Snippings

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The API-fication of payments will continue to gather momentum, and has the potential to lead to a significant increase in new payment services and functionalities

From Visa initiative fuels API-fication of payments

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Bitcoin is more expensive and inconvenient than regular banking is, and far more expensive and inconvenient than regular banking could be if it starts supporting smart transactions on public ledgers without bothering with the baggage of mining.

From Bram Cohen’s answer to Bram Cohen: What is the state of Bitcoin in 2016? – Quora

The robust (and accurate) remark from Bram Cohen (the chap who invented BitTorrent).

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A consultation from the Department for Culture Media and Sport said “commercial providers” of porn should have verification controls to stop under 18s viewing the content. Companies that don’t comply may face fines from a new porn regulator, or have their websites shut down.

From UK’s porn age checks set ‘dangerous’ precedent (Wired UK)

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Another neighbor and co-owner of the building, Sandeep Hingorani, lives in the top-floor studio — and for the past 10 months he has also rented Huang’s unit, despite her not wanting him to live there.

The problems started when an Airbnb user, “Jim Tako,” asked to rent Huang’s apartment.

From Airbnb renter fooled neighbor, refused to leave – Business Insider

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Whether that’s listing a spare room on Airbnb, driving for a few hours a week on Uber, completing a few DIY jobs on TaskRabbit or cleaning someone’s flat via Hassle.

And as a customer of these services you’re required to trust that the individual you let into your house is as trustworthy as the stranger driving your car.

From Onfido: Figuring out who perfect strangers are

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Onfido run this data through an instant checking system, pulling the numbers and writing straight off your passport to check it is genuine and not stolen, and then cross-referencing this data with other databases.

From Onfido: Figuring out who perfect strangers are

Ah. But this isn’t quite the same thing. If you are my Uber driver, there are lots of things I want to know about you, but who you are isn’t one of them. I want to know you a have clean driving licence, that the car is insured, that you don’t play loud music and annoy people with it. All sorts of things. Who you really are?  Whatever. That’s none of my business anyway. One thing I really do want to know is that you are actually the driver with the five star reviews that you say you are, whether I know your real name or not.

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Trust is about much more than money; it’s about human relationships, obligations, experiences, and about anticipating what other people will do.

From In third parties we (mis)trust? » Banking Technology

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So we went to the pub. For lunch. Seven of us. Say £20 per head. £100+ quid. Say £50 quid gross for the pub. Colleague goes to order food and drinks and pay at the bar. Apologetic barmaid comes over to explain that their “card machine” is down, so she can only accept cash. Under normal circumstances I would have simply walked out, feeling it wholly inappropriate to reward such a poorly managed establishment and, as a functioning actor in a capitalist economy, done my duty to depress their lunchtime takings.

Here’s what we wanted to say:

This is absurd. This is 2016 not 1916. Your card machine is down? Well, so what! Are you seriously telling me that mein host has no mobile phone number capable of registering for PingIt or PayM? That none of the staff or the pub itself have a PayPal account that I can send the money to? That neither the owners nor managers not contingency planners thought to tuck an iZettle behind the bar to use when the clunky and expensive GPRS terminal fails for one reason or another? This is a joke. Either the person responsible for the finances of this dive should be sued by the shareholders for negligence or I suspect your card machine isn’t broken at all, you’re just keeping the cash off the books to save on the paperwork. Either way, I’ve been thrown out of better places than this, so I’m taking my business elsewhere. Good day to you.

Of course, being English, what we actually said was:

oh sorry, don’t worry about it, we’ll go and get some cash

A helpful barfly explained that there was a free ATM only a couple of minutes walk away, so a scouting party was sent out to forage for cash while we waited back in the comfort of the lounge.

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There is absolutely no excuse for not taking electronic payments, even for those eking out a living in the margins of the crumbling ruins of post-Brown Britain.

//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

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My own decidedly unscientific survey involved a shopping spree one recent morning to no fewer than seven different retail locations, which revealed exactly seven different chip-capable payment terminals instructing customers to “Please Swipe Card.”

From The Great EMV Fake-Out: No Chip For You! — Krebs on Security

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Allow users to not show their tweets to unauthenticated users. 

From Putting out the Twitter trashfire — Medium

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Parents who did not know the letters had been tampered with then paid the school fees into the crooks’ bank accounts without realising.

From Crooks put their own bank details on stolen school fee letters to steal 1000s of pounds | Daily Mail Online

I know, I know, they’re not smart and they’re not contracts. But in the well-known Birch-Pannifer-Parulava model for thinking about shared ledgers from a business perspective (a model that continues to be refined, even as I type), we’ve stuck with the term “contract” on our 4C layer, more for marketing reasons that anything else (clients like the “4C” model and find it easy to remember).

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So I’m happy to continue to use the word contract But it does bother people, and I think we need to discuss it.

I think folks know this and that’s why there’s been a subtle effort lately to avoid “contract” and “smart contract” in favor of more use-specific labels like “Distributed Application” or “DAO.”

From Upacking the term ‘Smart Contract’ — Medium

From Upacking the term ‘Smart Contract’ — Medium

I did have an effort to introduce the new term LAPPS (i.e., Ledger APPlicationS) so as to have a simple and natural term, but it doesn’t seem have gained much traction. I suppose the whole “smart contract” thing has just become too embedded. But I agree with the author, and others, that it’s time to pick up the cudgels and fight a rearguard action before it is too late.

This is probably a good idea. Calling something that is really just an application a ‘contract’ or ‘smart contract’ sends signals you may not want to send. You don’t, for example, want users of your Hello World app to think they’re [entering a legal contract]

From Upacking the term ‘Smart Contract’ — Medium

So. LAPPS it is for the time being.