Snippings

 

 

 

Of course, who will provide the apps themselves is a different matter. And here is where I expect to see competition and innovation. If we look to somewhere that went contact-free some time ago, we can already get some idea of the possibilities. Wei Zhihong of UnionPay International highlights the interesting example of large mall that enabled consumers to buy from the merchants inside using its own app. Shoppers could then easily access all the brands they wanted and it was also good for the merchants who were able to sell through the app, giving them an added incentive to locate in the mall.

As Wei Zhihong of UnionPay International recently said, the pandemic has boosted demand for indoor entertainment with consumers spending more time and money on music, movies and games: Unionpay transactions at the world’s top online game stores have multiplied “several times” during the pandemic. 

The British government’s “Making Tax Digital” (MTD) initiative is the future for all UK taxes and for all UK taxpayers. This won’t be achieved by the tax authorities developing more sophisticated platforms but by them providing API access to software used across the marketplace (I used Quickbooks, for example, to submit my VAT returns).

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Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Tuesday that $256.6 million would go towards GovPass, the whole-of-government federal program that aims to eventually provide identity verification across a range of government and private sector services.

From Troubled digital ID scheme gets another $250m – InnovationAus:

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After receiving a tip from a local resident, police in the province of Binh Duong raided a warehouse on Saturday, where they confiscated nearly 800 pounds worth of bags filled with roughly 320,000 recycled condoms. The condoms had been boiled, dried, reshaped with a wooden prosthesis, and were going to be put up for sale. Officers arrested the warehouse owner, a 34-year-old woman who said she received a monthly delivery of used condoms from an unknown person, and that she was paid 17 cents for every two pounds of condoms that she recycled.

From Police Bust Massive Condom ‘Recycling’ Operation in Vietnam:

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pre=loved

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To that end, the House this week finally passed the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act, which should finally bring some meaningful privacy and security standards to the internet of things (IOT). Cory Gardner, Mark Warner, and other lawmakers note the bill creates some baseline standards for security and privacy that must be consistently updated (what a novel idea), while prohibiting government agencies from using gear that doesn’t pass muster. It also includes some transparency requirements mandating that any vulnerabilities in IOT hardware are disseminated among agencies and the public quickly:

From House Passes Bill To Address The Internet Of Broken Things | Techdirt:

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To prevent problems like these from occurring, each IoT device needs to be able, as it were, to show an identity document—”authentication,” in professional terms. Normally, speaking, this is done with a kind of password, which is sent in encrypted form to the person who is communicating with the device. The security key needed for that has to be stored in the IoT device one way or another, Lieneke Kusters explains. “But these are often small and cheap devices that aren’t supposed to use much energy. To safely store a key in these devices, you need extra hardware with constant power supply. That’s not very practical.”

Digital fingerprint

There is a different way: namely by deducing the security key from a unique physical characteristic of the memory chip (Static Random-Access Memory, or SRAM) that can be found in practically every IoT device. Depending on the random circumstances during the chip’s manufacturing process, the memory locations have a random default value of 0 or 1.

From A fingerprint for the Internet of Things:

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n contrast, the magnetic PUF is resistant to attack and insensitive to environmental variations.

“In all previously proposed MRAM PUFs, a procedure to set random magnetization orientations is necessary for their practical application,” said Zhe Guo, a post doctor in You’s team. “In our IAE-PUF, the random distribution of magnetization orientations is formed during the MgO layer thinning process, so no initialization is required.” The avoidance of setting random states with an external magnetic field or writing current makes it easier to integrate and scale down with low power consumption.

From Highly secure physically unclonable cryptographic primitives based on interfacial magnetic anisotropy:

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Chandler Guo was a founder of Bitbank and a cryptocurrency entrepreneur of note.

(You should check out the pictures of his bitcoin mining operation featured by the BBC.)

“One day everyone in the world will be using DCEP,” he says.

From ‘One day everyone will use China’s digital currency’ – BBC News:

As well as being very knowledgeable, he’s also a very nice guy. Here I am awarding him my prestigious “Toast D’Or” award for best question asked at Money 2020 way back in 2015.

Anyway, 

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After a vendor delivers their diamonds to a global Gemological Institute of America lab to be assayed, the diamonds are inspected and separated into sets. They’re then assembled into a “Diamond Standard Coin,” which is sealed with an embedded, wireless encryption chip. The process is audited by Deloitte and the coin is registered as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain.

From A Record $1.2 Billion in Bitcoin Has Now Moved to Ethereum – Decrypt:

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Coinbase, a leading cryptocurrency exchange and custodian, said it had 35 million total accounts as of July. Chainalysis, a firm that provides crypto investigations software, estimates there were at least 3.1 million active accounts using the popular bitcoin currency in the U.S. between June 2019 and July 2020.

From The IRS Sets a Trap for Cryptocurrency Tax Cheats – WSJ:

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The IRS is also sending a new round of letters to crypto holders who may not have complied with the tax rules, expanding on last year’s mailing of about 10,000 letters. Tax specialists say the recipients are often customers of Coinbase, which was ordered by a federal court to turn over information on some accounts to the IRS.

Martin Walker, Director of Banking and Finance at the Center for Evidence-Based Management wrote a great piece exploring these issues for the LSE Business Review. He reflects on the idea of using some form shared ledger, digital asset tokens and “smart” “contracts” to implement a digital currency, what I referred to in my book “Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin” as smart money, and quotes Robert Sams points on the potential for innovation: “More likely are the use-cases that don’t even exist today and can’t exist without [smart money]”. I am very sympathetic to this view and can’t help but feel that this is where we should focus. Walker goes on to observe that while there probably is scope to “create more mechanisms for adding more conditionality in the financial system, locking up funds until an event happens or creating more easily accessible escrow arrangements” it is not obvious that autonomous consensus applications are the best way forward. Indeed, the early lessons learned from the world of “decentralised finance” (or “DeFi”) suggest that there’s a lot of work to be done to bring working, population-scale schemes to fruition.

I think his words of caution are entirely justified, but along with Yves, I also think that the concepts should be explored. If we are going to create digital currency, then surely we want it to be a platform for new products and services, not simply an emulation of what we already have.