Snippings

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I’m not the only person who was wondering about this. The noted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen knows more about the web than I ever will, and back in 2012 he told a Wired magazine conference in New York that “we should have built payments in the browser”.

(They got half way, because buried in your browser, in addition to the familiar error 404 for page-not-found, there is also error 402 for page-requires-payment. But no payment mechanism was provided.)

I note that the Collisons (the genius brothers behind Stripe) were also quoted arguing that the lack of effective payments mechanism is the reason that the web went from being an open environment and opportunity for all to an “oligopoly controlled by five companies now worth more than $3 trillion”.

From: Micropayments Are A Macro Opportunity.

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The Saxons then scattered all the beehives there were in the town on top of the besiegers, which prevented them from moving their feet and hands because of the number of bees stinging them. After that they gave up the city, and left it.

From: An Anglo-Saxon Anecdote: How beer and bees beat the Viking siege of Chester in c. 907 – Thijs Porck.

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Plus, the symbiosis has potential. Bridge makes it relatively easy for clients to issue and send stablecoins. Privy’s wallets make it easier to handle them. Put differently, Bridge is the stablecoin engine and the pipes. Privy’s wallets are the destination as well as the use case front-end.

Even more than that, they are customizable enough to disappear into the background. The infrastructure allows any user to spin up wallets for their clients, abstracting away the hassle of custody, key management, onchain fees and transaction signing. Stablecoin users need not even know they’re using a wallet – with Privy and Bridge integrations, transactions would become as easy as “click here to pay”, and balances could show up in simple and familiar web accounts.

From: Stripe’s stablecoin strides – by Noelle Acheson.

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cale AI’s shock $15 billion deal to sell a 49% stake to Meta, with its CEO Alexandr Wang leaving the startup he founded to lead a new AI lab at the tech giant, has raised the specter that the startup’s $14 billion-valued data labeling business could implode.

At play is the concern that Scale, which has been the dominant player in labeling data to help major tech companies and AI startups train their models, could share details about the types of data that leading AI players have used to build their most cutting edge tech with Meta.

From: Scale AI’s Business Could ‘Collapse’ If Meta Buys A Stake And Hires Its CEO.

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This is the ingenious moment pinned Ukrainian troops threw beehives at Russian soldiers after running out of grenades on the frontlines.

Drone footage taken in the midst of Russia’s invasion shows the savvy troops picking up the beehives and carrying them over to a cellar occupied by Russian troops in what appears to be a farm in the countryside in the town of Pokrivsk, in the east of the country.

From: Buzz off Russians! Moment Ukrainian troops hurl BEEHIVES at Putin’s troops after running out of grenades on frontline | Daily Mail Online.

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The Saxons then scattered all the beehives there were in the town on top of the besiegers, which prevented them from moving their feet and hands because of the number of bees stinging them. After that they gave up the city, and left it.

From: An Anglo-Saxon Anecdote: How beer and bees beat the Viking siege of Chester in c. 907 – Thijs Porck.

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Research conducted by FreedomPay, Dynatrace and Retail Economics in the UK found that retail and hospitality businesses are losing a whopping £1.6billion a year to payment system outages. These disruptions, which can last an average of 84 minutes, far exceed what most consumers are willing to tolerate, putting businesses at risk of lost revenue and reputational harm. What’s more, they are not one-off events but recurring challenges, with British businesses experiencing an average of more than five major outages each year (two-thirds of which ouccr during peak trading periods, naturally amplifying their impact). The study also found that one in five retail and hospitality businesses do not have a backup payment system in place, so with fewer than one third of consumer regualrly carrying—and the average amount of cash carried (£35) below the typical in-store spend of £47—businesses without digital backups are particularly exposed.

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The credit card programme is expected to launch this fall, with the experience embedded inside the OnePay app and powered by Mastercard’s global payments network. The card, issued by Synchrony, will be made available to millions of Walmart customers and to consumers across the US.

From: Walmart’s OnePay adds credit cards to financial services portfolio.

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Yet potential property claims of prior owners could hinder the use of stablecoins as digital money.

From: Stablecoins should be treated as currency.

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Yet potential property claims of prior owners could hinder the use of stablecoins as digital money.

Legislation is much needed. The US Congress is considering two bills that will regulate stablecoins: the Senate’s Genius Act and the House’s Stable Act. However, neither clearly define the use of stablecoins as money under private commercial law, tax law, and accounting rules.

From: Stablecoins should be treated as currency.

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Last month, a working paper from the Bank for International Settlements, the central bank for central banks, cranked up the volume on that warning. In it, Rashad Ahmed and Iñaki Aldasoro calculate that when stablecoins (of which tether is by far the biggest and most impactful) draw in funds, and churn them into reserves, that has a marked impact on the value of short-term US government debt.

That is a reassuring sign that stablecoin operators are indeed buying reserves to match their inflows. Still, this is a substantial and little understood market force. According to the researchers, large inflows of $3.5bn over five days can place enough upward pressure on the price of short-term US government debt to pull down yields by up to 0.025 percentage points over 10 days.

That does not sound like much, but the paper says it is “comparable to that of small-scale quantitative easing on long-term yields” — in the same ballpark as central bank efforts to stimulate a flagging economy

From: Why we should worry about the rise of stablecoins.

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