Snippings

In my book “Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin” I made the point that the “smart contracts” of the blockchain world are not smart and are not contracts, and mentioned in passing Vitalik Buterin’s comment that he wished that with hindsight he had used the word “persistent script” instead.  Gartner’s Avivah Litan recently made a similar point, noting that “the benefits and logic of smart contracts are not understood by all parties” (or indeed, I might add, any of the parties in some of the use cases I have seen).

(I did have an effort to introduce the new term LAPPS (i.e., Ledger APPlicationS) so as to have a simple and natural term, but it never gained traction. I suppose the whole “smart contract” thing has just become too embedded.)

I was reminded of these comments when I was reading Maria Grazia Vigliotti and Haydn Jones “The Executive Guide to Blockchain”. They have a nice subsection on “A Brief History of Smart Contract” that summarises the key characteristics — that they should be verifiable, observable, enforceable and have privity — and make an interesting distinction between smart contracts in the sense of immutable code on a shared ledger and smart contracts in the sense of legal agreements that can be (partly) implemented using immutable code on a shared ledger.

“The level of trust between China and the US is at its lowest point since diplomatic ties were first established in 1979,” says Wang Huiyao, president of the Center for China and Globalization, a non-government think-tank in Beijing. He went on to say that conflict is not likely “But the risk is that the boom years of globalisation will be over and we might see the global system breaking into two parts”. It is not hard to imagine these two parts as the greenback zone and the redback zone.

The former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. made this point in a piece for Foreign Affairs, in which he wrote that unilateral sanctions that are made possible because of the dollar’s dominance are not cost-free and that “weaponizing the dollar in this way can energize both U.S. allies and foes to develop alternative reserve currencies—and maybe even to join forces to do so”. This is an issue that I cover in my new book “The Currency Cold War“: Not to make a political point but to illustrate just how important the competition over digital currencies is.

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Venezuela has filed a $1bn lawsuit against the Bank of England over its refusal to release gold stashed in its vaults, as the government of Nicolás Maduro scrambles for funds to alleviate a deepening economic and health crisis.

Caracas has used the BoE for decades to store bullion that makes up part of its central bank reserves. It tried in late 2018 to get access to the gold but the BoE refused. The British government, along with about 60 others worldwide, does not recognise Mr Maduro as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, arguing that he rigged the last presidential election two years ago.

From Venezuela sues Bank of England over refusal to release gold | Financial Times:

As Anthony Lewis rather amusingly noted on Twitter in a mimetic echo of the Bitcoin Maximalist’s rallying cry “not your keys, not your coins”, not your vault, not your gold.

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According to Adam Blacker, a VP at Apptopia, the number of U.S. downloads for Venmo grew 16.5% and those for Square’s Cash App grew 20.1% from April to May. Meanwhile, PayPal downloads soared 32.3% during this period.

In raw numbers, Cash App was the most popular with nearly 4 million new downloads, while Venmo and PayPal respectively saw around 2.5 million and 2 million downloads.

From PayPal, Cash App and Venmo use soar during pandemic | Fortune:

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Through the analysis, they identified more than 100 types of inaccurate covid-19 stories and found that not only were bots gaining traction and accumulating followers, but they accounted for 82% of the top 50

From Nearly half of Twitter accounts pushing to reopen America may be bots | MIT Technology Review:

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esearchers have found that bots may account for between 45 and 60% of Twitter accounts discussing covid-19. Many of those accounts were created in February and have since been spreading and amplifying misinformation, including false medical advice, conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, and pushes to end stay-at-home orders and reopen America.

From Nearly half of Twitter accounts pushing to reopen America may be bots | MIT Technology Review:

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Facebook is pushing WhatsApp Pay, its payments app, as a mechanism to enable small businesses to go online. The company has been running a pilot with 1 million users since February 2018, and is awaiting regulatory approval to roll it out more widely.

From Friend request: How India’s battle with Facebook will change the internet – Nikkei Asian Review:

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So could India, rather than America, be the prism through which to view the internet of the future?

After a number of incidents of mobs lynching (and sometimes killing) innocent people based on social media rumours, the Indian government called for a response from industry. Facebook (which has just invested some $6 billion for a tenth of the telecommunications network Reliance Jio) introduced labels to show a message had been forwarded and instituted a five-person limit to forwarding messages. That measure was later rolled out to the rest of the world.

India is about to introduce additional regulations, so that if Facebook (or any other social media platform) gets a complaint about content from a government agency, it will be required to disable the content within 36 hours and its origin and provide that information within 72 hours. 

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In India, Facebook sees a colossal market ripe for growth, and has invested heavily. On April 22, the company announced a $5.7 billion deal for 9.99% of Reliance Jio, a telecommunications network operator with 370 million subscribers. But Indian society has been riven with violence catalyzed by the unfettered spread of malicious rumor through the company’s platforms. Security services want access to private messages, while other government ministries worry about the data that Facebook is collecting on citizens.

How the two sides resolve these clashes could have implications for the way that social media and the internet are regulated globally.

From Friend request: How India’s battle with Facebook will change the internet – Nikkei Asian Review:

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