A library of snippets
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The current flushing-out of the crypto world strikes some investors as similar to the late-1990s and internet companies. On the one hand, investors were correct during that bubble: The internet was the future. But that didn’t stop many of them from losing boatloads of money as hundreds of internet companies failed.
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Just a few short months ago, Matt Damon exhorted us to fearlessly buy into cryptocurrencies — in a slick CGI ad for Crypto.com hyping the tagline, “Fortune Favors the Brave.”
Now, with cryptocurrencies in freefall and cratering to new lows, the Oscar-winning star of “Good Will Hunting” and “The Martian” is getting mercilessly dragged again for his gig as the face of Crypto.com in a new round of online jeering.
Users across social media are pointing out that if you had taken Damon’s advice to buy into cryptocurrencies last fall, the value of your holdings would have dropped roughly two-thirds today.
From Matt Damon Mocked for Crypto Ad as Virtual Currency Values Crash – Variety.
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Crypto.com declined to tell the Financial Times how much Damon had been paid for his appearance but the company reportedly spent more than $100m on the “Fortune favours the brave” campaign — the entire budget for Damon’s last feature film, box office flop The Last Duel.
From Matt Damon’s crypto ad is more than just cringeworthy | Financial Times.
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A more interesting question is what will happen when governments finally get serious about regulating bitcoin BTCUSD, -6.70% and its brethren. Of the major economies, only China has so far begun to do so. Most policy makers have instead tried to change the topic by talking about central bank-issued digital currencies (CBDCs).
But this is something of a non sequitur.
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The first challenge for the British government’s new new Office for Digital Identities and Attributes (OfDIA) is to ensure that digital identity services for important activities, such as proving a person’s right to work or rent, are as inclusive as possible. As Edgar Whitley, associate professor in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics (and one of the UK’s leading experts on digital identity and privacy) observes, the industry ensure that technologically appealing solutions don’t end up creating a two–tier system, reinforcing existing data divides or producing solutions that are overly burdensome.
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France’s Interior minister Gérald Darmanin noted that the embarrassing spectacle was the direct result of poor ticket filtration practices maintained by the Stade de France and the French Football Federation. He highlighted: “70% of the tickets coming into the Stade de France were fake. Fifteen percent of fake tickets also were after the first filtering … more than 2,600 tickets were confirmed by UEFA as non-validated tickets even though they’d gone through the first filtering.”
From Blockchain Ticketing Could Have Prevented the Champions League Fake Tickets Fiasco.
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Having a person’s EUDI wallet suddenly revoked without notice or ability to instantiate a new one containing the same data would be equivalent to erasing that person’s digital existence.
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Amsterdam plans to launch its own digital currency in the next four years. The coin can only be used in Amsterdam at the local entrepreneurs with the idea of boosting the neighborhood economy. “It ensures that the money really continues to circulate in the city,” GroenLinks city councilor Elisabeth IJmker said to AT5.
From Amsterdam to launch its own digital currency to promote local economy | NL Times:
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I recently gave a keynote on central bank digital currency (CBDC) in which I made the point that it is impossible to ignore the wider issues are around money and sovereignty. In particular the International and cross-border use of such currencies
Senators Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio and Mike Braun are set to introduce the bill, which states that US companies that own or control app stores “shall not carry or support any app in [their] app store(s) within the United States that supports or enables transactions in e-CNY.”
From US Bill Would Ban Digital Yuan from Google, Apple App Stores:
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NFTs just feel like homeopathy, people are insisting that they work, despite there being no real evidence that they do what they do beyond people just believing in it, effectively its the placebo effect that is making NFTs value into something right now
From NFTs — Crypto Homeopathy. One of the often touted features of… | by Steve Jones | Medium:
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A 401(k) provider sued the U.S. Labor Department, seeking to invalidate recent agency guidance that says companies that offer cryptocurrencies in retirement plans should expect to be investigated.
ForUsAll Inc. filed the lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., against the Labor Department, which regulates 401(k)-type plans. The San Francisco company is a 401(k) administrator. It has said it plans to let workers in retirement plans it administers invest up to 5% of their 401(k) contributions in bitcoin, ether, litecoin and other cryptocurrencies.
From 401(k) Provider Sues Labor Department Over Handling of Crypto in Retirement Plans – WSJ:
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