Snippings

xxx

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.

xxx

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 On one of our local neighbourhood message Boards the other day I saw a plaintive appeal from a man who had withdrawn a few thousand pounds in cash and then gone shopping.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

xxx

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.

From Monday 8 August, 2022 – by John Naughton – Memex 1.1.

xxx

xxx

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

From (10) Domer on Twitter: “How can a union strike if there’s no strike? Good question! Here was his plan: 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 https://t.co/XZMEKcBof6” / Twitter.

xxx

xxx

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.

xxx

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…

xxx

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.

xxx

xxx

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.

From Fake tradie robbers steal $30,000 from Junction Hotel, Newcastle poker machine room cash dispenser | Daily Mail Online.

xxx

Twitter confirmed that the recent data breach that exposed data of 5.4 million accounts was caused by the exploitation of a zero-day flaw.

 

xxx

The vulnerability allows any party without any authentication to obtain a twitter ID(which is almost equal to getting the username of an account) of any user by submitting a phone number/email even though the user has prohibitted this action in the privacy settings.

From Twitter confirms zero-day used to access data of 5.4M accountsSecurity Affairs.

In response to this breach, Twitter posted a statement saying that they understand the risks that an incident like this poses and recommend “not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account”. Basically they recommend burner phones and disposable e-mail addresses (kind of like the Apple pseudonymous e-mail addresses).

Wise precautions I suppose, although not everyone has access to a burner phone.

How much longer are we going to put up with this? You know the drill. Step one: App or website asks for personal information such date of birth, phone number or mother’s maiden name for “security” although none of the information contributes in any way to transaction security. Step two: App or website gets hacked and your personal information is now in the hands of scammers, nation state cyber warriors and perverts. Step three: Rinse and repeat.

Now what’s strange about this situation is that the technology to stop the loop is well-understood and widely-available. We all know what to do, which is to shift to the world of verifiable credentials, the reputation economy. Here’s how this works: I want to know something about you, but I don’t want any of your personal information because that is toxic waste that will inevitably leak from my systems because I will always spend more money on marketing and stock buybacks than detailed risk analysis and appropriate countermeasures. Hence I ask you to present a credential, which is a fact about you that is digitally-signed by someone I can trust (by which I mean, of course, someone I can sue). If you tell me that you are over 21, whatever, But if you present a credential from Wells Fargo that says that I am over 21, great.

If you are interested, what actually happens is that you present the attribute I am interested in (eg, IS-OVER-18) together with a public key and an expiration date, all signed by Wells Fargo. Since I know Wells Fargo’s public key (which is, after all, public) I can check this digital signature and know that it is real. I can then extract your public key, encrypt a random number with this key and send it to you and ask you what the number is. Now, of course, the only person who can decrypt this message is the person with the corresponding private key: You respond to this challenge and now I know that not only is the credential real, but that it belongs to you.

There’s no point in calling for “people to be in charge of their own data”, however it is phrased, because as the leading security guru Bruce Schneier has long maintained, given the choice between security and dancing pigs, people will always opt for dancing pigs.

 

We need to stop requiring personal data to enable transactions and instead require the relevant credentials necessary to enable to the specific interaction. There is a world of difference between me asking for your date of birth and me asking for proof that you are over 21, between me asking for your address and me asking for proof that you are resident in the continental United States, between me asking you to find pictures of tractors in a confusing array of blurred photographs and me asking for proof that you are a person.

That latter example, proof of personhood, is at the heart of the Twitter debacle. Since there is no IS-A-PERSON credential that Twitter can ask for

xxx

Amazon has agreed to buy iRobot, the company best known for its Roomba robot vacuum, for $1.7bn as the ecommerce group expands its portfolio of home electronics products and personal services.

From Amazon acquires Roomba maker iRobot for $1.7bn | Financial Times.

xxx

xxx

Andreessen’s counterargument is that Dorsey is a hippie moron. No techno utopia is coming. The blockchain is nothing more than a new technology, and technology makes the world better in small ways that add up to big advances for everyone

From Jack Dorsey, Marc Andreessen and the Makings of a Crypto Holy War — The Information:

xxx