel in Newcastle, NSW, on July 4 and quickly targeted the poker machine area. They were only inside for a minute but walked out with an estimated $30,000 after taking the cash dispenser.
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Snippings