Snippings

This year, around 100 million U.S. consumers will use proximity-based mobile payments at least once during a six-month period. That’s a lot, but note that these eMarketer forecasts show that even in 2025, only half of US smartphone users will be paying with mobile contactless xPays or apps, meaning plenty of opportunity for convenient wearables (keyfobs, bracelets, rings and such like). I think keyfobs, in particular, have real potential. My wife, who is a normal person and therefore couldn’t care less about payments was a heavy user of her Barclaycard keyfob until it packed up, so I delighted to see some gorgeous contactless key fobs from Tovi Sorga available online. I got her the gold leather one and I have to tell you it took approximately three minutes to link it to her bank account and get it up and running. When she nips into the gas station or convenience store, she always has her keys in her hand so waving her keys over the reader is faster, easier and considerably more convenient than taking out her phone and open her xPay or (as I had a woman do in front of me in the pharmacy a few days ago) mess about trying to put her hand upside down through a hole in a plexiglass shield to pay with her Apple Watch.

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A significant portion of the Bitcoin, however, landed in one account on Coinbase’s platform, according to the lawsuit. The man who owns that account… identity has thus far been protected by Coinbase because of its privacy rules.

From Springfield businessman says $1.8 million in Bitcoin stolen overnight:

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The lawsuit says Williams transferred his Bitcoin to a cryptocurrency wallet at Blockchain.com on Feb. 25. But when Williams went to check his virtual wallet the next day, it had been emptied without his authorization.

According to what Williams’ lawyer, David Silver, said in court last week, Williams’ stolen Bitcoin was transferred to various private wallets across the internet.

From Springfield businessman says $1.8 million in Bitcoin stolen overnight:

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A Springfield real estate businessman has filed a lawsuit against Coinbase Global Inc. and an unnamed suspect after he says $1.8 million of his Bitcoin was stolen overnight.

From Springfield businessman says $1.8 million in Bitcoin stolen overnight:

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Swinburne University senior lecturer in digital media Dr. Belinda Barnet was skeptical about the effectiveness and wisdom of placing large quantities of sensitive personal data in the care of social media companies and online dating websites.

From Australia Considers Social Media ID Requirement – Infosecurity Magazine:

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Australia is mulling the introduction of a compulsory points-based ID verification system for users of social media and online dating sites.

Under the new proposal, individuals would be required to prove who they are by submitting 100 points of ID before they are allowed to use a service. Permissible forms of identification could include a driver’s license, Medicare card, birth certificate, or passport.

From Australia Considers Social Media ID Requirement – Infosecurity Magazine:

Now, that sounds good. And lots of people think that social media sites, dating platforms, adult services and so on should be legally required to identify their users. But this is a knee-jerk reaction to the evident problems of the media and, frankly, wrong.

November 2013

As 
Alfred North Whitehead
 (1861-1947) observed*, “it is the business of the future to be dangerous”. It’s interesting, and says something about human nature I’m sure, that discussions about electronic payments and electronic identity management often drift toward the negative as we begin to imagine the horrors that await. Crime is exciting and interesting and payments are not, so there’s a natural media focus on this dark side. Which is why I wrote about
assassination markets for FT Alphaville
. Why have these dark side markets surfaced again? Well, it’s because of the resurgence of interest in electronic money attendant on the Bitcoin phenomenon. Oh, and because a chap called Kuwabatake Sanjuro
has set one up
.

Here’s how an assassination market works. Someone runs a public book on the anticipated death dates of public figures. If I hate a particular pop star or politician, I place a bet on when they will die. When the person dies, whoever had the closest guess wins all of the money, less a cut for the house. Let’s say I bet £5 that a particular TV personality is going to die on April Fool’s Day 2014. Other people really hate this personality too and they put down bets as well. The more hated the person is, the most bets there will be.

April Fool’s Day comes around. There’s a million quid bet on this particularly personality. I pay a hit man £500K to murder the personality. Hurrah! I’ve won the bet, so I get the million quid and give half to the hit man. I don’t have to prove that I was responsible for the assassination to get the money: I’m just the lucky winner. If someone else had bet 31st March and murdered the television personality themselves the day before, then I wouldn’t get the payoff but it would only have cost me a fiver and that would have been a fiver spent in a good cause. You can see how the idea plays to, and exploits, our base human nature.

