A library of snippets
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China’s regulators are trying to get Jack Ma to do something the beleaguered billionaire has long resisted: share the troves of consumer-credit data collected by his financial-technology behemoth.
From Chinese Regulators Try to Get Jack Ma’s Ant Group to Share Consumer Data – WSJ:
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Martin Kearsley, Post Office banking director, said the joint branches initiative would help make banking as important to the company as its traditional mail and parcel business. He added that it had “a social and moral responsibility to focus on cash and banking as one of our main strategic pillars”.
From Post Office leads drive to preserve UK access to cash with banking hubs | Financial Times:
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A gang of robbers stole bitcoin valued at more than HK$3 million from a trader on Monday, luring him to meet for the transaction and then kicking him out of the car on a Hong Kong hillside.
The robbers fled with HK$3 million (US$387,000) in cash that they had pretended to pay their victim, but took back later when 15 bitcoin worth about HK$235,000 each were transferred.
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And it will, definitely, happen. Just as one of the first uses of the modern computer (the Bletchley Park Bombe) was to break the symmetric key cryptography used by the Nazi military (Enigma and all that), so one of the first uses of a quantum computer will be to break the public key cryptography used by the military, government, bank, pharmaceutical and other systems in place today. But note the implication: breaking the codes will not simply mean that banks won’t be able to use it to exchange messages in confidence in the future but that all data encrypted using public key cryptography since it was invented (in the 1970s) will become visible.
From Schrodinger’s cash:
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National banks and federal savings associations can use public blockchains and stablecoins for settlement, The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said in an interpretive letter published late Monday.
The letter indicates that banks and savings associations can now run crypto nodes and utilize associated stablecoins for “permissible payment activities.” This means banks can use public blockchains to validate, store, record and settle payment transactions as long as they’re compliant with existing laws.
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The study also found these apps play an important role in modifying the composition of couples by making them more diverse.
In particular, this applied to highly educated women and less educated men getting together.
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Financial health is going to take center stage in 2021 for a few reasons that have nothing to do with what the advocates talk about:
Banks (and credit unions) will up their virtue signaling to unbearable decibel levels. Fintechs have been telling us (inaccurately, in many cases) about how much they’re concerned about consumers’ financial health. Incumbents have paid lip service to it, but with a new administration occupying the White House (probably), demonstrating their social conscience and contribution—to more than just low income consumers—will be a top priority for incumbents.
Financial health scores are emerging. The topic of financial health is often dominated by discussions of financial literacy—which is virtually useless (not enough room here to explain why). Quantifying financial health has been a challenge because self-reported measures are unreliable. But some companies—like Financial Health Network and MX—have developed robust financial health scores that rely on actual account data.
Financial health will be regulated. Look for the new administration to require banks to monitor and improve their customers’ level of financial health. What could this look like? Todd Baker and Corey Stone recently proposed some ideas. The first of their three-stage proposal would require providers to “make available to regulators data that regulators can use to analyze and measure changes in customer financial health.”
The combination of these three factors will spur innovation in the fintech community to build financial health platforms.
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Divesh Aggarwal, Gavin K. Brennen, Troy Lee, Miklos Santha, Marco Tomamichel
On the other hand, the elliptic curve signature scheme used by Bitcoin is much more at risk, and could be completely broken by a quantum computer as early as 2027,
From [1710.10377] Quantum attacks on Bitcoin, and how to protect against them:
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This suggests that people are generally following the best practice of not using p2pk address as well as not reusing p2pkh addresses. Nevertheless, there are still over 4 million BTC (about 25% of all Bitcoins) which are potentially vulnerable to a quantum attack. At the current price this is over 40 billion USD!
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For cryptocurrencies, a fork in the future that might affect large parts of the chain, but it will be somewhat predictable — there is a lot of thought being placed on post-quantum encryption technology.
From Here’s Why Quantum Computing Will Not Break Cryptocurrencies:
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Snippings