Snippings

Unified Payments Interface or UPI continues its forward march. It has raced past 3 billion transactions (moving approximately $80 billion) for the first time since its inception according to data released by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

Our Communications Commissar, Mr. Ed Vaizey, has been having some more meetings with key stakeholders (other than, for example, the public) about copyright and such like. The people consulted about this are, naturally, the vested interests who would benefit from stricter copyright enforcement (provided the costs can be offloaded onto the taxpayer) rather than the diffuse and disparate interests who would benefit an environment more supportive of innovation. But there’s more at work here than Bastiat’s candlemakers, and I suspect something pernicious. As John Naughton picked out of the Hargreaves report on Intellectual Property:

In the case of IP policy and specifically copyright policy, however, there is no doubt that the persuasive powers of celebrities and important UK creative companies have distorted policy outcomes.

[From

The stupidity of our copyright laws is finally laid bare | Technology | The Observer ]

The economist John Kay is absolutely spot on about this in his comments on the Hargreaves report.

Mr Hargreaves deplores the way government policy has been led by business interests and not evidence of its effects. The Carter report, unintentionally, illustrated his point in every chapter.

[From

FT.com / Comment / Op-Ed Columnists – Publishers badly need a new Sir Thomas Bodley ]

If the debate were led by rational business interests, maximising the value of the industry for UK plc, that would be one thing. But it isn’t. It’s led by pop stars egged on by record companies, misguided authors and the owners of rights. I put this point to none other than
Fearghal Sharkey , once upon a time the lead singer of the Undertones , but now the CEO of lobby group UK Music .

We had an honest to and fro with
Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC in the middle and it made for an enjoyable end to a long day listening to people discussing the future of consumer electronics. I said, essentially, that I thought that copyright should be reduced to a welfare-maximising level of around 15 years in return for more effective enforcement of unauthorised copying of the material because the legal and regulatory environment should be constructed to the benefit of society as a whole and not be co-opted by the economic interests of particular sectors and he said, essentially, fuck off.

Apple users in India, to choose a scale example, can now use their bank accounts to pay for App Store stuff. Up until now, users were required to add their credit or debit card details for this sort of thing, but now they can pay using their UPI account, RuPay and net banking.

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Like Credijusto, Finterra targets the nearly 5m small and medium-sized companies that make up half of Mexico’s gross domestic product and employ 70 per cent of workers, but struggle to access credit. But Credijusto’s unique selling point is the way it crunches electronic invoice, tax and other data to grant customers loans within hours.

From The Mexico-based fintech that decided to buy a bank | Financial Times:

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The CfM panel of experts on the UK economy is nearly unanimous in agreeing that a Bank of England-issued digital currency would benefit the British economy. Half of the panel also believes that a digital currency would have limited impact on the UK banking system.
Background
The June 2021 CfM survey asked the members of its UK panel to assess the benefits of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) to the UK economy and its potential risks to the UK banking sector.

From The latest thinking of European macroeconomists | The CFM-CEPR Surveys:

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In crypto, the prevailing ideology is that people take responsibility for their actions. If you “ape into” an unaudited project and lose your shirt, that’s on you.

From Cats Clog Ethereum, the Sequel | Daniel Kuhn – CoinDesk:

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Erik Voorhees, longtime bitcoiner and founder of exchange ShapeShift, told CoinDesk in an email. (The identity of Nakamoto, the creator of original cryptocurrency bitcoin, has never been conclusively determined after years of speculation, and yet the asset remains the sector’s most valuable with a $216 billion market cap.) An identifiable leader, after all, is arguably a single point of failure for a technology that depends on having none.

If given a second chance, Voorhees said, he would consider starting ShapeShift anonymously.

“Being anonymous can be very helpful to a project, but obviously people should tread carefully before reputation is established,” he said. “The problem with Blue Kirby wasn’t that he was anonymous, but that he was new. The account came out of nowhere and people threw money at it.”

From What Yearn Finance’s ‘Blue Kirby’ Incident Means for Pseudonymity – CoinDesk:

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The simplicity of the term Digital Pound conceals a broad range of different forms it could take, from back-end changes in electronic payment systems, largely invisible to the public, to a suite of user-facing technologies that would revolutionise how people spend their own money.

From A path to Britcoin: a UK digital currency isn’t just about the money, it’s a public service – CityAM:

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More than two-thirds of the gains went to the 25 biggest institutions, according to the FDIC. And that was concentrated at the very top of the industry: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, the biggest U.S. banks by assets, grew much faster than the rest of the industry in the first quarter, according to company data.

From Banks have grown by $2 trillion in deposits since coronavirus first hit:

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The first and most obvious risk from blanket age verification is consent fatigue. The simplest way to put it is this: if you hate cookie consent pop-ups, welcome to the wonderful world of age verification pop-ups. You will be required to prove your age and identity, linked to some official form of identification or via a third party intermediary, on every site you visit and every service you use. (Once you get through that process, then you can move on to cookie consents.)

The second risk is the chilling effect that these blanket age verification processes will have on your digital rights to privacy and freedom of expression. You will no longer be able to read some websites without proving your identity. You will no longer be able to say some things without proving your identity. You will no longer be able to seek certain information without proving your identity. And in the view of some age verification proponents, the only reason you would be opposed to any of that is if you have something to hide.

The third risk comes from the age verification and assurance processes themselves. These processes may collect many different pieces of personally identifiable information in order to profile you to establish your likely age. In doing so, they will create massive privatised databases of personal Internet browsing – databases which would be very appealing to governments or hackers.

From Age verification in the Online Safety Bill | Open Rights Group:

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