Snippings

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Coronavirus vaccine passports could soon be ‘recognised’ across the EU as leaders give initial backing ahead of a summit this week.

From Covid: EU gives initial backing to ‘vaccine passports’ for travel | Daily Mail Online:

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We are living in a world where the second-order effects of permissionless money – like the greater use of ransomware – are already evident.

From Bitcoin Is Aiding the Ransomware Industry – CoinDesk:

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Bob Hettinga reminded me about Peter Wayner’s “translucent databases”, that build on the Eric’s concepts.

Wayner really does end up where a lot of us think databases will be someday, particularly in finance: repositories of data accessible only by digital bearer tokens using various blind signature protocols… and, oddly enough, not because someone or other wants to strike a blow against the empire, but simply because it’s safer — and cheaper — to do that way.

[From 
Book Review: Peter Wayner’s “Translucent Databases”
]
There are other kinds of corporate data that it may at first seem need to be secret, but on reflection could be translucent (I’ll switch to Peter’s word here because it’s a much better description of practical implementations).

From Cryptography can bring novel solutions – Consult Hyperion:

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The last two times I paid in MacDonalds I paid with a phone and a watch. I think using contactless cards is old-fashioned…

From Contactless and fries – Consult Hyperion:

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Winwatch explained how it is the first company to seal a payment chip (EMV) and antenna within a glass watch face, the kind of technology jump users may expect from a Q-made James Bond watch.

From REVIEW: Swiss smartwatch glass taps into a post-pandemic contactless world:

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Not sure if this is the first EMV watch. Here I am using one in 2012…

 

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As my life is so dull, when I travel to interesting places I like to waste my time and the time of everyone around me by trying out any new payment schemes, terminals and form factors to hand. Thus, I went to San Francisco not with flowers in my hair but with an array of cards, phones and my splendid new PayPass watch.

From Bore reporter – Consult Hyperion:

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Any time we want to present healthcare data in the form of a VC, we must first make some use-case-specific decisions:

Define a set of required and optional FHIR content resources (e.g., Immunization or Observation) that must be packaged and presented together
Decide how to bind these FHIR content resources to a person’s external identity, via FHIR identity resources (e.g., Patient)

From Credentials – SMART Health Cards Framework:

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A mock-up from the Commons Project of what a digital vaccine credential might look like.

From Covid Vaccine Digital Credentials See Interest From Microsoft, Salesforce – The New York Times:

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The cost of not pursuing digital identities is high. Being able to digitally prove claims is vital to enable paperless, contactless, streamlined processes across public and private sectors. Sadly, COVID-19 has shown many cases of fraud applications for grants from bogus organisations, selling non-genuine tests to citizens, setting up fake companies or enlisting fake directors to harvest data. In the UK alone, Policy Exchange estimates that fraud and error could cost the government between £1.3bn-£7.9bn ($1.8bn-$10.8bn) in 2020.

From How digital identity can improve lives in a post-COVID-19 world | World Economic Forum:

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Today Visa published a technical paper that outlines a novel approach for offline point-to-point payments between two devices. The protocol allows digital money to be directly downloaded onto a personal device, such as a smartphone or tablet. The money is stored on a secure hardware embedded in that device and managed by a wallet provider (e.g. a bank).

From Central Bank Digital Currency and the future Visa publishes new research | Visa:

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While adiabatic semiconductor microprocessors exist, the new microprocessor prototype, called MANA (Monolithic Adiabatic iNtegration Architecture), is the world’s first adiabatic superconductor microprocessor. It’s composed of superconducting niobium and relies on hardware components called adiabatic quantum-flux-parametrons (AQFPs). Each AQFP is composed of a few fast-acting Josephson junction switches, which require very little energy to support superconductor electronics. The MANA microprocessor consists of more than 20,000 Josephson junctions (or more than 10,000 AQFPs) in total.

Christopher Ayala is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Advanced Sciences at Yokohama National University, in Japan, who helped develop the new microprocessor. “The AQFPs used to build the microprocessor have been optimized to operate adiabatically such that the energy drawn from the power supply can be recovered under relatively low clock frequencies up to around 10 GHz,” he explains. “This is low compared to the hundreds of gigahertz typically found in conventional superconductor electronics.”

This doesn’t mean that the group’s current-generation device hits 10 GHz speeds, however. In a press statement, Ayala added, “We also show on a separate chip that the data processing part of the microprocessor can operate up to a clock frequency of 2.5 GHz making this on par with today’s computing technologies. We even expect this to increase to 5-10 GHz as we make improvements in our design methodology and our experimental setup.”

The price of entry for the niobium-based microprocessor is of course the cryogenics and the energy cost for cooling the system down to superconducting temperatures.

“But even when taking this cooling overhead into account,” says Ayala, “The AQFP is still about 80 times more energy-efficient when compared to the state-of-the-art semiconductor electronic device, [such as] 7-nm FinFET,

From Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They’re Ultra-Efficient – IEEE Spectrum:

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A CBDC not only has domestic macroeconomic and financial implications for the issuing economy; it has also implications for the rest of the world.  Our simulations suggest that if a CBDC is available to non-residents, additional volatility in capital flows, exchange rates and interest rates resulting from its presence can be mitigated through holdings limits on transactions by foreigners or through flexibility in the CBDC’s remuneration rate.  Of the two policy tools, our simulations show the latter is the most powerful – price flexibility dominates quantitative restrictions.  That a CBDC increases asymmetries in the international monetary system by reducing monetary policy autonomy in foreign economies, but not domestically, suggests in addition that introducing a CBDC sooner, rather than later, could give rise to a significant first-mover advantage.

From The international dimension of a central bank digital currency | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal:

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