Snippings

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The ill-gotten gains were sent to Tornado Cash, a popular coin mixing app, and then laundered to a separate wallet.

From Crypto Investors Scammed of $1 Million Through Bogus MetaMask Token.:

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Last year I wrote here in Forbes that if PayPal were to pivot away from the traditional (and expensive) infrastructure of banks and accounts, payments cards and interchange towards an infrastructure of wallets exchanging their own alternative to Facebook’s Diem private currency, with no SWIFT or FedNow or ACH in the picture, that would be a significant shift in the dynamics of the payments sector.

Now I read that PayPal is indeed looking into launching its own stablecoin as the company grows its crypto business. Curv, the custody business that they purchased last year, is reported to be actively developing a suitable product.

What difference would it make to me, as a normal customer, whether the dollars in my PayPal wallet are a USD stablecoin provided by PayPal itself or a USD stablecoin from the Fed or electronic US dollars in an account somewhere? I do not think customers would notice, frankly. The difference is under the hood.

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There is, however, more agreement that the metaverse will push us towards a situation where certain “realities” are defined by experience rather than physicality. As millions of fans flock to virtual “concerts” in games such as Fortnite, it’s clear that the reality lines are already blurring.

Which brings us to the recent announcement by Manchester City FC and Sony that they are working towards rendering an accurate metaverse version of the Premier League champions’ home stadium, the Etihad, which could be visited by fans around the world through their avatars

From Football’s future is in the metaverse | Financial Times:

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What non-fungibility means

Jonathan Fredricks, a 16-year-old Dallas-area teen saved up $10,000 over the course of a year working at Chick-Fil-A. His grandfather offered to take him car shopping when he turned 16, and their shopping journey landed them at a local dealership called I Drive-DFW. They didn’t find a car they liked on the lot, and instead were offered to buy the personal vehicle of the salesperson that was helping them out, the ironically named James Steelman. Fredricks paid Steelman about $9,800 a 2016 Mazda CX-5, which they later find out didn’t actually belong to Steelman. It was owned by the dealer, who Steelman bought the car from and stopped making payments on. The dealer repoed the car from Fredricks five months after he paid Steelman cash for it, leaving the teen without a car and his money.

From Teen That Had Car Repoed After Paying Cash Is Given A Car:

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Concerns about privacy in payments are genuine and well-founded.

n late October of 1971 a group of academics and technologists gathered at a conference at Georgetown. They were given the task of devising the most comprehensive (yet invisible) surveillance program imaginable. What they came up with sounds an awful lot like our current debit card system.

This was the question posed to the researchers in 1971:

Suppose you were an advisor to the head of the KGB, the Soviet Secret Police. Suppose you are given the assignment of designing a system for the surveillance of all citizens and visitors within the boundaries of the USSR. The system is not to be too obtrusive or obvious. What would be your decision?

What amazing, unobtrusive surveillance system did they come up with? It wasn’t a network of intercepting every phone call or placing cameras on every street corner. They imagined an electronic funds transfer system, or EFTS—a system that looks strikingly similar to the debit card system we all use today.

From 1970s Researchers Predicted Debit Cards Would Be Great For Surveillance — Paleofuture.

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I’ve written before about my interest in paleofutures. I think it’s important not just to look at what people used to think about the future but why they thought it. Not to make fun of them, but to try and understand why they were wrong, so that we can use that knowledge to help to construct our own narratives about the future. I need these for work, because narratives are the way to create shared visions for organisations try to develop realistic strategies (and therefore make the right tactical investments right now).

“
Technology’s Martyrs: The Slide Rule ” by Kirk Johnson in the New York Times (3rd January 1987) covers the story of Keuffel & Esser . This company, founded in 1867, was America’s pre-eminent manufacturer of slide rules . In 1965, they sold one million of them. In 1967, their centenary, they were commissioned to prepare a report about the future called “Life in the year 2067”, looking a century on. They interviewed scientists to come up with a vision that predicted electric cars and 3D TV. What it didn’t predict was that they would be out of business within a few years because of the electronic calculator. The end came quickly. On this day in 1976

K&E produced its last slide rule, which it presented to the Smithsonian Institution.

[From

Computer History Museum | Exhibits | This Day in History: July 11 ]

In less than a decade they were gone because of technological change. But note the “Gibson” take on this: the invention that destroyed them, the electronic calculator, already existed when they wrote their report. In fact the first all electronic calculator desktop calculator went on sale in 1961

At the end of 1961 the Bell Punch Company put the Anita Mk VII on the market in continental Europe and the Anita Mk 8 in the rest of the world as the world’s first electronic desktop calculators. These were the only commercial electronic desktop calculators for more than 2 years

[From

Anita: the world’s first electronic desktop calculator ]

What’s more, the first electronic all-transistor calculator (from Sharp) went on sale in 1964. So by the time the slide rule guys did their study, the technology that would destroy them had been on open sale for several years. They made the mistake, I guess, of thinking that because slide rules cost $10 and calculators cost $1,000 they would never compete, forgetting that the inevitable curve of technology price/performance would do for them in time. And, I suspect, the scientists that wrote the report all used slide rules and were perfectly happy with them.

