A library of snippets
Tom Noyes’ typically accurate comment on this
From a payment scheme perspective open payments typically means leveraging a low cost clearing network (ex SEPA, ACH, Debit, …etc) or cryptocurrency with enhanced risk or identity services.
From Open Banking, Open Payments and Trust Networks – Noyes Payments Blog:
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Open is a terrible business model, but a fantastic technical one. Tip toe into any “open” effort as a form of intelligence gathering. Standardizing messages will enable merchants (and banks) to deliver new forms of payments within embedded processes and systems.
From Open Banking, Open Payments and Trust Networks – Noyes Payments Blog:
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Deep-fake images — a portmanteau word from “deep learning” for machine learning and “fake” — are generated with the help of computer models, so-called Generative Adversarial Networks, GANs for short. Two algorithms work together in these networks: the first algorithm creates random images based on certain input data. The second algorithm needs to decide whether the image is a fake or not. If the image is found to be a fake, the second algorithm gives the first algorithm the command to revise the image — until it no longer recognizes it as a fake.
From Which Face is Real? Using Frequency Analysis to Identify “Deep-Fake” Images:
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group of 16 major European banks from five countries (Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain) have paved the way for the future launch of the European Payments Initiative (EPI). The ambition of EPI is to create a unified pan-European payment solution leveraging instant payments – particularly the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) – offering a card for merchants and customers across Europe, a digital wallet and P2P payments.
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financial-data sharing will reinforce Mastercard’s and Visa’s centrality not only for banks but also for the fast-evolving ecosystem of fintechs,
From COMMENTARY: How Their Open-Banking Buys Could Propel Mastercard And Visa – Digital Transactions:
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In my book “Before Bablyon, Beyond Bitcoin” I made the point that I had turned to work of social anthropologists to help me to make sense of the impact of new technology on money and the relationship between social, economic, business and technological pressures on the various functions of money. I found the perspectives of the discipline indispensable in formulating models of the future. This is why I was delighted to be invited to the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Annual Conference 2020. I’m going to take part in Panel 057, “Digital encounters, cashless cultures: Ethnographic perspectives on the impact of digital finance on economic communities”.
This panel explores new approaches towards value, economy, money, debt, finance and fiscal relations. In doing so, it discusses how global turns towards digital finance (e.g. mobile wallets; credit and debit cards) impact cash dependent and marginalized groups, communities and families worldwide. In particularly interested in following the narratives around these issue because, as I have long maintained, we need to being to develop strategies toward cashlessness rather than simply allow cashlessness to happen. I am not smart enough to know what all of those strategies should be, although I am smart enough to know that they require knowledge that it far beyond that of the technology and the business model, so I am genuinely keen to learn.
Just to show the variety of topics that will be discussed, here is the list of papers in the session:
Economy of lies: Drunk husbands, digital savings and domestic workers in Kolkata, India
Cutting the wire: financial exclusion and online work among Syrians in Lebanon
Debt economies as urban survival strategies in the collapsed economies: examples from post-Soviet economies and Turkey compared
Spheres of exchange 2.0: Conversions and conveyances in Bitcoin economy
Accessing Cash(lessness): Cash-dependency, Digital Money and Debt Relations Among Homeless Roma in Denmark
Self-making stories: Accounts of cryptocurrencies from the ground
An ethnography of unsettled debt. Cashlessness and betrayal in Brazil
An ethnography of Italian Bitcoin Users
Coercive Political Economies, the Anthropology of Risk and Social Financing. Ethnographic notes from North India (Rajasthan)
Banking on digital money: Swedish cashlessness and the fraying currency tether
The authors of the papers in this session have produced a series of blogs that explore a fascinating variety of perspective on money and what it means, from financial inclusion and
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This has given rise to the need for extensive VPN use. A VPN acts, essentially, as a virtual Ethernet cable spanning the public internet. It’s a kludge designed to get external users inside the local network perimeter in a virtual way.
As digital resources become decentralized, the “dumb” hardware perimeter becomes less and less sensible, which is why the conversation around SDPs are heating up. A new generation of network use needs a new way of operating a network.
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What remained, together with all the special forging machinery, was taken to a remote lake, Toplitzsee, and dumped. It had been intended to execute all of the slave labourers who had been employed in producing the currency in order to stop them from revealing their secrets. Fortunately in the chaos of the American advance, this was never carried out.
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Supermarket giant Carrefour has become the first retailer in Europe to integrate its customer loyalty programme with Apple Pay, enabling shoppers both to pay for their purchases and collect loyalty points with a single tap of their iPhone or Apple Watch.
From Carrefour integrates its loyalty card with Apple Pay • NFCW:
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Banks and laundromats are scrambling. Arcades and gumball machine operators are bracing for the worst. Grocery stores are rounding their prices to even dollars or rejecting cash altogether. The specter of the coin shortage lurks everywhere.
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But as the economy reopened, stores quickly exhausted their existing coin inventories, and then turned to their banks for more. The flow of coins out of the banking system picked up, as coins started piling up in our piggy banks once more. But the flow of coins back into the banking system, from our piggy banks, had not yet restarted. Lacking the usual coin deposits from the public, the banks, in turn, requested coins from the Fed, which requested them from the Mint. With the Mint unable to fill the gap with new coins—and, indeed, falling short of its usual production levels—-a shortage resulted.
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Tens of millions of coins may never make it into circulation as a result of the shift toward digital payments that has been hastened by Covid-19, as Australia’s currency producers observe dramatic fluctuations in demand for cash.
The Royal Australian Mint has seen “virtually no demand” for coins in 2020 as physical retail closed down,
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The Mint lost 0.99 cents on each penny it sold in 2019. And, yet, it produced more pennies than any other coin in circulation. Nearly 60 percent of all circulating coins minted in 2019 were pennies. In total, the Mint lost $69.7 million dollars making pennies.
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The case for producing these costly, cumbersome‐to‐use coins is weak. They get minted today because clever lobbyists are good at harnessing nostalgia and advancing junk arguments about rounding. A private coin industry would not be able to waste taxpayer funds for the sake of subsidizing metal miners or pleasing their representatives in Congress.
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Whaples, Robert, (2007), Time to Eliminate the Penny from the U.S. Coinage System: New Evidence, Eastern Economic Journal, 33, issue 1, p. 139-146.
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a study of convenience stores and found that the final digit of purchases, which usually involve multiple products and a sales tax, was pretty much random. “And so if you round it to the nearest nickel, the customer wouldn’t get gouged,” Whaples says. Sometimes you’d round up; other times you’d round down. In the end, it would basically be a wash.
From Is It Time To Kill The Penny? : Planet Money : NPR:
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Rounding is not that complicated. Here is how they do it in Belgium where total amount payable in cash has been rounded up or down to the nearest five cents since December 2019: if the total amount payable in cash ends in one or two cents, it is rounded down to zero, if it ends in three, four, six or seven cents then it is rounded to five cents and if it ends in eight or nine cents then it is rounded up to one euro. As far as I know, Belgian civil society has not collapsed and shops are operating normally under the circumstances.
Snippings