Snippings

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Roughly three-in-ten U.S. adults (29%) say they make no purchases using cash during a typical week, up slightly from 24% in 2015.

From More Americans do not use cash in a typical week | Pew Research Center.

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“Does the government have an obligation or a duty to provide risk free money to the general population? Does that duty persist after cash usage drops off?”

From At least 15 central banks are serious about getting into digital currency – MIT Technology Review.

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Even as cryptocurrencies collapse, DRW is not the only company persevering with experiments in both digital currencies, tokens and blockchain.

From Corners of Wall Street remain undeterred by crypto crash | Financial Times.

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A good outcome would be for data portability to encourage and facilitate competition at a layer above these data stewards, amongst the applications that provide direct value to people.

From Data portability: the role governments should play – The ODI.

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The most common answer to the problem of overly powerful firms is to break them up, as U.S. regulators once did to Standard Oil and AT&T. Yet that would destroy much of the value that these digital giants have created and probably do little to improve competition in the long run, since without structural reforms, killing today’s digital superstars would simply generate opportunities for new ones to emerge. There is a better solution: a progressive data-sharing mandate.

From Why Governments Should Force Tech Companies to Share Their Data.

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A cup of Mr Rashid’s tea costs 2,000 Somaliland shillings – equivalent to $0.25 or Dh0.92 – and his customers pay almost exclusively with their mobile phones. “I never see cash,” he tells The National.

From Somaliland’s world-leading move towards a cashless culture  – The National.

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“They estimated between 15 and 35 per cent of all cash is doing its job – allowing Australians to buy everyday goods and services. But that leaves a lot of notes – at least 65 per cent of them – doing something other than being a means of exchange.

Between 10 and 20 per cent have been hoarded by Australians with another 15 per cent sent overseas for cash hoarders there.

The shadow economy, a notoriously difficult sector to measure, is thought to take up between 4 and 8 per cent of the outstanding notes. Between $40 million and $1 billion is held by drug dealers alone at any one time before they convert their earnings to assets.

And then there’s remaining cash that has simply disappeared.

‘This suggests that $4 billion to $8 billion, or roughly 5 to 10 per cent of all banknotes on issue have been lost, destroyed, forgotten about, or are sitting in numismatic collections,’ the researchers found.”

From “Expensive washing? Australia loses $8 billion in cash”.

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“China’s central bank on Monday warned that rejecting cash as a form of payment was illegal, saying that such practices could eventually could cause the loss of confidence in physical money and was unfair to those not accustomed to electronic payments.”

From “China says rejecting physical cash is illegal amid e-payments popularity – Business Insider”.

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I”m very wary of promulgating the “political correctness gone mad” meme, as it is so often a lazy reactionary knee-jerk response to changing times, but I could not resist tweeting about the news that a British police force launched an investigation after a man claimed he had been the victim of a “hate crime” when… a branch of the Post Office refused to accept his Scottish banknote. This incident has now indeed entered our official statistics as a hate crime.

Frankly, this is mental. Scottish banknotes are not legal tender, even in Scotland, as I have explained before. The Post Office is no more obliged to accept a Scottish Fiver than it is to accept Euros, gold or cowrie shells. The story did, however, cause me to reflect on what will happen when, post-Brexit, Scotland votes to leave the UK. Will Scotland then join the euro or create its own currency?

As supporters of Scottish independence insist, once Scotland becomes an independent country, it will be responsible for managing its currency in the same way that every other country that has its own currency is responsible for managing. But how should the Scots go about creating this currency? Surely messing around with notes and coins, other than for post-functional symbolic purposes, is a total waste of time and money.

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“A young woman sits at a bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans and orders a beer. The bartender asks for identification. The bar patron pulls out her phone, clicks on an app, and displays a digital version of her driver’s license showing she is over 21. In response, the bartender pulls out her own phone, clicks on the same app, uses it to scan the woman’s digital license, and verifies that her information is legit.”

From “Louisiana Adopts Digital Driver’s Licenses – IEEE Spectrum”.

I was beyond excited to discover than Louisiana is implementing a version of the “psychic ID” that I set out back in 2005!