Snippings

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One of the concerns about Ethereum contract safety has always been the issue that even though it’s theoretically possible to check a piece of code and make sure that it does exactly what you expect it to do, in practice, outside of highly standardized contexts (ie. widely used dapps) where many people can audit the code, it’s hard for the average user to check and make sure that there is no secret bug in the program… I actually found a real live example of this on the ethereum mainnet today.

From Live example of “underhanded solidity” coding on mainnet : ethereum

I hadn’t much thought about this, although I imagine my colleagues who spend more time thinking about risk analysis had, and I once again reinforced to me the distinction between shared ledger applications (SLAPPs) and actual contracts! Would you want to use a system where,

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Егор Цветков (Egor Tsvetkov), a photographer in Russia, has taken photos of random people on the subway and connected them to social media portraits and complete profiles using face matching technology.

From Subway photographer connects random photos to people’s social media profiles | Privacy Online News

Right now, he’s using some software that matches faces against the pictures on vKontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, and it is getting a 70% match rate even against photographs taken from angles and under different lighting.

Think what this means.

When I walk into a conference, my Google glasses will be able to tell me who everyone is and scan their LinkedIn profiles. I’ll get it to put green ticks next to people who influence the budgets at banks and red crosses next to mouthy but powerless middle managers such as myself. Come on, you’d all do it. It’s embarrassing enough meeting people that you’ve forgotten meeting, or remembered their names wrong or you didn’t know that they work for you (all of which have happened to me).

It would certainly be helpful for a run of the mill pervert looking at women on the subway to know whether they are single, straight, living on their own, where they work, what their address is, whether they are going out later and so on. Instead of having to do any donkey work, they’ll just iPerv or some similar app to get the details there and then.

There is no answer other than the immediate mass production of Facebook-blue burkhas for us all.

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Micro investment company Acorns has accused ANZ Banking Group and other banks of telling customers they can’t share account passwords with the start-up, retarding its growth. 

From Banks and fintechs at war over password sharing | afr.com

The article calls password-sharing a “grey area”, which it really isn’t, since both bank procedures and common sense security practice should tell us that giving _anyone_ a password (which ought not to be thought of as any form of security at all) to a third party is dangerous. When they get hacked, you get hacked.

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In general, there were two fundamental challenges that needed to be addressed before smart contracts could be used in the real world. First: How would a smart contract actually control real assets so that it could enforce an agreement?… Second: What computer would be trusted to “execute” those terms in a way that both parties could rely upon?

From How Close Are Smart Contracts to Impacting Real-World Law? – CoinDesk

The emergence of the blockchain as the existence proof of a consensus protocol capable of operating an entirely trestles environment opened up new possibilities for dealing with the second problem, but the first one remains difficult to address. As Gideon Greenspan, who I take very seriously on such matters, has pointed out, the link between the world of the blockchain and the “real” world must be managed by a trusted entity, otherwise the blockchain cannot know that the state of the real world has changed.

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The head of the Chilean branch of Transparency International, which campaigns against corporate secrecy, resigned after being linked to five firms in tax havens.

From A torrential leak | The Economist

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Governments and regulators should avoid undue restrictions, support a predictable, consistent and simple legal environment and respect the “bottom-up” nature of the technology and its development in a global marketplace. “Do no harm” is the right approach for DLT.

From Comment: With blockchain, regulators should first do no harm – FT.com

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“It is important for countries like Korea which suffer a severe polarization of wealth due to the shadow economy to pursue more transparency,”

From [Weekender] Korea going coinless by 2020

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The use of cash has fallen more than 50% in the last four years and is projected to continue to fall as consumers look for faster and secure means of paying options. With a high degree of smartphone penetration in the US market, mobile and digital payments are rapidly gaining a market share in digital payments.

From Americans Are Using Less Cash but Mobile Payments Are Not The Ones Replacing It | Let’s Talk Payments

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Before the industrial revolution, we lived in an essentially cashless economy. A reputation economy. There was very little money in circulation.

 

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To spur the trend, the Bank of Korea is seeking a digital way to replace coins for transactions with its aim to make Korea a “coinless society” by 2020.

From [Weekender] Korea going coinless by 2020

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Meanwhile, Kenneth Rogoff in his book on cash makes precisely the opposite recommendation: that we replace the banknotes with digital alternatives and keep the coins.

Sarah Jeong, writing in The Atlantic, raises the spectre of of surveillance in a cashless society. And she’s right.

When money becomes information, it can inform on you.

From How a Cashless Society Could Embolden Big Brother – The Atlantic

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In June 2015, Thomas Dart, the sheriff of Cook County—the largest county in Illinois, which includes the city of Chicago—wrote an open letter to the major payment processors. “As the Sheriff of Cook County, a father and a caring citizen, I write to request that your institution immediately cease and desist from allowing your credit cards to be used to place ads on websites like Backpage.com.”

Visa and Mastercard immediately folded in the face of Dart’s letter, and stopped serving Backpage.

From How a Cashless Society Could Embolden Big Brother – The Atlantic

Now, whatever you think about the morality of prostitution, there’s something troubling about this. You can blame Visa and MasterCard for spinelessly caving to a form a blackmail that circumvents legal due process by invoking social media mobs. That’s the world we live in. But if the Sheriff Dart’s of the world succeed, then payments will vanish underground and society will be vastly worse off.