A library of snippets
1. Stern message arrives from @Barclays telling me to log in to online banking and update my business details (which are unchanged in every respect) or else
2. Log in to online banking and follow instructions, concerned that my corporate banking facilities might be interrupted
3. Hit the contine button to comply with ridiculous KYC/AML waste of time and money…
Over at PYMNTS, Karen Webster’s predictions for 2022 include what she calls the “real-time payments momentum” that will continue to eat into debit transactions.
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a forthcoming New York City seafood restaurant there will be no fish without fintech. Flyfish Club, an eatery the VCR restaurant group plans to open in early 2023 at an unannounced location that “has iconic views of New York City”, per a promo video, will require guests to show proof of membership in the form of an NFT (non-fungible token) in order to enter.
From Caviar with your crypto? World’s ‘first NFT restaurant’ planned in New York:
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Delivery giant FedEx is asking federal regulators for permission to install countermeasures in its cargo jets designed to thwart missile attacks, according to a notice published in the Federal Register.
From FedEx asks U.S for permission to install anti-missile lasers in its cargo jets:
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What we could have on our hands is a vast parallel financial system, where AML, KYC and CTF rules are not applied. A system where no investor protection rules apply. A system where no accredited investor rules are in force. A world, in other words, that looks just like how the existing world would look if we simply woke up one day and the last fifty years of financial regulation was rolled back.
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Cryptocurrency usage is growing faster than ever before. Across all cryptocurrencies tracked by Chainalysis, total transaction volume grew to $15.8 trillion in 2021, up 567% from 2020’s totals. Given that roaring adoption, it’s no surprise that more cybercriminals are using cryptocurrency. But the fact that the increase was just 79% — nearly an order of magnitude lower than overall adoption — might be the biggest surprise of all.
In fact, with the growth of legitimate cryptocurrency usage far outpacing the growth of criminal usage, illicit activity’s share of cryptocurrency transaction volume has never been lower.
Bitpay is the biggest cryptocurrency acquirer for legitimate businesses. They process around 2,000 transactions per day (compare this with, for example, Visa which processes around 2,000 per second) of which half are Bitcoin. So let’s say 1,000 Bitcoin payments per day. This is, statistically, nothing. The use of Bitcoin for goods and services is a blip. Bitcoin is running about around a quarter of a million payments per day right now, so if Bitpay has (a rough estimate) 3% of the market then that means about a tenth of payments are for goods and services. That seems about right and tallies with with Tim Swanson’s figure.
But what goods and services? The Bitpay figures for December 2021 show that almost half of all cryptocurrency purchases were gift cards and around a tenth were for computer games. Internet services and VPN hosting together account for another quarter. Retail purchases of goods and services are down at the 1% level.
Professor Bill Buchanan OBE from the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University is leading expert on cryptography and cyber security (and also an excellent speaker, by the way). I always take what he has to say about things very seriously and I couldn’t agree more with him on his comments about the nature of the infrastructure that we need for the new economy. As Bill says, we built a set of interweb tubes with very little trust built in to them and then we patched them up with what he calls “simple methods” but what I might call string and sealing wax. He says that “our digital future must be towards an infrastructure that properly integrates trust” and goes on to highlight that we already have the tools and techniques needed to do this. We already have private keys and digital signatures and computers and so on. We should have to continue to live with an infrastructure build on fake news, fictional friends and fraudulent transactions.
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When it all comes down to it, Web 3 — at its lowest layer — involves the trusted digital signing of transactions and will start to properly integrate digital trust into our Internet. It will support the true integration of the digital identity of the citizen into our digital world, and in the integration of their wallets (and which would store their private key).
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The latest of these new “privacy-aware” libraries is Kryptology, and created by Coinbase. This library provides the APIs that developers need, in order to apply to areas of blockchain development. This library include BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Shacham) signatures, Zero-knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and Shamir Secret Shares (SSS). With BLS we can digitally sign for data, but also preserve its privacy. Applications of this include group signatures, where multiple entities can merge their signing keys together and provide a single signature for a transaction. With SSS, we can split encryption keys up into shares, and then distribute them across a network. When required, we can call these shares back to reconstruct the key.
From Kryptology.
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Speaking in the FT Partners “State of Fintech Investing” video conference earlier this year, Annie Lamont (Co‑Founder & Managing Partner at Oak HC/FT) said that XXX. I always take Annie’s views very seriously, so I began to wonder YYY
Nigel Morris, Managing Partner of QED & Co‑Founder Capital One
Matt Harris, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures
Mike Abbott, Global Banking Leader at Accenture
Steve McLaughlin, Founder & CEO of FT Partners
Snippings