A library of snippets
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In his first public comments on leaving the global anti-money laundering standard setting body after six years, David Lewis told ACAMS moneylaundering.com that there is considerable appetite both inside and outside FATF for steering national AML frameworks towards truly risk-based, intelligence-led decision-making and measurable, real-world results.
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On 2 June 2021, Suarez tweeted: “Check out this on the first CityCoin being of course MiamiCoin!!!!!!!!!” [Twitter]
MiamiCoin was promoted locally on banners, signs and truck billboards.
CityCoins is built on Stacks — formerly BlockStack — which is a smart contract platform built atop Bitcoin, run by Muneeb Ali. MiamiCoin is a token running on Stacks. [Stacks; CoinTelegraph]
From CityCoins — free magical money for your city! Maybe – Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain:
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Other cities such as New York and Philadelphia are actively looking at the same or similar ideas.
(It does seem odd that these same cities are at the same time passing laws to force merchants to accept physical currency in compulsory tender, which is simultaneously an anti-competitive backstop and a stealth tax on business.)
Last year I wrote that an economy that is a network of cities will demand different financial services and institutions from one based on national economies and I pointed to Jane Jacobs’ seminal work on “Cities and the Wealth of Nations” from a generation back as well as more recent work, such as the Canvas8 report on “The city an an identity anchor” and the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2017 report that “Cities, not nation states, will determine our future survival”.
Given this background, it’s obvious why I have been interested in development in the decentralised finance world at the intersection of cities and cryptocurrencies. While cryptocurrency is forcing us to consider the relationship between money and the nation state (as I am fond of pointing out, a pretty recent arrangement) it seems to me the imminent nexus of cryptocurrencies and cities is a more interesting and potentially more radical stimulant for innovation.
There have been some high profile experiments already. MiamiCoin was a high profile example, launched to some fanfare when Mayor Suarez tweeted: “Check out this on the first CityCoin being of course MiamiCoin!!!!!!!!!”. CityCoins is built on Stacks, which is a smart contract platform built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. MiamiCoin is implemented as a token running on Stacks. Other cities, including New York and Philadelphia, are actively looking at the same or similar ideas.
(It does seem odd that these same cities are at the same time passing laws to force merchants to accept physical currency in compulsory tender. These are simultaneously anti-competitive backward-looking measures and a stealth tax on business, because if it was cheaper for businesses to accept cash, they would.)
These kinds of initiatives are rather uninteresting though. If cities create cryptocurrencies as speculative instruments they are really only taking baby steps. If a city were to issue its own money and, for example, demand that taxes be paid in that money or that certain city services could only be paid for using that money, or the money was backed by some city assets or or other, that would be much more interesting. I can imagine that this is a big step to take for an existing city though, so perhaps it makes sense to look to new spaces for this kind of experiment. Perhaps on an island somewhere? Indeed, this where certain utopians are already looking, having abandoned the idea of floating seasteads to sit beyond national waters. One such plan is to take a three million square metre island in the Vanuatu archipelago and transform it from undisturbed rainforest into a “sustainable smart city”, filled with multistorey apartment blocks and offices for cryptocurrency investors from around the world.
Another approach is, rather than escape the nation-state, to create new cities within it. In America, crypto billionaires are talking about smart contracts owning land in Wyoming and building new crypto-cities in Nevada. In Africa, the noted rap music star Akon is about to begin building another crypto city in Africa. He already started work on a city in Senegal and the new one will be in Uganda. These cities (which will run on Stellar rails using the “Akon” cryptocurrency) fascinate me. I had the opportunity to ask Akon about them recently, and I
2. It seems to me that it takes amazing vision to think about founding a city! Who were your inspirations in thinking of such a grand endeavor? NOTE: this might be a better first question? Start with the vision, then go to the action?
As an artist, I’m a creator, a connector and a problem solver. I want to create, I want to build and I want to help people rise up, reach their true potential. This is what Akon City is: the chance for the world to see the true potential of the people of Africa and inspire more Africans to join in. As such, there really wasn’t any one individual who inspired me, as much as many. I’ve always surrounded myself with amazing minds and people of different exceptional skill sets and experiences. When I tackle any new problem, I go to these different sources to help me bring new ideas into reality and the future. In terms of Akon City, when I could see that Africa wasn’t getting a fair shake on the global stage, especially given all of the natural resources and human power we have there, I knew there was a solution that could begin to tackle this. My goal is to build not just one Akon City but many around the world, creating hubs of African innovation and excellence, honoring our history and putting the continent in the spotlight. I want Akon City to be the blueprint for a modern and equitable Africa.
1. I am very curious about the relationship between your cities and your currency, but which of these ideas came first? Were you already thinking about new cities before cryptocurrencies came along?
I’d been visualizing and thinking about building a city in Africa for a long time, way before I had even heard about cryptocurrencies. Building a forward-thinking and futuristic city is very very important to me as this is a crucial building block for establishing Africa as a global leader.
