A library of snippets
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This week, ERC-8004 officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet. The protocol allows independent agents to register verifiable identities. Developers can now build applications based on on-chain reputation.
From: ERC-8004 Mainnet Launch: What This Agent Protocol Actually Does | Live Bitcoin News.
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PSP VAS – Processors need to fundamentally rethink how they create value for merchants beyond just moving money. AI gives them a shot at becoming merchant growth partners (conversion optimization, demand forecasting, inventory management) but they’re still stuck selling payment rails when merchants want business outcomes. The ones who figure out how to tie AI-driven VAS to actual merchant revenue growth will win the next decade. Fir example, can they evolve beyond back-office plumbing to build a Shopify-style demand side agentic connector (ex Google UCP)?
From: Keeping Up With Chaos: A Payments Stakeholder Reality Check | Noyes Payments Blog.
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There used to be a Journal of E-Finance and Payments Law and Policy (that later became Payments & Fintech Lawyer). Way back in 2009, I wrote a piece on micropayments for them (Vol. 3, No 2, p.11-13, February 2009).
While watching Jon Stewart’s Daily Show recently, my interest was re-kindled by his interview with Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute who had written a story about this for Time magazine, in which he (Isaacson) had referred to an odd paradox of content2:
Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast
I said at the time that the technological determinist saw a straightforward explanation: people won’t pay 10 cents for stuff on the Internet because they cannot, whereas they will spend $1 for a ringtone on their phone because they can. I remember thinking “well, I can load ringtones to my iPhone for free if I want to mess around, but I can’t be bothered to, so I just pay in iTunes”. It is cheaper and quick for me to pay than for me not to pay. Therefore, perhaps the technology as much as the business model is to blame. Isaacson goes on to say just that.
We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.
This was seen as a fundamental problem at the very dawn of the web and I’ve been thinking about it again this week because of a comment on saw on social media. Alex Pilar was talking about the tsunami of AI-generated slop that is about to wash away the internet as we know and he said that this might drive something that the spam of old could not: the use of Hashcash.
Hashcash was an idea of Adam Back and was influential in the evolution of Bitcoin. The idea was simple: come up with a problem that is hard to solve but has a solution that is easy to check. It was originally developed to counter spam, with the basic operation as follow..
To send an email the sender must find a value (called a nonce) such that when some information (like the recipient’s address, the date, the nonce and a counter) is hashed, the hash has a certain number of leading zeros. The sender hashes the string and looks to see if the hash output begins with a certain number of zeros. If it doesn’t, the sender changes the counter and tries again. The sender repeats this until a suitable hash is found and then attaches this “stamp” to the message. The receipient stamp, hashes it, and checks whether the hash meets the required difficulty (ie, correct number of leading zeros).
(Yes, you are right, this is at the heart of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work.)
Hashcash thus delivers stamp that is fast to check but slow to generate which in turns means that spammers must do a lot of work for every message, making scale abuse expensive, whereas normal people sending emails now and then wouldn’t notice thre overhead.
Alex’s suggestion was that something like this be attached to all content
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And if that LLM has access to any of its user’s private information, the consequences could be dire. “Using something like OpenClaw is like giving your wallet to a stranger in the street,” says Nicolas Papernot, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto.
From: Is a secure AI assistant possible? | MIT Technology Review.
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An IDF reservist and a civilian have been indicted for using classified information to place bets regarding military operations on the popular Polymarket prediction market, authorities announce.
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Apple, boldly proclaiming that it believes privacy is a fundamental human right, has announced the use of “homomorphic encryption” in its products. This means that a client device (e.g., an iPhone) encrypts a query before sending it to a server (e.g., Apple), then the server operates on the encrypted query and generates an encrypted response, which the client then decrypts. The server does not decrypt the query or even have access to the decryption key, so the client data remains private throughout the process. I realize that to a lot of people, including regulators and legislators, that must sound like witchcraft.
From: Witchcraft Or Mathematics, Apple’s New Encryption Tool Is Important.
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It seems that Apple is working on a wearable pin that could be released as soon as next year. The pin would be useful because of AI, positioning the company to compete with OpenAI, which is planning its own AI-powered devices, and Meta, which sold more than seven million of its Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025 (tripling its 2023 and 2024 sales combined.)
Apple’s pin will be a thin, flat, circular disc with an aluminum-and-glass shell and two cameras built in. It will have one with a standard lens and one with a wide-angle lens, designed to capture the user’s surroundings. It will also have three microphones to pick up sounds in the area surrounding the person wearing it, a speaker and a physical button. With magnetic inductive charging on the back, similar to the Apple Watch, it will be something like an AirTag that can see and hear everything around it. Meanwhile, Google has already launched Android xr, a platform designed to power VR headsets and smart glasses. It also recently launched a new version of its smart speaker, powered by Gemini.
(Along with the pin, Apple is supposedly working on its own smart glasses, building on technology developed for its Vision Pro headset. Yes, relatively few people have bought these $3,000 headsets, but that doesn’t matter. Financial services organisations should see the Vision Pro as, in the words of the Financial Times, “a statement of intent rather than an end in itself” and start thinking about where it might take us.)
