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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.

From UK Banking: Authorised Push Payment Fraud:

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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.

From UK Banking: Authorised Push Payment Fraud:

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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.

From On Nathan Schneider on the limits of cryptoeconomics:

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And so we get the fundamental conundrum: the cypherpunk spirit is fundamentally about making maximally immutable systems that work with as little information as possible about who is participating (“on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”), but making new forms of governance requires the system to have richer information about its participants and ability to dynamically respond to attacks in order to remain stable in the face of actors with unforeseen incentives.

From On Nathan Schneider on the limits of cryptoeconomics:

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As I wrote in Wired magazine back in 2019, banks will soon have to convince bots – rather than people – that their deal is the best. And bots won’t care which soccer team the bank sponsors or how nice the decor in the branches is or how long the bank brand has been established.

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Losses to authorised push payments fraud topped card fraud for the first time in H1 2021, acccording to new figures from UK Finance.

In previous years the largest fraud losses have been unauthorised frauds mainly committed using payment cards.

This year, however, criminals focused their activity on APP fraud, in which a customer is tricked into authorising a payment to an account controlled by a criminal.

As a result, UK Finance recorded a 71% increase in APP fraud during the first half of 2021 and, for the first time, the amount of money stolen through APP fraud overtook card fraud losses. All told, authorised push payment (APP) fraud losses in the first half stood at £355.3 million, compared to £261.7 million in losses from card crime.

From APP fraud losses overtake card crime in H1 2021:

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the idea of age verification is taking off around the world. Europe’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive requires companies to put measures in place to protect children, a bill in Canada is looking to introduce age verification but has faced privacy concerns, Australia has recommended using digital IDs to access pornography and officials in Utah have been pushing a law that would require new smartphones and tablets to have pre-installed and on-by-default pornography filters. France has also threatened to block pornographic websites that don’t put age-verification systems in place.

From Germany Is About to Block One of the Biggest Porn Sites | WIRED:

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