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Crypto exchanges operating in the UK will have to pay the 2% digital services tax as they do not qualify for an exemption because HMRC doesn’t recognise digital assets as financial instruments.

From This Week in Fintech | Nik Milanović | Substack:

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Differences in prices for digital avatars based on race, gender and skin color are emerging among a popular collection of NFTs known as CryptoPunks, belying the utopian and egalitarian ideals touted by the closely connected world of crypto, decentralized finance, blockchain and non-fungible tokens.

From CryptoPunk NFT Prices Suggest a Diversity Problem in the Metaverse – Bloomberg:

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We evaluate the performance of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered mutual funds. We find that these funds do not outperform the market per se. However, a comparison shows that AI-powered funds significantly outperform their human-managed peer funds. We further show that the outperformance of AI funds is attributable to their lower transaction cost, superior stock-picking capability, and reduced behavioral biases.

From Do AI-Powered Mutual Funds Perform Better? – ScienceDirect:

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Little attention has been paid to Article 22 in light of decision-making processes with multiple stages, potentially both manual and automated, and which together might impact upon decision subjects in different ways.
Using stylized examples grounded in real-world systems, we raise five distinct complications relating to interpreting Article 22 in the context of such multi-stage profiling systems. We argue that the nature of these challenges will make it difficult for courts or regulators to distil a set of clear, fair, and consistent interpretations for many realistic contexts.

From Is that your final decision? Multi-stage profiling, selective effects, and Article 22 of the GDPR | International Data Privacy Law | Oxford Academic:

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An NMI survey of 300 small business owners and 1,000 consumers in the US and UK highlights an interesting opportunity. Almost all of the small business owners surveyed (93%) said that they would consider using tap-to-mobile (including more than nine in ten of the current cash-only businesses). So there seems to be a reasonable demand for download point-of-sale apps. But what struck me as odd about this survey was that while 93% of the small business owners said that customers wanted contactless payments, more than a third (in the US) and one in ten (in the UK) do not offer the option.

When questioned as to why they don’t offer what customers obviously want, around half of the business owners say that they just haven’t gotten round to upgrading their POS and a third say that they do not see the need to offer them at all (presumably because they think that consumers will always have a payment card or cash on them as an alternative).

(As an aside, within the one quarter of small businesses that offer cash only, the main barrier to providing the enhanced customer experience were the payment card transaction fees.)

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The pandemic also conditioned consumers to enjoy—and expect—a breadth of payments options. “There’s actually some data to suggest that if a merchant isn’t offering their consumers a contactless payment experience, there are some consumers that just won’t shop there anymore. I’m actually one of those consumers myself,” admitted Roffey.

From Digital Wallets Are in Store for In-Store Shopping – PaymentsJournal:

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Most of the 12 central banks that are known to be in the advanced stages of retail CBDC deliberations view retail CBDC as a contingency plan. For example, Bank of Canada officials have said that a digital loonie could be introduced if cash usage continues to decline or stablecoin usage accelerates, or both. The European Central Bank (ECB) has a similar view on a digital euro.

Although the U.S. Federal Reserve is conducting a major retail CBDC research program, Christopher Waller, a member of the Fed’s board of governors, has described a digital dollar as a “solution in search of a problem.” As CoinDesk columnist J.P. Koning points out, for several advanced economy countries, “everything that a CBDC is supposed to fix can already be achieved by another existing process or institution – and these alternatives are typically cheaper and less risky.”

And even if central banks in some advanced economies move in the direction of issuing a retail CBDC, the road will be long and ponderous. The Bank of England has said that if the results of its development work “conclude that the case for CBDC is made, and that it is operationally and technologically robust, then the earliest date for the launch of a U.K. CBDC would be in the second half of the decade.” The ECB has said that a digital euro could come in 2026 at the earliest.

From CBDCs for the People? Where the Current State of Digital Currency Research Leads:

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Another important aspect of digital literacy is being able to earn money online. As a judge of the National Entrepreneur of the Year awards, Hill has been amazed at how teens make money with side hustles, using apps such as Etsy, Vinted and Depop to sell their wares. However, access to digital payment platforms is usually restricted to over-18s, meaning children have to piggyback on their parents’ accounts, or risk accounts being frozen if providers find out they are under 18.

From Vanishing cash means ‘digital literacy’ is vital | Financial Times:

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When I visited a school in Manchester this summer, an alarmingly high number of 14-year-olds said they had received requests to be a “money mule” via social media platforms.

From Vanishing cash means ‘digital literacy’ is vital | Financial Times:

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Mr. Marcus, 48, a longtime Silicon Valley executive in payments and digital finance, worked on many projects during his seven years at the social media company. Most recently, he spearheaded Meta’s push into a global digital currency that could be used by Facebook and WhatsApp users to transmit payments across borders. The project, initially called Libra, was later rebranded Diem after facing pushback from regulators.

From Head of Meta’s Crypto Efforts, David Marcus, Is Leaving the Company – The New York Times:

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In a policy paper published Oct. 18, Amazon said law enforcement, border control and other authorities needed to make “bold changes” to protect the integrity of e-commerce.

But Amazon has resisted requiring its sellers to share more information about themselves. It has opposed lawmakers’ efforts to demand more transparency, saying it would violate sellers’ privacy. Recently it signaled guarded approval of a weaker bill but noted that there were a few parts of it “that could be refined.”

From What Happened to Amazon’s Bookstore? – The New York Times:

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