Snippings

xxx

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is acknowledging that hackers compromised its email servers and sent spam messages. B

From Hackers sent spam emails from FBI accounts, agency confirms : NPR:

xxx

xxx

Crucially, Mastercard is deploying Open Banking technology through Finicity in the US and its pending acquisition of Aiia in Europe to use consumer permissioned data tied to debit or bank account credentials to run affordability checks on applicants.

From Mastercard BNPL programme gains momentum:

xxx

xxx

If the results of this ‘development’ phase conclude that the case for CBDC is made, and that it is operationally and technologically robust, then the earliest date for launch of a UK CBDC would be in the second half of the decade.

From Statement on Central Bank Digital Currency next steps | Bank of England:

xxx

xxx

That’s the premise under which Jeremy Balkin, global head of innovation and corporate development at J.P. Morgan Payments, operates. It means that any merchant is reliant on the ability to send and receive money quickly and safely, a concept that Balkin says is at the root of such innovations as cars becoming payment vehicles.

From JPMorgan executive on how payments are ‘eating the world’ | American Banker:

xxx

xxx

Markets can’t operate without clear property rights: Before someone can buy a good, it has to be clear who has the right to sell it, and once someone does buy, you need to be able to transfer ownership from the seller to the buyer. NFTs solve this problem by giving parties something they can agree represents ownership.

From How NFTs Create Value:

xxx

xxx

Axie Infinity is “a Pokémon-inspired universe where anyone can earn tokens through skilled gameplay and contributions to the ecosystem. Players can battle, collect, raise, and build a land-based kingdom for their pets.” The game in its present state is centered on the buying and trading of non-scarce virtual creatures called “Axies” in order to battle them against each other, but future plans put a heavy focus on buying and selling scarce digital land.

From Land speculators will kill your game’s growth:

xxx

 

I can tell you exactly what’s going to happen here, because it’s what always happens – speculators will buy up all the land and hold it. If there’s no cost to holding onto this scarce asset that everybody needs and wants, and this asset will predictably rise in value, speculators will just sit on it and watch the price shoot through the roof and anyone who wants to use land will have to pay out the nose.

xxx

Ultima Online (UO) first launched in 1997. Though hardly the first MMO, it was a genre-defining title. It notably featured a housing system: save up enough resources for a blueprint of the house you want – anything from a small shack to a magnificent castle – then find a free plot of land somewhere, and place it down. It didn’t take long for nearly every free space to get used up.

If you didn’t visit your house often enough it would be automatically deleted to make room for others, but enterprising land speculators were undeterred. Holding free plots with a building – any building – was a good investment because the price players were willing to pay to gain access to the land far exceeded the costs of capturing and holding it.

So why didn’t players just move to a less populated server, one that wasn’t already filled up with houses? It’s a good question – the less popular servers had more free space; but they also had far less players, which made the experience less fun. Besides, back then you couldn’t transfer your character across servers, so moving also meant abandoning not only all of your friends, but also all of your experience, skills, and equipment. Populated land was and is the most valuable land.

From Land speculators will kill your game’s growth:

Location, location, location

xxx

An average person defecates about 500g a day, which can be converted to 50 litres of methane gas, the environmental engineer said. This gas can generate 0.5kWh of electricity or be used to drive a car for about 1.2km (0.75 miles).

From South Korean toilet turns excrement into power and digital currency | Reuters:

xxx

xxx

‘The people whose data was exposed were those who did their market securities KYC,’

From CDSL Data Breach: 44 million investors’ personal data like PAN, Demat details leaked | Technology News | Zee News:

xxx

xxx

“The most important thing for Taproot is…smart contracts,” said Fred Thiel, CEO of cryptocurrency mining specialist Marathon Digital Holdings. “It’s already the primary driver of innovation on the ethereum network. Smart contracts essentially give you the opportunity to really build applications and businesses on the blockchain.”

As more programmers build smart contracts on top of bitcoin’s blockchain, bitcoin could become more of a player in the world of DeFi, or decentralized finance, a term used to describe financial applications designed to cut out the middleman.

From Bitcoin taproot upgrade: What it means for investors:

xxx