Snippings

The hack of 1903

Neville Maskelyne was a British music hall magician who had already undertaken some telegraph experiments. He was keen to see whether Marconi’s system was truly as groundbreaking as he claimed. The Eastern Telegraph Company’s tasked Maskelyne, to set about the business of breaking into the secure communications. He started his task by building a 50 metre radio mast on the cliffs of Porthcurno to see if he could intercept Marconi’s company messages being sent to vessels at sea. He succeeded quite easily and soon realised that without tuned equipment it was relatively easy to intercept a signal without anyone knowing.

From Hacking at the Royal Institution | The Royal Institution: Science Lives Here:

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In an April robbery in Calgary, Canada, armed thieves tied up a man and stole his computers, bank cards and other valuables. They also took what the Calgary Herald described as “cryptocurrency keys”.

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When Hurricane Dorian swept across the northern Bahamas in September 2019 it left a trail of what the country’s prime minister Hubert Minnis called “generational devastation” in its wake. Buildings were flattened, scores of people lost their lives and, in addition to water and electricity supplies being cut off, banks were destroyed. Though they had their lives to rebuild, the archipelago’s residents were left with no access to cash.

In some cases restoring bank branches and ATMs took months to achieve, prompting the Central Bank of the Bahamas to accelerate the launch of a “storm-proof” mobile-phone-based digital currency. The Sand Dollar, which went live in October last year, became the world’s first central bank digital currency (CDBC), allowing Bahamian citizens to electronically send and receive money without the need for a bank account.

From The race to replace cash with crypto is hotting up | WIRED UK:

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Faruk Fatih Özer, founder of Turkish crypto exchange Thodex, seeks to expand internationally! To this end, he flew out on 21 April, just as $2 billion of cryptos from the exchange turned up missing. Thodex had been having completely temporary withdrawal issues for a while, was put up for sale, and is now temporarily shut for business, permanently.

Özer also paid the most painstaking attention to money-laundering compliance — he took Know-Your-Customer data for hundreds of thousands of users with him, including scans of their national ID cards. He is presently in Albania; Turkey has arrested 62 people trying to track Özer down, and is seeking to extradite him.

From News: Bitcoin mining is not green, miners versus programmers, gold is cleaner than bitcoin, exchanges collapse, how to forge an NFT – Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain:

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Andreessen touches on some of the contributing factors in his essay, writing that the right — the traditional pro-capitalist wing of American society — “must fight hard against crony capitalism, regulatory capture, ossified oligopolies, risk-inducing offshoring, investor-friendly buybacks in lieu of customer-friendly (and, over a longer period of time, even more investor-friendly) innovation.”

From Marc Andreessen calls to build things — here’s why we don’t:

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A third fascinating use case for Bitcoin is micropayments, or ultrasmall payments. Micropayments have never been feasible, despite 20 years of attempts, because it is not cost effective to run small payments (think $1 and below, down to pennies or fractions of a penny) through the existing credit/debit and banking systems. The fee structure of those systems makes that nonviable.

All of a sudden, with Bitcoin, that’s trivially easy. Bitcoins have the nifty property of infinite divisibility: currently down to eight decimal places after the dot, but more in the future. So you can specify an arbitrarily small amount of money, like a thousandth of a penny, and send it to anyone in the world for free or near-free.

From Why Bitcoin Matters – The New York Times:

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Tyler Cowan is surely right to point out that decentralisation, far from doing away with intermediaries, will drive the creation of new kinds of institutions to regulate and police transactions. No-one wants a “Wild West” for commerce (if the Wild West was all that, we’d still be in it) and despite the caveat emptor nonsense coming from the pseudo-libertarian crypto-maximalists, it must be obvious that, as Cowan puts it, that in a decentralised world “the concept most in need of radical revision may be adjudication”.

Have you read those stories of people who have their crypto wallets hacked and have no bank or intermediary to go to for a refund? Or of those people who cannot remember their crypto passwords and will lose millions in locked accounts as a result? It is possible that this kind of thing will become far more common, and notions of control will require a wholesale rethinking.

China led the way in super-app world, the business school case study being Ant of course. Alipay, which began as a payments app, now provides myriad services to a billion users, including financial services of all kind. The microloan service is one of the most popular. It accounted for almost 40% of total sales by the first half of 2020. Banks underwrote the microloans, assumed the credit risks and collected the interest payments, while Ant pocketed a fee for facilitating the transactions.

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“In the past, payment was the end of all transactions, but now payment has become the beginning of all transactions,” Ant’s then-chief executive Simon Hu told Chinese media last year.

From China Orders Tech Giants to Unbundle Financial Services – WSJ:

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On Thursday, China’s central bank and four other regulatory agencies told some of the country’s biggest financial technology firms—including WeChat operator Tencent Holdings Ltd., ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing Technology Co. and e-commerce firm JD.com Inc. —that their apps should no longer provide financial services beyond payments, according to people familiar with the discussions.

From China Orders Tech Giants to Unbundle Financial Services – WSJ:

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