Snippings

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Royal Bank of Canada’s chief executive says data is the battleground for banks that will determine the future success of financial institutions.

From RBC CEO Dave McKay: Battleground for banks is data – Article – BNN

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To those who believe bitcoin’s main innovation is the exclusion of a central authority — a peer-to-peer system in which transactions are validated by “miners” — the interest of China and Russia is baffling. But those governments aren’t looking to give up control to the blockchain. On the contrary, they are trying to figure out how to lower the cost for a centralized issuer to control everything that’s going on in the financial system. 

From Authoritarian Cryptocurrencies Are Coming – Bloomberg

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modesty forbids me from noting Consult Hyperion’s role in the project, so I’ll let Finextra do it instead

From NFC drivers | Consult Hyperion

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FURIOUS Nationwide customers had their payments declined and were locked out of their accounts when the bank’s system went down yesterday.

From Nationwide customers ‘bank cards suddenly stopped working’ after technical glitch

The system went down. But what if there was no system to go down? Imagine that each ATM is a node in a shared ledger. Suppose a bank has a million customers, and each customer’s transaction record is 1Kb. A balance, last few transactions, that sort of thing. No need to store the whole transaction history in the ledger. That’s 1Gb. Maybe 10Gb for all of the bank customers in the UK. I have a flash drive in my bag with 128Gb on it and it cost like $50. Now, when someone draws money from an ATM the ledger is updated over a few minutes at all of the other ATMs (remember, ATMs are doing nothing most of the time). If an ATM goes down, so what? Just go to another one. When an ATM comes back, the ledger will update.

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While individual organizations in the public health network share the same overall mission, a complex mishmash of data usage agreements and government privacy rules dictate which members can access information and which ones can modify it.

From Why the CDC Wants in on Blockchain – MIT Technology Review

A blockchain, I guarantee, won’t make any difference to this. Those privacy rules don’t depend on whether you store the data in a spreadsheet or a database and they don’t depend on whether the data is in a shared ledger of some form either.

How should identities, not only patient IDs but also the IDs of public health organizations, be managed on the blockchain?

From Why the CDC Wants in on Blockchain – MIT Technology Review

If Open Banking is a success, then banks are going to fail. One viable picture of the future is of a few giant megabucks sitting in the background, like PG&E or British Gas, while other banks go to the wall and consumers obtain their financial services from Amazon and Facebook.

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The banks’ response to the growth of the Zelle network follows positive statistics from the service itself, which reported 100 million transactions in September 2017 totaling $33.6 billion.

From One Year After Rollout, Banks Are Bullish on Zelle | Bank Innovation | Bank Innovation

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According to the Daily Mail, the police have seen an “explosion in the use of digital currency by criminals who are strolling into cafes, newsagents and corner shops to dump their ill-gotten gains in virtual currency ATMs“. Well, let’s hope so because Bitcoin isn’t fungible (unlike the £50 notes so helpfully provided to the criminal fraternity by the – yes, couldn’t make this up – Bank of England) which means that the money can be traced from wallet to wallet so that should make it easier for these detectives to get a handle on where the ill-gotten gains are heading.

While I remain concerned about the rise of Bitcoin for reasons of consumer protection, I am much less concerned about its use in crime. First of all, if the demand for Bitcoin were about crime (and not speculation) is would actually be worth far less than it is today. There just isn’t enough crime. Calculations based on the use of Bitcoin in this sector of the economy put its value at something like one-twentieth of the current price. Now, I think these kinds of calculations are highly spurious, for two main reasons. First of all, I have yet to see any evidence that criminals are adopting Bitcoin at scale. And the reason for this is obvious: it’s not anonymous enough. Wallet addresses are pseudonyms, and once any of these pseudonyms has been linked to a mundane identity in anyway, the identities can be connected, monitored, tracked and traced. This is why ransomware rogues convert their Bitcoins out into something more suited to the less-regulated corners of the economy. The people behind the famous “WannaCry”, which hit more than 300,000 computers in over 150 countries, took their rewards and converted them into Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that has seen some growth in its popularity over the last year or so.

The second reason why I think such calculations are spurious is that it is they are often based the value of the global market in illegal drugs. Now, while no-one can be sure of the exact size, this is undoubtedly a vast market. But it is a market that is conducted almost entirely in cash. Were these transactions to be converted to digital money, the sums involved are so vast that it would be almost impossible to create to an AI machine-learning transaction monitoring services to ignore them.

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Alt-right blogger Jenna Abrams (@Jenn_Abrams) enjoyed a large following in Twitter, and her tweets were cited by Buzzfeed, the NY Times, and other news agencies. It turned out “she” was another creation of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government-funded troll farm in St. Petersburg.

From An alt-right Tweeter with 80k followers is a fictional entity created by Russian troll farm / Boing Boing

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Criminals are exploiting the gift card loophole to commit financial fraud for a myriad of reasons, including money laundering, and as a way of moving illicit funds by drug cartels and terrorists.

From The evolution of gift card fraud » PaymentEye

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One in five cash points will disappear from Britain’s high streets within four years, according to the ATM industry body. 

From One in five ATMs set to close over next four years

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