A library of snippets
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“Venture capitalists, such as Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, who was an early investor in Twitter, now talk of a ‘kill-zone’ around the giants. Once a young firm enters, it can be extremely difficult to survive.”
From “American tech giants are making life tough for startups – Into the danger zone”.
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The Bank of Canada published an interesting working paper on retail payment transaction times (“How Long Does It Take You to Pay? A Duration Study of Canadian Retail Transaction Payment Times“, Working Paper 2018-46, September 2018). The author finds that “cash is more efficient in terms of time than cards, allowing for the processing of more payments… it helps explain the continued use of cash to pay for low-value retail purchases, despite the increase in payment innovations. This is a useful contribution to the discussion about cashlessness and I was thinking about it when I went to the fish and chip shop recently. Now, I haven’t used cash in the fish and chip shop for years. Like most normal people, I pay by contactless, and it seems pretty quick to me, even allowing for the time taken for online authorisation. So while I was waiting for the haddock and chips, I watched the couple of people behind me in the queue. One used contactless but the other used a £10 note, which meant that the .
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A Jixi resident said the supermarket had different – but poorly labelled – lanes for customers who paid by cash or with their phones.
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The growing “cashlessness” of Chinese cities threatens to expose underlying issues of economic instability. Mobile payments are carving out lines between young and old, and between the prosperous urban middle class and those left behind by the boom times.
From China Can’t Afford a Cashless Society – Foreign Policy.
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The court however curtailed the scope of the Aadhaar identification scheme, declaring that it would no longer be required to open bank accounts, obtain mobile telephone connections, admission to schools.
From World’s largest biometric ID system approved by Indian court as 1 billion enroll for welfare and tax.
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As of 1 January 2018, all companies with a Chinese business licence – a necessity for operating in the country – were brought into the social credit system through the new licence requirement to have an 18-digit “unified social credit code”. Through this business ID number, the Chinese government keeps track of all businesses, reporting transgressions on its National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System, Hoffman said. The system extends to non-profits, NGOs, trade unions and social organisations after 30 June.
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This has led to introduction of a legal requirement for banks and building societies to support app-to-app data flows, which will enable customers to approve TPPs via their bank or building society app.
From Open Banking shouldn’t be written off, the revolution is just starting – FinTech Futures.
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The network, called Red Belly Blockchain, was developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the University of Sydney, and deployed over the Amazon Web Services (AWS) global cloud infrastructure.
It was tested across 1,000 nodes in 14 countries at a benchmark rate of 30,000 transactions per second and with an average latency of three seconds.
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Circle noted that USDC is built on openness and accountability, with commercial issuers required to be licensed to handle electronic money, to have audited AML and compliance programs, to back all tokens on a fully reserved basis and to provide monthly published proof of reserves, to support fungible exchange and redemption of USDC tokens from other authorized issuer members, and to meet other reporting and review requirements established by CENTRE.
More like Mondex than Bitcoin, frankly.
So what is a “stablecoin” anyway? If it is meant to be a coin that maintains purchasing power over time then why would you back it with US dollars, which do not? If it is meant to be a coin that
Well, this was first tried donkey’s years’ ago when Digicash launched. The idea of of a crypto coin that represented a dollar, a euro, a pound or whatever. This
There’s a difference between a currency and a currency board. A currency board issues a currency (let’s say Zimbabwean Dollars) that is backed by a 100% reserve in another currency (let’s say South African Rand). So, for example, if I issued DaveCoin and each DaveCoin
Now, if that sounds pointless – why would you use DaveDollars when you could use USDollars? – you have to remember that lots of people do this already. When I give Safaricom at Kenyan Shilling, they in turn give me an M-PESA Kenyan Shilling which is more useful to me because I can send it to someone else using my mobile phone. All of the Kenyan Shillings that are in the form of M-PESA account balances are backed one-for-one by Kenyan Shillings in Safaricom’s bank account.
Under European electronic money laws, this is how things should work. If I give you an e-Euro, I ,must have an actual Euro in “tier 1” capital. The point of this is that
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A first time buyer whose dream to purchase a flat was temporarily derailed by a Barclays IT glitch yesterday faces heartbreak today as NatWest’s banking system failed.
From First-time buyer is left ‘homeless’ as Barclays and NatWest banking crash | Daily Mail Online.
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Snippings