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Starling Bank steps into 2022 with a year of strong growth, investor support and innovation behind it. We’ve opened over 2.7 million accounts to date, including 475,000 accounts for small and medium-sized enterprises. Our UK SME market share now tops seven per cent, almost half of Barclays’ share.

Our deposit base now stands at £8.4 billion, up from £4.8 billion this time last year, while we’ve expanded our lending from £1.9 billion to £3.1 billion.

From Taking flight on a new stage of our journey – Starling Bank.

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Respondents to the 2021 U.S. Health of Cash Study, conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research, cited a number of benefits and characteristics that make cash an important payment option:

Cash protects my privacy and financial security (66%).
Allowing people to pay in cash is important for society (63%).
Cash is safe to use (58%).
Cash is as important today as it ever was (54%).
Cash is often the easiest way to pay (44%).
One of the most interesting findings of the study was that underbanked consumers who consistently relied on cash also expanded their digital payment usage. In fact, underbanked consumers regularly used a variety of digital payment options, with significant increases across person-to-person (P2P) payments (29%), digital wallets (28%) and merchant wallets (24%), even as other demographics reported less usage.

From Even in the digital economy, cash is king:

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That being so, and absent some intervention by the disparate group of developers and miners that preside over the Bitcoin codebase, simple game theory tells us that a process of backward induction should, really, at some point, induce the smart money to get out. And were that to happen, investors really should be prepared to lose everything. Eventually.

From What is a Bitcoin worth? – Bank Underground:

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You can probably remember your first taste of the meta verse back in the early days of second life. Who can forget such a compelling vision of the future as Wells Fargo’s “Stagecoach Island” or the hope for the future of the human race apparent in one of the online poetry reading sessions that I went to where avatars milling around in a mine craft style forest glade listened to utopian expositions on the interconnectedness of everything and the sunlit uplands that await us all once we are truly connected.

One thing that sticks with me from that time is a demo I saw at a financial institution that shall not be named. Not because I want to protect their image as valiant pioneers trailblazing across the newly minted territories but because it was a long time ago and I’ve completely forgotten who it was. Anyway I remember using a mouse to navigate my virtual self into a virtual bank branch where I found a virtual bank employee who proceeded to virtually annoy me by droning on about some credit card offer or other when I was trying to move money from one account to another (or whatever mundane bank activity I was engaging in). It was in colour and in 3D, but in every respect the experience was even worse than the web-based online banking they were using at the time. Now, of course, I realise that this was simply a reflection of the paucity of imagination amongst technologies such as myself. If you want a vision of the future, you need artists, not programmers who specialise in optimising parallel processing in graphics cards.

The central catastrophe of this scheme autism skua morph is is that as a customer I don’t want to go into a bank branch at all. I don’t care whether it’s a real bank branch or a virtual bank branch I just don’t want to go there. Embedded finance has delivered a much better version of the future where I go to do something I actually do want to do and via the miracle of Apis and micro-services the boring banking stuff gets done out of my field of view. I pull up my app and order a takeaway and it shows up at my door and somehow the payment gets done but I pay no attention to it and don’t care about it.

Similarly a supermarket video of meta verse shopping that was doing the rounds on Twitter a day or two ago displayed a similarly blinkered perspective. The consumer pushes a virtual shopping basket around a virtual supermarket while being shadowed by a sinister supermarket employee/political officer who chirpily steps in to advise on which wind by to go with the meat that you just purchased. No matter how nice the graphics are and no matter how skilfully the AI can make it seem to me that I’m being shepherded from shelf to shelf by Clint Eastwood or Sergio Aguero, the experience is dead. Real or unreal, I don’t want to go to the supermarket. I want to select some recipes from some suggestions and have the shopping service in the background source them and arrange delivery.

What’s important here is the distinction between virtual reality and hyperreality, between a digital simulation of the world and the construction of a world that existed only in the imagination. I’m not smart enough or visionary enough to know what the meta verse shopping experience should look like but if it is me putting on a headset to flog around the aisles of a virtual supermarket then that’s never going to gain traction. Why create something that is worse than the options we already have in front of us just so that it can be done in 3D?

Generally speaking, the idea that we will want to do things in the virtual world that are the same as the things that we do in the real world is ridiculous.

 

 

The words real and virtual no longer usefully describe the spaces available to us, the superposition of the mundane universe and the machine multi-verse.

In Marian Salzmann’s thought-provoking 22 for 2022, she talks about the sale of an NFT for cryptocurrency:

“In exchange for all those tens of millions of dollars, the buyer received a certificate of authenticity (guaranteed by blockchain) but not the work authenticated by it. Payment was in cryptocurrency, making the whole thing virtual. Did it really happen?”

This made me think: do we need some new words? We’ve inherited the words “real” and “virtual”, but they don’t seem to work properly in our soon-to-be disunited universe and metaverse.

Transactions that take place somewhere in the matrix, where I exchange bitcoin for a JPEG of the chimpanzee sunglasses are just as real as the transactions that take place in the supermarket around the corner from me. The transactions are all real but some of them take place in a mundane ecosystem, by which I mean an ecosystem that includes at some point physical being, and some of them take place in a virtual ecosystem, by which I mean an ecosystem that does not demand (or perhaps even imagine)