Snippings

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POLICE forces across the UK have seized bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies valued at almost a third of a billion pounds during criminal investigations, New Scientist can reveal. But this figure may be only a tiny fraction of the illicit funds being used in the UK, because police face significant technological and legislative hurdles when investigating crimes involving cryptocurrencies.

From Bitcoin: UK police forces have seized more than £300 million in cryptocurrencies | New Scientist:

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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).

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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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