Snippings

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“Miles and points are cash, that’s what we teach people, and it’s certainly nice when the credit card companies are giving you $1,000, $1,500, $2,000 for getting a single credit card”

From Credit card providers fight to stay top of your wallet

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There was interesting discussion on Twitter the other day (as there often is) about the relationship between identity and reputation. The discussion was in the context of “fake news” but it raised a number of general points about reputation and the reputation economy that are worth reflecting on. One particular point was whether a reputation must link one-to-one with a confirmed identity in order for the reputation to be useful. I think it doesn’t, and I can point to a particular case study which I think triggered a lot of this kind of thinking in my own mind.

Many many years ago in the early days of electronic commerce and digital money and online payments and all those good things, I came across a mailing list (I’m not sure what it was called it at the beginning but it later became known as the e$ list) that I found very useful. The list had links to interesting stories, discussions and very well-informed debate on the then very new topics of money and transactions in an interconnected world. One day, there was a message on the mailing list saying that it was going to be discontinued because the person or people running it couldn’t continue to do it as voluntary effort, so without some form of sponsorship they would have to stop.

Since my colleagues and I found a list very useful we stepped up to the plate and agreed to provide some sponsorship money. The list operator asked us to send the money to an ISP to cover their charges for the next six months or the next year or something. This we did and thus we became sponsors.

mailing lists (sponsored by Hyperion & C2Net Software)

From Welcome to the e$ Web Site

Now, it was only afterwards that I realised that we had just been through a commercial transaction with an entirely unknown counterparty. I didn’t know whether the mailing list was run by a person, a group of students, a rival company or agents of a foreign power trying to collect contact details of key players in the electronic money field. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. The quality of the list established over a period of months (in other words, the reputation of the list) was the necessary ingredient for the transaction to take place. Of course, I later discovered that the list was curated by “Robert Hettinga” but that meant nothing to me and I had no clue whether he was a real personal not (he is: I’ve met him!).

My point is that reputation is sufficient. I did not know who or what was providing the news, but the news and the discussions were of sufficient quality to merit our money.

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One sticky-fingered thief managed to embezzle over $4.8 million from his employer, and then went on to spend $1 million of it on Game of War in-app purchases.

From Man steals $1m, spends it on Game of War in-app purchases

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Rather, it would provide the internet resources for retail users to access utility central banking as banks already can rather as internet giants like Facebook and Google syndicate their services through application programming interfaces.

From Why Central Banks Should Offer Bank Accounts to Everyone – Evonomics

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On 23 December 2013, just before Christmas, Belgian merchants faced an outage of the domestic debit card scheme Bancontact for two and a half hours, costing them €51 million in sales. 

From The Hidden Costs of Cards

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President Maduro said there were “entire warehouses full of 100-bolivar notes in the [Colombian cities of] Cucuta, Cartagena, Maicao and Buaramanga”.

From Venezuela pulls highest-value banknote ‘to strike against mafia’ – BBC News

I was quite surprised to read this, given that the 100-bolivar note is worth about 10p, but whatever.

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if blockchains (in the sense of useful peer-to-peer databases) are ever going to emerge as a coherent product category, it’s important to distinguish between half-baked and real solutions

From How to spot a half-baked blockchain | MultiChain

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Perry Kramer, vice president and practice lead at consultant Boston Retail Partners, contends that as many as 80 percent of retailers today are already largely cashless

“Retailers don’t really want to be banks. It’s not their sweet spot,” he says. “It is much less expensive to process credit and debit than it is cash, because cash has a lot of labor involved.”

From Cashing In or Cashing Out? | National Retail Federation

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Banks have said that providing such accounts to the financially vulnerable is a loss-making business for them

From Lloyds fails on fee-free in no-frills bank accounts market | Reuters

They are. Of course. What almost all of these finally vulnerable people need is a payment account, not a bank account. A simple, pre-paid account with a decent app able to nudge them to help them. And it needs to have a low regulatory overhead so that it works for all of the stakeholders.

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The surge in use, however, comes as the Treasury cautioned that the entrenched use of mobile money in the country posed fiscal risks to the economy if the service collapses.

From Mobile Money Africa

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