Snippings

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The US Treasury has for years expressed worry about the potential decline of the dollar’s dominance following excessive use of blocking sanctions.

From 2020 letter | Dan Wang.

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The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has announced the launch of iAM Smart (internet Access by Mobile in a Smart way), a digital identity service that enables users to leverage the biometrics in their smartphone to act as proof of identity for all types of digital services including financial firms. A website has been created to explain the service to Hong Kong residents. iAM Smart is available for download as an App.

From Hong Kong Monetary Authority Launches Digital ID Service iAM Smart, Calls Service Key Milestone in Fintech Development.

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From a fraud perspective, we are seeing two things:

First-party fraud. Each business was supposed to only be able to make one bounce back application, but there are no controls to restrict a business to one application. There are businesses that have applied 3, 4, 5 times, so they are getting multipliers on the £50K or 25% of annual turnover they’re supposed to get. Some business owners may be ready to cash out and could have received 5 loans for 125% turnover.
Impersonations. I could pretend to be a director of your company and start making applications for loans on your company. You might not even find out that this has happened until you need to start paying next spring. Fraudsters will try to put mail redirection on businesses, so that people at the company won’t get the mail confirming the loan. But in fact, as we’re in lockdown, those bounce back loan confirmations may be sitting in vacant offices. When people get back to their offices, they might find a bounce back loan letter. That means there’s a big balloon potential for fraud next spring when the payments start coming due.
The program was a great success,

From Bounce Back Loan Fraud – What Should The Uk Do? | FICO:

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Today, the frontrunners are just bots. Tomorrow, it will be miners.
Miners today leave money on the table by not acting on these opportunities. In the future, they will reorder and submit transactions in their mempools for their benefit.

From Ethereum is a Dark Forest. A horror story. | by Dan Robinson | Medium:

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The Dark Forest is my favorite science fiction book. It introduces the concept of a “dark forest” — an environment in which detection means certain death at the hands of advanced predators. In this environment, publicly identifying someone else’s location is as good as directly destroying them. (This concept is also the inspiration for the Dark Forest game on the Ethereum testnet.)
In the Ethereum mempool, these apex predators take the form of “arbitrage bots.”

From Ethereum is a Dark Forest. A horror story. | by Dan Robinson | Medium:

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It’s no secret that the Ethereum blockchain is a highly adversarial environment. If a smart contract can be exploited for profit, it eventually will be. The frequency of new hacks indicates that some very smart people spend a lot of time examining contracts for vulnerabilities.
But this unforgiving environment pales in comparison to the mempool (the set of pending, unconfirmed transactions). If the chain itself is a battleground, the mempool is something worse: a dark forest.

From Ethereum is a Dark Forest. A horror story. | by Dan Robinson | Medium:

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On 21 September 1993 at about 16.00 in the afternoon, top Eurosceptic MP Sir Richard Body received a phone call from someone he believed was the then-prime minister.

From Impressionist Rory Bremner ‘saved Sir John Major’s bacon’ amid MPs revolt – BBC News:

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The dealership recently sold two high-end sports cars—a 2017 Pagani Huayra Roadster and a 2019 Bugatti Chiron—to a customer who paid more than $6 million in bitcoin

From Bitcoin Looks to Gain Traction in Payments – WSJ:

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Ursula von der Leyen’s proposed ‘secure digital identity’ would be a cornerstone of such a soft infrastructure

From EU Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act – ‘traffic lights’ are a positive step, but what about the soft infrastructure? – Data Sovereignty Now.

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Sadly, for crypto maximalists, it might not mean crypto replacing central banks or central banks adopting permissionless public cryptocurrencies. It could instead mean central banks issuing their own, non-debt based, digital currencies, which could be used to provide a basic income for citizens and fund government spending without the need for debt.

From Will Cryptocurrency Matter in Ten Years? – Pairagraph:

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