Snippings

There’s a fascinating article int he archives of The New York Times. It’s from July 1992, and it’s all about the future for “personal wireless communicators” or what we now call “smartphones”. While John Sculley, then head of Apple, is enthusiastic about the coming “mother of all markets”, the idea is poo-pooed by Andrew Grove, the chairman of Intel, who called the idea of a such devices in every pocket “a pipe dream driven by greed”. Now, while it’s always fun to go back and find important, clever people making predictions that turned out to completely wrong, what’s more interesting to students of paleo-futurology is why they were wrong and what we can learn from that so our own strategies can me made more robust. I found the issue of software raised in the article particularly interesting in that context.

Personal communicators for the mass market raise the possibility of dozens, hundreds, even thousands of different designs and functions and operating standards, each tailored to a different need.

From The Executive Computer – ‘Mother of All Markets’ or a ‘Pipe Dream Driven by Greed’? – NYTimes.com

We’ve ended up with, basically, Apple and Google. A quarter of a century after that article was written, one generation after that predication of chaos, we now find that almost all (in fact 99.6% at the start of 2017) smartphones run iOS or Android.

Other countries have a more robust approach to banking regulation and less sympathy for poor behaviour by bank management.

The former head of a major Vietnamese bank has been sentenced to death for his role in a fraud case involving millions of dollars of illegal loans.

From Vietnam fraud trial: Death penalty for ex-head of OceanBank – BBC News

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Contemporary artists are increasingly turning to vellum – the prepared animal skin sometimes known as parchment on which Britain’s Acts of Parliament have traditionally been printed – to insure against the risk of copies of their work being passed off as originals.

But while the use of vellum goes back to the classical age, its use to foil bogus copies of valuable paintings is the result of a very modern technique – DNA analysis.

Because, as an animal product, each piece of vellum used to paint on carries its own unique DNA fingerprint.

From Artists turn to vellum to beat the forgers copying their work

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Take, for example, Roomba, the adorable robotic vacuum cleaner. Since 2015, the high-end models have created maps of its users’ homes, to more efficiently navigate through them while cleaning. But as Reuters and Gizmodo reported recently, Roomba’s manufacturer, iRobot, may plan to share those maps of the layouts of people’s private homes with its commercial partners.

From The ‘internet of things’ is sending us back to the Middle Ages

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when it comes to the big three areas covered in the research – payments, securities settlement, and central bank-issued digital currency – the Bundesbank experts are wary.

The authors “see little prospect of DLT being put to widespread use in the field of individual and retail payments given the current state of the art”.

From German central bank flags DLT weaknesses

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There are technical factors that explain why cybersecurity is so weak, but the underlying reason is political, and it’s pretty simple: Big corporations have poured large amounts of money into our political system, helping to create a regulatory environment in which consumers shoulder more and more of the risk, and companies less and less.

From Equifax’s Maddening Unaccountability – The New York Times

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blockchains are not super-computers or AI machines – neither Freenet nor Skynet – they’re databases

From Monax | Blog | Smart securitisation, or: why it’s time to stop talking tokens and start talking smart contracts

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Three of the country’s four largest parties – the Five Star Movement, the Northern League and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia – have proposed introducing a new currency following an election scheduled for next year.

From Three Of Italy’s Top Four Political Parties Seek A New Parallel Currency | Zero Hedge

A couple of years ago, I had lunch with the Northern League to discuss digital currencies and the potential for local and community currencies to spring up because of the decentralising nature of new technology. I was in Rome to take part in a hearing about Bitcoin in the Italian Parliament organised by my good friend Geronimo Emili from No Cash Day and was invited to the lunch as part of the day. As Geronimo is a PR wizard, there is of course a photo album of the day online.

Naturally I told them that the era of fiat currencies was coming to an end, that in the future economies would be city-centric and that communities would develop currencies that embedded their own values. The usual stuff, discussed at greater length in Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin (available at all good bookstores).

I wasn’t there to reflect on their politics, of course. But I must note that new technology makes the potential for community currencies widely available and therefore it will inevitability impact politics. Suppose the people of Catalonia decide to start using their own currency and ignore the euro? What if Milan and its hinterland switches to its own currency and you have to have it in order to pay taxes?

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What these naysayers don’t understand is the fact that the lack of cryptocurrency regulator has already been addressed by the blockchain technology.

From Adam Vaziri: Blockchain is the future regulator

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A recent working paper from economists at Princeton and University College London found that American companies are increasingly able to demand prices well above their costs — which… suggests that the market is not truly competitive — that existing companies have found ways to block competitors.

From A Start-Up Slump Is a Drag on the Economy. Big Business May Be to Blame. – The New York Times

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