Snippings

To exchange bitcoin for cash at a bitcoin ATM, one must pay a bitcoin ATM fee. Athena lists its
bitcoin-sale fee at 5%, plus whatever network fees are being charged at the moment. These
network fees are the cost of confirming and executing the sale. To facilitate more rapid
transactions, Athena recommends paying higher network fees. On Athena’s website, it even
recommends to “err on the side of higher fees.”19 It is worth mentioning that bitcoin transactions
may never be consummated unless a large enough network fee is paid. That’s why Athena
recommends paying higher fees. So, the “remittance cost” when El Salvadorans exchange their
bitcoin for dollars is at least 5%, even before factoring in the network fees, the travel costs
associated with going to an ATM, and the safety and security costs associated with using an
ATM in El Salvador.

BUKELE’S BITCOIN BLUNDER

Steve H. Hanke, Nicholas Hanlon, and Mihir Chakravarthi

 

Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics,
Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise

Click to access Bukeles-Bitcoin-Blunder-Final.pdf

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At first, Lydia was a peer-to-peer payment app. After adding your debit card and your bank details, you could send and receive mobile payments with other Lydia users. It progressively became the dominant mobile payment app in France.

Over the last few years, the app has evolved quite a lot to become a financial super app, with a wide range of features and financial products. Users can get a virtual or physical debit card that works on the Visa network. They can also manage their money more easily by creating sub-accounts that they can share with other Lydia users.

In addition to daily payments, Lydia also offers small loans, from €100 to €3,000, savings accounts and now trading. In particular, the new crypto and stock trading partnership with Bitpanda makes it much easier to invest small amounts of money whenever you want.

Lydia and Bitpanda are offering fractional shares so that you can buy, for example, €10 worth of Apple share 24/7 — it’s something quite new for the French market.

From Lydia grabs another $100 million for its European financial super app | TechCrunch.

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Cocounut’s new tax app for freelancers, launched in 2021, enables self-employed people to connect securely with 25+ bank accounts and credit card providers, and automatically pull in bank statements and transactions.

Sam O’Connor, CEO & Co-founder of Coconut, says he no longer believe that combining a current account with a tax tool is the best solution for freelancers.

From Coconut shifts away from current accounts.

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Bank failed to spot scheme that involved large cash deposits including £700,000 carried in bin bags

From NatWest fined £265m for money laundering failures | Financial Times:

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Speaking at recent Ghana Economic Forum on Monday, Kwame Oppong (head of fintech and innovation at the Bank of Ghana), said that efforts to bring financial services to people without access to bank accounts are hindered by “the availability of connectivity and power”. He suggested that a CBDC that could be used offline might be a possible solution to this problem.

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Fintech startup Klarna is launching a desktop browser extension that provides many of the features that you can find in the company’s mobile app — but on your computer. In addition to the ability to manage your Klarna payments, the extension automatically applies coupon codes when you’re on a checkout page.

Klarna has acquired Piggy for the automatic couponing feature.

From Klarna launches browser extension with payments and coupons | TechCrunch.

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Klarna’s new extension lets you generate one-time cards from your desktop browser. You can then copy and paste the card details in the payment field when you’re ready to pay.

In Togo, a nation of about 8 million people where the average income is below $2 a day, it took the government less than two weeks to design and launch an all-digital system for delivering monthly payments to about a quarter of the adult population. The program, called “Novissi” (which means “solidarity” in the local Ewe language) first had to identify which Togolese were most in need. With few people in possession of either a national ID of any kind, they used the electoral roll which requires potential voters to indicate their occupation and address. This covered somewhere between 83% and 98% of the adult population.

With the funding allocated by the government, they could provide each beneficiary one-third of the minimum wage, about $20 per month. The money was sent immediately (by SMS). So far, so good. But what really interested me about this example of direct support was that researchers went on to create an algorithm using mobile phone data — including the frequency and timing of calls, texts, and data use — to identify the poorest users and subsequently push support out to 138,00 of them.

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Amazon’s dominance and the existence of alternative payment options gives them the power to ban Visa credit without a material loss of custom. Aside from trying to force Visa to lower their prices, the real motivation may lie in another development – Pay by Bank.

From In a world of open banking, Amazon holds all the cards in the face off with Visa.

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Now chipmakers like Intel and Arm and Nvidia, which supplied many of the first GPUs, are pivoting to make hardware tailored specifically for AI. Google and Facebook are also forcing their way into this industry for the first time, in a race to find an AI edge through hardware.

For example, the chip inside the Pixel 6 is a new mobile version of Google’s tensor processing unit, or TPU. Unlike traditional chips, which are geared toward ultrafast, precise calculations, TPUs are designed for the high-volume but low- precision calculations required by neural networks. Google has used these chips in-house since 2015: they process people’s photos and natural- language search queries. Google’s sister company DeepMind uses them to train its AIs.

From AI is reinventing what computers are | MIT Technology Review.

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In addition, certain features of DeFi blockchains favour the concentration of
decision power in the hands of large coin-holders. Transaction validators need to
receive compensation that is sufficient to incentivise them to participate without
committing fraud. Blockchains based on proof-of-stake, which are expected to
improve scalability, allow validators to stake more of their coins so that they have a
higher chance of “winning” the next block and receiving compensation. Since the
associated operational costs are mostly fixed, this setup naturally leads to
concentration (Auer et al (2021)).12 Many blockchains also allocate a substantial part
of their initial coins to insiders, exacerbating concentration issues

From :

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