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To maintain their cover, undercover detectives were posting and sharing abuse material on Childs Play. Other users continued to post and view images while the site was under police control.
[From
Australian police sting brings down paedophile forum on dark web | Society | The Guardian
]
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Chancellor Philip Hammond has announced a new National Productivity Investment Fund of £23 billion to be spent on innovation and infrastructure over next five years.
From Chancellor announces £23bn Productivity Investment Fund – ITV News
Since this announcement productivity has collapsed still further.
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The accumulating evidence on economic growth, meanwhile, has become damning. Between July and September 2016, India’s GDP grew 7.53 percent. Between January and March 2017 it grew 5.72 percent. Former head of the Reserve Bank of India Raghuram Rajan, now returned to the University of Chicago, links the drop to demonetization: “Let us not mince words about it — GDP has suffered. The estimates I have seen range from 1 to 2 percentage points, and that’s a lot of money — over Rs2 lakh crore [i.e. trillion] and maybe approaching Rs2.5 lakh crore.” Kaul adds that GDP does not well capture the size of the informal cash sector, where the losses from demonetization were greatest.
From India’s Failed Demonetization Program and Its Retreating Economic Defenders – Alt-M
So why does the Bank of England think that getting rid of paper cash will boost the economy when the figures from India clearly show it didn’t. The answer, of course, relates to the stage of development of the economy. In England, there are ready alternatives to cash that almost everyone already uses. Contactless cards and mobile phones mean that if all the ATMs in England gave up the ghost tomorrow, it wouldn’t really matter. Yes, there are some unbanked people and, as I have long argued, we should be providing digital financial services that are appropriate to them (not forcing them to use bank accounts) so that they can use electronic alternatives. Having been involved in projects to do just this (e.g., mobile money accounts for “universal credit” recipients and services delivered via digital TV to the housebound) I can honestly say that I do not find insurmountable problems.
While the India has taken great strides (the introduction of “payment banks”)
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“‘There were a lot of people who came and clicked photos (of the sign) but apart from that no transactions,’”
Bitcoin accepted here: The tiny family restaurant in India that’s embraced virtual currency — Quartz
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Bank of England’s (BOE) Chief Cashier Victoria Cleland adamantly stating that “cash is not in decline.”
Cleland made the remarks at the Future of Cash Conference in Vienna, Austria, on Oct. 5, continuing the argument that, despite the fact that non-cash purchases and transactions are on the rise in the U.K., the amount of currency being circulated in England’s economy is also increasing.
“Very notable in the U.K. is the rise in the use of contactless cards, which tripled in 2016, accounting for 7 percent of payments. The shift in consumer preferences is also evident in online spending, where average weekly online shopping in the U.K. was £1.1 billion in August 2017; an increase of 16 percent compared with August 2016. Such developments have led many commentators to predict the demise of cash,” she said.
“But the numbers show a different story,” Cleland continued. “In 2016, the value of Bank of England notes in circulation increased by 10 percent, reaching over £70 billion in the run-up to Christmas: the fastest growth in a decade. Cash remains the most widely used payment method in the U.K. It accounted for 40 percent of all payments and 44 percent of payments made by consumers in 2016.”
From BOE’s Victoria Cleland: UK Pound Usage Grows | PYMNTS.com
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Well, this was fun. The BBC2 series “Billion Dollar Deals” had an episode on the “War on Cash”. As you might imagine, the reason I mention this is because I was on it, gratifyingly labelled a “Digital Money Expert”.
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European Banking Authority should require banks provide evidence that a customer was aware of the nature of the transaction and gave informed consent before they can hold the customer liable.
From Liability for push payment fraud pushed onto the victims – Bentham’s Gaze
Having worked on a European project about means of establishing informed consent, I can assure you that this is a non-starter.
The British interior minister (“Home Secretary”, as we call them) is the historian Amber Rudd, famous for being the “aristocracy co-ordinator” for the inexplicably popular film “Four Weddings and a Funeral”. She has been attracting headlines.
Amber Rudd Says She Doesn’t Need To “Understand How Encryption Works” To Know It Needs Changing
From Amber Rudd Says She Doesn’t Need To “Understand How Encryption Works” To Know It Needs Changing
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Rudd replied: “I don’t need to understand how encryption works to understand how it’s helping, end-to-end encryption, the criminals.”
From Amber Rudd Says She Doesn’t Need To “Understand How Encryption Works” To Know It Needs Changing
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That said, there does still seem to be a lot of cash used for potentially dodgy purposes (e.g. drug deals or tax evasion purposes). While the RBA doesn’t have any direct data, its damaged banknote facility has uncovered multiple examples of huge cash piles in excess of $20,000.
From $100 notes: the heart of the black economy? – MacroBusiness
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One possibility is the break-up, or unbundling, of banking services. In the future, we might keep minimal balances for payment services on electronic wallets.
The remaining balances may be kept in mutual funds, or invested in peer-to-peer lending platforms
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People in China simply aren’t interested in bitcoin’s potential for political change… Ordinary Chinese bitcoin users I spoke to are far more interested in the ability to speculate on bitcoin’s wild price swings—it’s just another way to make money as China continues to adopt characteristics of a market economy.
From Why China dominates bitcoin and how it may control the blockchain technology behind it — Quartz
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