This is actually a rather old idea and, as I mentioned in the FT, the first name it brings to my mind is that of
Jim Bell
, whose 1995 essay on “assassination politics” was brought the concept to the mass market although, as mentioned below, he wasn’t the first person to write about it. Will it work with the current technology? I wouldn’t have thought so. Bitcoin is a poor choice of payment mechanism for an assassination market that has to have unconditional anonymity to work properly. The placing of the bets, and the collection of the winnings, must be untraceable. Completely untraceable.

But contrary to conventional wisdom, Bitcoin is not anonymous.

[From

Unlike Liberty Reserve, Bitcoin Is Not Anonymous — Yet – NYTimes.com

]

So if you obtain your ransom in Bitcoin the trail of breadcrumbs will sooner or later lead back to you…

Of all the millions of dollars of purloined bitcoin that’s floating around out there, not one Satoshi of it has been spent. That’s because while most other stolen property becomes relatively indistinguishable from its legitimate brethren, everybody knows the identity of this particular stolen wealth, and can track it until the end of time.

[From

Let’s Cut Through the Bitcoin Hype: A Hacker-Entrepreneur’s Take | Wired Opinion | Wired.com

]

And there are people who examine these trails in detail and this examination will get more automated and better informed in time. So you can’t spend stolen bitcoins. But in any case who says there were stolen? How do we know that the exchange operator who says that a hacker transferred out all of their bitcoins didn’t do it themselves? Who decides whether a particular bitcoin is stolen or not? And do people who have accepted bitcoins that are subsequently ruled to be stolen out of pocket? (I hate to spoil the libertarian party, but Visa and MasterCard have tens of thousands of pages of rules to deal with all of this stuff for a reason, which is that consumers, regulators, merchants and other stakeholders all want it).

When it comes down to it, I don’t think pop stars or politicians should be too worried about Kuwabatake Sanjuro’s market. For all I know, Kuwabatake Sanjuro is actually the NSA and even now they are collecting the IP addresses of lunatics who want to murder public officials. In fact, that’s a great idea for TV series!  I had a similar idea after last year’s
Consult Hyperion
Tomorrow’s Transactions
Future of Money
art competition. One of the ideas was for crowdsourced crime, which was in time taken over by corporate interests. This was selected as the winner by the panel of payment industry judges and I thought that it was a great idea for my William Gibson-style movie blockbuster (I must remember to mention it to Heather Schlegel when I next see her). It was a thought-provoking idea (which is the point of the competition) and well-presented, as you can see for yourself if you go to the web site, but as
Wendy Grossman
pointed out at the time, the “cypherpunks” version of this meme dates back to Tim May’s 1994 “
Cyphernomicon
” and the row about anonymous money has been going on ever since.

The proponents of cash argue that if us e-money people are to mount a serious effort to eradicate physical money then we must replicate anonymity as it is a key property of cash. I couldn’t disagree more. Us e-money people are building something better than cash.

* I know about this because of
Hawkwind
, not because I am literate.

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When you make a purchase, you don’t just slide a card and wait for your product. You get to communicate with the person you’re buying from, seeing the transaction from their perspective as well as your own.

From The Future of Paying Each Other on the Web | by Amber Case | Medium:

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The 12th century text Dialogus de Scaccario—written by Richard FitzNeal, Lord Treasurer during the reigns of Henry II and Richard I—instructs the use of sheepskin for royal accounts as “they do not easily yield to erasure without the blemish being apparent”.

In the 17th century when paper was common, Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke wrote of the necessity that legal documents were written on parchment “for the writing upon these is least liable to alterations or corruption”.

From Sheepskin Parchment Helped Medieval Lawyers Prevent Fraud : Science Fiction in the News:

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“Anything that threatens the dollar is a national security issue. This threatens the dollar over the long term,” Josh Lipsky of the Atlantic Council told the Wall Street Journal, in a feature that described the digital yuan as “a re-imagination of money that could shake a pillar of American power.”

From Will China’s new digital yuan threaten King Dollar’s reign? – MarketWatch:

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