Something going on, for sure. We are about to see shift away from the mobile phone as the primary gateway to the internet tubes while a plethora of wearable devices bring a more immersive version of the web into the mass market. I’ve written before that one reason for my obsession with the evolution of the interface is, of course, identity. I was reminded of this when I turned up at Finovate in London and immediately ran into someone who I liked, and could remember to talking with many times, but couldn’t for the life of me remember their name or which organisation they were currently with. With my smart glasses on, I will know who everyone is, whether I am in a real bank and whether I am talking to a real police officer, doctor or lawyer. Just as financial services became more convenient and more secure when they moved from the web to the mobile handset, there is another step change coming as they move from mobile phone to super shades and I am very optimistic about the new opportunities for safe commerce that these present.
(If you think that real-time face recognition and reputation retrieval sounds about cybershades, then please note that Meta is considering introducing facial recognition technology to its smart glasses and could launch the product as soon as this year. The “Name Tag” feature will allow wearers to identify people around them and receive information through the glasses’ built-in AI assistant.)
The Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously said that the combination of AI and AR/VR ‘will likely replace smartphones one day’. It won’t be soon, because of the time being will still need to carry our smartphones in our pockets even if we never look at them. Smart glasses, smart pins, smart watches, hats and badges do not yet have the battery or processing power to do without a smartphone hub. Having been working at home a lot recently, I’ve begun to notice that my AirPods have been staying in longer and longer and I’ve begun to ask Siri about stuff I would normally use the smartphone to investigate. And Siri’s not that smart right now, but when it gets to use Gemini it will be awesome.
My personal opinion is that we’ve probably already begin the decade-long cycle to replace the smartphone as the main interface. If AR, AI, battery and compute trends continue, then around 2035 mainstream users could see glasses (or perhaps even more sophisticated wearables like contact lenses) become their default internet interface. The transition will be similar to the 10-15 year shift from feature phones to smartphones: some people will keep smartphones for specific use cases (media consumption, gaming, typing-heavy tasks) just as laptops didn’t vanish when phones took over many roles.
Smart glasses and AI to one side, things are happening in the background to bring this new “interface” (ie, the pervasive, immesive internet) together. A few years ago companies including Meta Platforms, Google, Apple and Microsoft lobbied the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to expand the use of 6GHz band to ease the development of metaverse-related gadgets in order to get faster connectivity via tethering and in turn enhance overall performance. Back in 2023, the FCC responded and authorised the use of the 6GHz band for low power devices such as wearables. This will bring new devices and new VR/AR applications to bear. In time, the smartphone will migrate from being a window on the metaverse into a hub for an immersive experience, an internet that you will look through rather than down at. As the idea of apps goes the way of floppy disks. commerce (and finance) must respond.
I don’t know if he will remember this but, but this is what “Singe” Deakins wrote about this back in 2012! He pointed out that due to progressive miniaturistion, devices will become increasingly unobtrusive and specialised. With advances in interfaces, sensors, raw computing power, battery technology (crucial, of course) and connectivity (my iPhone has NFC, Bluetooth 5G, UWB and WiFi) we will progress towards persistent ambient connectivity where we’ll become seamlessly and deeply intra-connected with things and people in our physical and virtual environments.
He was right and it’s time for us to take seriously the issues of identification, authentication and authorisation in an immersive online existence. Should the people walking down the street be able to determine your identity? Under what circumstances? What kind of questions are allowed? Should my glasses be able to query if you are a wanted criminal? Available on Tinder? A qualified first aider?
These are valid and urgent questions. China illustrates quite clearly how quickly the technology can penetrate. I can choose any one of a thousand examples to illustrate this point, but I like this one: taxi drivers in the Chinese city of Xi’an are verified by facial recognition technology when they get behind the wheel. The biometric identification system is, as is much the fashion these days, linked to an AI to ensure that drivers are not misbehaving (eg, using their smartphone when on the road and so forth). Now, I can see why such a system is attractive. Who doesn’t want a safer taxi service?
(Of course, if we start to rely on such interfaces, they can bring unexpected problems. One of my veryfavourite stories from the South China Morning Post concerned a woman who had plastic surgery only to discover she could no longer pay online or get into her office!)
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On January 9, Betterment warned about a social engineering attack that saw crooks gain access to its systems and send out a fraudulent crypto offer to some customers.
The company has not disclosed the number of customers affected but now data breach notification site Have I Been Pwned says its analysis shows that the incident exposed 1.4 million unique email addresses, along with names and geographic location data. A subset of records also included dates of birth, phone numbers, and physical addresses.
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The next few years already look tough for smartphones. Yang Wang of Counterpoint Research, a firm of analysts, expects global shipments to fall by 6% this year, even worse than his previous forecast of a 2% decline, and does not see a rebound in 2027. In 2025 shipments grew by 2%.
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A European safe asset would complete the long-overdue EU financial architecture: a savings and investment union, unlocking idle private savings; a digital euro that ends our dependence on foreign payment systems; and a credible euro-denominated stablecoin market. Moreover, it would increase the euro’s use as a reference currency for trade and commodity pricing, reinforcing the gains from recent trade deals.
From: Europe’s best bet for financial sovereignty is a true safe asset.
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