A library of snippets
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Adrienne LaFrance: The web isn’t just fragile; it’s wholly ephemeral. We get a false sense of permanence from these tech giants with their walled-garden platforms. But the truth is that nothing lasts online, and it’s all decaying all the time.
From Facebook and Instagram Down: Making Sense of the Outage – The Atlantic:
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Twitter reveal that hardly 2.3 percent of all users have opted for one of the two factors of authentication
And of those that did, three-quarters opted for the not-really-security of SMS.
Will Harborne, chief executive of DeversiFi
I wouldn’t personally recommend to anyone else that they rely on the goodwill of strangers on the internet to return their $24m
From ‘Fat finger’ $24m charge exposes fragility in crypto market | Financial Times:
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Hilary Allen, professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law.
“This is why finance is so highly regulated. At a minimum, regulatory structures that require developers to test for bugs in their DeFi applications are needed.”
From ‘Fat finger’ $24m charge exposes fragility in crypto market | Financial Times:
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Millions of pounds have been stolen from Barclays accounts after the bank fell victim to a series of orchestrated attacks by a fraudster using a Monzo
From Millions stolen from Barclays accounts by Monzo fraudsters:
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Barclays and Starling won’t accept Monzo statements as proof of address. When I queried why, Starling said it was a “business decision” but refused to elaborate.
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A new trial scheme to help customers avoid scams can include only nine banks because of the limits of phone keypads
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Google is abandoning plans to pitch bank accounts to its users, marking a retreat from an effort to make the tech giant a bigger name in finance.
From Google Is Scrapping Its Plan to Offer Bank Accounts to Users – WSJ:
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More than 20 publicly listed companies have announced plans to begin marketing products and services related to the digital yuan, such as a mobile phone SIM card that can pay for bike rentals, a digital yuan payment system for schools, and hardware wallets, the China Securities Daily reported.
From Tens of public companies bringing e-CNY products and services to market in China | Bankless Times:
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There was no proper basis for requiring banks and payment service providers to test that the proposed recipient of funds is genuine. They need only, under their Quincecare duty, ensure the genuineness of the instruction to pay.
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It is worth noting that Mrs Philipp was asked by the Bank when making the transactions whether she wished to proceed, and confirmed that she did.
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Nevertheless, the rise of an ecosystem of financial services, known as decentralised finance, or “DeFi”, deserves sober consideration. It has the potential to rewire how the financial system works, with all the promise and perils that entails.
From The beguiling promise of decentralised finance | The Economist:
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Finally, freedom to fork is much more practical, and forking is much lower in economic and human cost, than most centralized systems.
Blockchain-based contraptions have a lot to offer the world that other kinds of systems do not. On the other hand, Nathan is completely correct to emphasize that blockchainized should not be equated with financialized. There is plenty of room for blockchain-based systems that do not look like money, and indeed we need more of them.
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