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A high-ranking representative of the management of Butyrskaya prison, in the Tverskoy District of central Moscow, is under investigation for setting up a crypto mining farm. Also known as Butyrka, this is the oldest prison in Russia, built in the distant 1771.

The coin minting hardware was found in the premises of a psychiatric clinic run by the Federal Penitentiary Service at the prison.

Crypto mining with subsidized and sometimes stolen electricity has become an attractive source of additional income for many Russians.

From Crypto Mining Farm Uncovered in Russia’s Oldest Prison – Mining Bitcoin News.

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I did not steal anyone’s private keys. I interacted with the smart contract according to its very own publicly available rules. The people who lost internet tokens in this trade were other people seeking to use the smart contract to their own advantage and taking on risky trading positions that they, apparently, did not fully understand

From Crypto Platform Hack Rocks Blockchain Community – Bloomberg:

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Indexed was built on the Ethereum blockchain, a public ledger where transaction details are stored, which meant there was a record of the attack. It would take weeks to figure out precisely what had happened, but it appeared that the platform had been fooled into severely undervaluing tokens that belonged to its users and selling them to the attacker at an extreme discount. Altogether, the person or people responsible had made off with $16 million worth of assets.

From Crypto Platform Hack Rocks Blockchain Community – Bloomberg:

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A March 2022 Wunderman Thompson Intelligence survey of more than 3,000 people between the ages of 16 and 65 in China, the United States and the United Kingdom found that while three-quarters to them had heard of the metaverse, only 15% said they could explain the concept of the metaverse to another person (and half of them were probably wrong).Those same people, when asked about their concerns about the metaverse put children’s privacy first and highlighted a number of other data protection, privacy and safety issues.

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even though people have heard of the metaverse, most wouldn’t feel safe trying to explain exactly what it is

From A study indicates that, although most of us have heard of the metaverse, only 15% could explain it:

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With 47% of bankers believing that customers will use augmented reality (AR) / virtual reality (VR) as an alternative channel for transactions by 2030, it’s no surprise to see early industry explorers in this area. BNP Paribas has launched a VR app that allows customers to use VR in their banking transactions, including account opening, while Citi has tested holographic workstations for financial trading.

From How the metaverse will change banking | Accenture Banking Blog:

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According to the 2021 edition of the Digital Banking Report, 34% of the surveyed bankers believed that about a fifth of their customers will use VR/AR as an alternative channel for daily transactions by 2030.

From Banking in the Metaverse Seems Like a Gimmick, Experts Say:

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A Simon-Kucher report from May 2022 notes that of the 400 neobanks in the world, less than one in 20 are actually breaking even. If you look at the US as an example, only a handful of the (currently) 85 neobanks are breaking even and some of them are losing as much as $140 per customer annually.

I’m rather proud of Starling’s success in the UK, even though I had nothing to do with it, because a few years ago I was running workshops for banks looking to develop their open banking strategies and I used to highlight Starling as an exemplar of the “packaging” strategy: providing a desirable banking-as-a-service by focusing on APIs, quality and grade of service. It now has about 30 fintech clients while other neobanks are caught up in (expensive) distribution plays with accounts and cards and transactions.

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lot of the positive momentum going into crypto last year masks a lot of really terrible engineering and really pernicious marketing practices

From Panic at the Discord — The Information:

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Using data on 4.1 million apps at the Google Play Store from 2016 to 2019, we document that GDPR induced the exit of about a third of available apps; and in the quarters following implementation, entry of new apps fell by half. We estimate a structural model of demand and entry in the app market. Comparing long-run equilibria with and without GDPR, we find that GDPR reduces consumer surplus and aggregate app usage by about a third. Whatever the privacy benefits of GDPR, they come at substantial costs in foregone innovation.

From GDPR and the Lost Generation of Innovative Apps | NBER:

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