Snippings

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A political battle between the UN-recognised Tripoli government led by Fayez Sarraj and the Tobruk-based parliament loyal to General Khalifa Haftar in the east has led to parallel splits in the country’s financial institutions, with two central banks threatening to circulate rival Libyan dinar banknotes in the country.

From Battle of the banknotes as rival currencies are set to be issued in Libya | World news | The Guardian

Apparently there’s going to be one lot of good old British-sourced banknotes and another lot of dastardly Russian-sourced banknotes duking it out across the desert. Fascinatingly, while I was reading this piece, Benjamin Cohen’s “Currency Power” was on my bedside table!

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Releasing software as an API allows those companies to pursue a number of different adoption routes. Rather than trying to sell specific industry verticals or use cases, often the customer is a developer, leading to an extremely low-friction sales process.

From The rise of APIs | TechCrunch

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Dr Francis Wangusi, Director General of the Communications Authority of Kenya, said… “The requirements for opening a bank account were and still are stringent and unfavourable to low income earners”.

From Why M-Pesa is a successful story in Kenya | News24 Nigeria

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Registration was very simple and the costs were cheap. Also unlike traditional banks, there were many access points called “agents” all over the country.

From Why M-Pesa is a successful story in Kenya | News24 Nigeria

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In the UK, the proportion is two-thirds. Here, around 59pc of smartphones run on Android, while another 35pc are iPhones, according to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, both of which offer m-pay options. Mobile payments are going to be far more ubiquitous than their plastic counterparts, relegating contactless cards to being an offline backup in dire phone battery situations. 

From Contactless cards are on borrowed time – they’re just an interim for phones

Actually, if the smartphones implement the standard properly (Apple don’t) then you should be able to use to your phone to pay even when the battery is dead because the microchips that do the payments get their energy from the electro-magnetic field of the reader, just as the microchips in a contactless card do.

Back in 2014, I wrote about how stupid the idea of making people very their age with credit cards for access to adult content.

Forcing people to give their credit card details out willy-nilly will inevitably leading to an explosion in card fraud,

From Porn is a serious issue, and so is identity | Consult Hyperion

So things like the Ashley Madison data leak were entirely predictable. Entirely predicted, in fact.

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At the seminar Helen said the “The gap between real-world identity and online identity is at the root of [the problem of cyberbullying]”. So let’s close that gap. Not by requiring (and policing) “real” names, but by implementing pseudonymity correctly.

From We can contribute to childhood e-safety | Consult Hyperion

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The idea that permissioned blockchain startups are now up against substantial challenges can be seen in the shifting strategies at startups R3 and Digital Asset Holdings.

Greenspan noted that both are working less on distributed ledgers, and more on “contract description languages”.

From On Blockchain Disillusionment and Bitcoin’s Big Bad Wolves – CoinDesk

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unlike Smart Contract platforms, agreements written using DAML do not need to be shared across multiple, often completely public, nodes in a network. Parties do not need to reveal the terms of their agreement to any undesirable third parties and it can be safely processed and authorized by only the relevant participants. All data is revealed on a need to know basis and even the distributed ledger, which only contains references to the agreement, is encrypted so other entities cannot detect even its existence on the ledger, let alone the terms.

From Introducing the Digital Asset Modeling Language – Digital Asset

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Tencent would want to hope most WeChat users aren’t like Cai Jiami. The 31-year-old hastily transferred the balance in her WeChat “wallet” – roughly 7,000 yuan ($1070) – to her personal bank account before the Tencent-backed mobile messaging app could charge her for doing so. “It’s not a lot of money but I just don’t like to be charged,” Jiami, a wedding planner based in China’s southwestern Chengdu city, told CNBC. “I have Alipay on my phone, which is free and working well. Why would I waste money on WeChat?” From March 1 WeChat will charge users a fee of 0.1 percent when they transfer money from the app’s built-in digital wallet to their personal bank account. According to an announcement by Tencent, the charge will be levied on withdrawals of more than 1,000 yuan ($153), with the minimum fee per transfer set at 0.1 yuan. WeChat also said it would scrap an existing monthly charge on large cash transfers; it currently charges users a 0.1 percent fee on total monthly transfers in excess of 20,000 yuan ($3,058). The new policies are an attempt to cover WeChat’s banking costs, as well as to keep users’ money in the WeChat Wallet, according to analysts.

From Mobile enewsletter

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A trial in the Bay Area involving 50 small businesses and 50  McDonald’s restaurants is allowing Google to hide payments in the background of retail transactions. It’s called Handsfree, it was announced at Google’s developer conference last month, and while this technology is admittedly in its “early days” as Spinnell puts it, it’s indicative of a future we’re heading toward where your identity matters more than your phone.

From Money20/20 Europe: Android Pay Handsfree is Easier Than Tapping

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Future applications of this technology will in all probability not be used to unlock smartphones, thought that cannot be ruled out. The group behind the work sees loads of potential for it when it comes to high-security settings, where a restricted number of authorized users need ultra high-level access.

From Researchers can accurately identify people using their brain waves

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