Snippings

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Gibson first used the word “cyberspace” in 1981, in a short story called “Burning Chrome.”

How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real | The New Yorker:

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US officials are also concerned about the possibility that foreign countries will increasingly use mass-market digital currencies, such as Facebook’s planned Libra coin, to avoid sanctions.

(1) FBI says blockchain expert aided North Korea | Financial Times:

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Mr Couré recently praised an initiative by about 20 large European banks including BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank to create a new digital payments system — dubbed the Pan European Payment System Initiative, or Pepsi. The idea is to enable instant cashless payments through a European rival to ApplePay in the US and Alipay in China [but] the project is becoming bogged down with competition authorities in Brussels for being too much of a closed shop.

(1) Central bank talk of launching cryptocurrencies is all bluff | Financial Times:

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Huang Qifan, vice chairman of CCIEE (China Center for International Economic Exchanges), speaking at the Inaugural Bund Financial Summit of 2019 in Shanghai, said that “in the current digital age, the payment and settlement methods between enterprises and countries need to be reshaped”. He also went on to say that cross-border liquidation of China’s renminbi (RMB) is “highly dependent” on SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system and CHIPS (the US Clearing House Interbank Payments System). He added that the two financial instruments that are “gradually becoming effective tools for the US to exercise global hegemony and carry out widespread jurisdiction control”.

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Money has always been a powerful, blunt instrument. It’s an imposition not just of will, but of values. After World War II, the dollar became the foundation of the international monetary system. That gave the U.S. government a special tool.

Brace for the Digital-Money Wars – WSJ:

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This is not just a poor-world problem. Britain was recently rocked by the “Windrush” debacle, in which dozens of citizens were wrongly deported. But it is a particularly acute problem in sub-Saharan Africa, where one in two people cannot prove his or her identity. It is not for want of effort. Every country in the region has either established or plans to create a universal identity programme.

Papers, please – African countries are struggling to build robust identity systems | Middle East and Africa | The Economist:

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“The number of card payments in the euro area have more than doubled in a decade as consumers increasingly dispense with the hassle of carrying notes and coins, according to the latest statistics from the European Central Bank.

In 2018, card payments accounted for almost half of the total number of non-cash payments across the single-currency area.

Credit transfers and direct debits were the second and third most common non-cash payment methods, accounting for approximately 23% each, while e-money and cheques together made up around seven percent.

However, the relative popularity of each type of payment service still varies widely across euro area countries. In 2018 card payments accounted for just over 70% of all non‑cash payments in Portugal, compared with around 23% in Germany.

The stats show that the number of card payments made by consumers and businesses has more than doubled in the last decade, with an average of 121 card payments per capita in 2018, compared with 56 in 2008. However, the average value of each card payment has declined steadily, falling from €54 in 2008 to €44 in 2018.

Again, big differences appear between member states, with the Finns, for example, using their cards five times more often than people living in Germany and six times more often than people in Italy.

Curiously, the average value of annual cash withdrawals in the euro area also rose, from €1,925 to €2,082 per card between 2008 and 2018.”

From “Euro area card payments double in a decade”.

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I tend to agree with people who see privacy as a function of control over personal information. Not a thing, more like a trade off. It’s a big problem though that the trade-offs in any particular situation are multi-dimensional and nothing like as explicit as they should be. And what if you have no possibility of control? The always interesting Wendy Grossman made me think about this in her recent net.wars column about her neighbour’s doorbell camera. 

As Wendy puts it “we have yet to develop social norms around these choices”. Indeed.

Whether it is neighbours putting up doorbell cameras or municipalities installing camera for our comfort and safety, the infrastructure of cameras (much more cost effective and useful than the one imagined by George Orwell) and pervasive always-on networks is going to created a decentralised surveillance environment that is going to throw up no end of interesting ethical and privacy issues.

Here’s an example. What happens if you set up a camera trap to photograph badgers but accidentally capture a picture of someone doing something they shouldn’t be doing? This is called “human bycatch” apparently. According to a 2018 University of Cambridge study, a survey of 235 scientists across 65 countries found that 90% of them had human bycatch. I remember thinking about this a while back when I came across a story about some Austrian wildlife photographers who had set up cameras in a forest in order to capture exotic forest creatures going about their business, but instead caught an Austrian politician “enjoying an explicit sexual encounter” (as Spiegel Online put it).

This was big news although (as one comment I saw had it) “if it had been with his wife it would have been even bigger news”. Amusing, indeed. But the story does raise some interesting points about mundane privacy in a camera-infested world. I don’t know whether, in a world of smartphones and social media, one might have a reasonable expectation of privacy when having sex out in the woods somewhere. I would have thought not, but I am not a lawyer (or a wildlife photographer). It’s getting really hard to think about privacy and what we want from it and cases like this one remind us that privacy is not a static thing. It is not an inherent property of any particular information or setting. It might even be described as a process by which people seek to have control over a social situation by information and context.

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Do you think it is inevitable that the U.S. Treasury will make the leap to the digital coin of the dollar?

‘Currently, Congress is set up in a way that matches the economy of 200 years ago.’ I think we are going to be in trouble if we don’t. The one good thing about the Libra proposal is that it [brought attention to] China, which has been working at some level for several years on central bank digital currencies.

Why Libra Worries This Physicist-Turned-Congressman — The Information:

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The European Central Bank has welcomed an initiative by some of Europe’s top banks to explore the development of a rival payment system to challenge the dominance of Visa and Mastercard and the threat from Chinese and US Big Tech firms

Backed by twenty French and German banks, the The Pan European Payment System Initiative (Pepsi) would seeks handle all forms of cashless transactions.

ECB offers support to bank-backed alternative to Visa and Mastercar…:

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