I am a person of action–when I saw the need for electricity, I found ways to create solar opportunities via Akon Lighting Africa. That led me to wanting to showcase and share Africa even more–its beauty, its people, its potential. And the best way to do that is to draw people to Africa so they can see for themselves. Akon City is that draw, not solely as a tourist destination, but as a model for other cities to see, understand and capitalize on the potential of the African people. This city offers pride, strength and dreams while delivering innovation and reality.
My vision for Akon City is to put a spotlight on African excellence, create hubs of commerce and tourism, and to create opportunities on the continent, supported by the Akoin cryptocurrency. Once I began learning about cryptocurrencies, it was a lightbulb moment in terms of how uniquely it could be used to empower and unite Africa’s, the puzzle pieces all started coming together.
Our Akoin cryptocurrency is the fuel that empowers and connects the people within the city to all they need within and beyond Africa thereby creating action, reaction and impact in an ongoing process that benefits all.
3. How will your cities improve the lives of the average person who lives in them? What will be the fundamental changes that your cities will bring to them?
The Akon City model brings technology and massive opportunity into the lives of those living in and around these cities. These cities will be placed in targeted areas around the African continent that allow them to become hubs, much needed in these areas. There’ll be tourism, and there’ll be commercial traffic, there will be global businesses establishing their presence here, all the way to education and cutting edge health facilities and entertainment. This will all lead to more jobs and more opportunity, and money flowing through the city and into the hands of every person living in them. I want Akon City to be vibrant and inviting, and to offer opportunities to both those located inside and around it. Ultimately, I want Akon City to be the example and standard for modern smart cities in Africa, showing on the global stage what Africa can offer, and has been offering, to the world. I’m doing this for Africa, but it’s really all about the people.
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The key point of Escaping the Dark Forest, Samczsun’s account of their night’s work, is that, after the group spotted the vulnerability and built a transaction to rescue the funds, they could not put the rescue transaction in the public mempool because it would have been front-run by a bot. They had to find a miner who would put the transaction in a block without it appearing in the mempool. In other words, their transaction needed a dark pool. And they had to trust the cooperative miner not to front-run it.
From DSHR’s Blog: EE380 Talk.
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Vitalik Buterin pointed out that lack of decentralization was a security risk in 2017, and this was amply borne out last year when Justin Sun conspired with three exchanges, staking their customers coins to take over the Steem Proof-of-Stake blockchain. Pushing back against the economic forces centralizing these systems is extremely difficult.
From DSHR’s Blog: EE380 Talk.
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One recent study, which a team of researchers published in the leading science journal Nature, for example, found that “the top 10% of traders alone perform 85% of all transactions and trade at least once 97% of all assets.” All things considered, the top 10 percent of “buyer–seller pairs” are as active as everyone else combined. All in all, the research paints a picture of the NFT market almost completely captured by “whales,” or deep-pocketed players in crypto.
From Researchers: The NFT Economy Is Just as Unequal as the Real One.
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LooksRare financially rewards users for their trading volume, which predictably led to people gaming the system. Just this week, it surpassed OpenSea in trade volume thanks to what crypto analytics firm CryptoSlam estimated to be $8.3 billion worth of wash trading―approximately 87 percent of its total trading volume since launching on Jan. 10, Decrypt reported.
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The platform which sold an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for $2.9 million has halted most transactions because people were selling tokens of content that did not belong to them, its founder said, calling this a “fundamental problem” in the fast-growing digital assets market.
From NFT marketplace suspends most sales, citing ‘rampant’ fakes and plagiarism – CNN.
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Consumers in Glasgow in Scotland can now take part in a pilot scheme that rewards participants with a micropayment made directly into a digital wallet on their smartphone every time they recycle a single-use plastic bottle.
To take part in Scotland’s Deposit Return Scheme pilot, consumers first download the Recycle Glasgow app that enables them to scan the barcode on single-use plastic bottles and receive a 20p (US$0.27) refund in the app’s wallet for every bottle they return to a smart recycling bin or a participating convenience store across the city.
From Scotland trials digital micropayments as rewards for recycling plastic • NFCW.
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For the past 12 years Anthony Welch and his partner Theresa have been living a Robinson Crusoe life alone on a South Pacific island mostly untouched by humanity.
Welch, a retired British property investor, hopes the tranquility will soon be shattered by 21,000 cryptocurrency investors he is trying to convince to move to his island and form a regulation-free “crypto utopia”.
Under Welch’s plan, the 3 million sq metre (32 million sq ft) island, which is part of the Vanuatu archipelago between Australia and Fiji, would be transformed from 90% undisturbed rainforest into a “sustainable smart city”, filled with multistorey apartment blocks and offices for cryptocurrency investors from around the world.From Bitcoin paradise? Briton creates ‘crypto utopia’ in South Pacific | Cryptocurrencies | The Guardian:
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Snippings