Snippings

 

Writes William Hockey in a blog: “I spent time with (literally) thousands of companies building in financial services and it was painfully obvious that the biggest bottleneck to their growth and innovation was the underlying banks and middleware they relied on.”

He continues: “We were always told that banks can’t be software companies, and until right now they have not been. We’ve built our own core, have a direct connection to the Federal Reserve, a robust balance sheet and a “

From Plaid co-founder unveils bank for fintechs.

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Betterment, an early pioneer among startups offering automated investment advice that was valued at $1.3 billion in September, bought crypto robo-adviser Makara earlier this year. Getting into crypto was a natural extension for the fintech company. Betterment CEO Sarah Levy said that crypto’s $2 trillion market cap was too hard to ignore—and an obvious way to lure more customers. Plus, the sheer variety of crypto options means there’s a huge need for investment advice.

From Key Crypto Takeaways from The Information’s Women in Fintech Summit.

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Congress should update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.

From Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid – The Atlantic.

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On top of making bitcoin legal tender, Bukele’s Bitcoin law made bitcoin a compulsory tender. While many Bitcoiners did celebrate Bukele’s move, this compulsory aspect was rejected by others, who believe that people should be free to choose which money to use. They tend to favor the abolishment of legal tender laws, because such laws skew the playing field in favor of some currencies. Compulsory tender laws skew the playing field even more.

From El Salvador: One Small Step For Bitcoin – Bitcoin Magazine: Bitcoin News, Articles, Charts, and Guides.

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In Jonathan Haidt’s widely-read essay in the Atlantic on the pernicious impact of social media on democracy, he calls for a fundamental reform of social media that I have been suggesting for years. He notes that banks have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises and argues that large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. As I have repeatedly observed, that does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular country, and are old enough to be using the platform.

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former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. He noted that distributed networks “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.”

From Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid – The Atlantic.

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Teresa Torres pointed me at “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise” by Anders Ericsson. Ericsson has spent his career studying what makes experts stand apart from novices and he argues that better mental representations are what set experts apart from novices.

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An Algerian man who won €250,000 (£206,000; $270,000) on a €5 scratchcard in Belgium is struggling to claim his winnings because of his undocumented status.
The prize is too large to be paid in cash and the man does not have the papers he needs to open a bank account

From Undocumented lotto winner struggles to claim prize – BBC News.

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Meta is looking at creating a metaverse token that will be, according to reports, more like its failed Facebook Credits virtual currency, which ran from 2001 to 2013, than its failed Libra digital currency that was terminated in 2022.

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Polygon ID is private by default, offers on-chain verification and permissionless attestation.

From Introducing Polygon ID, Zero-Knowledge Identity for Web3 — Polygon | Blog:

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