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So it’s a Fitbit for your old chap? Basically, yes, although I doubt that will be the slogan, for a number of reasons. You charge it with a USB cable and sync the data with your phone in the usual way. Then share it online, if you wish.

From Smart condoms: like Fitbit for sex – and you can even share your stats | Life and style | The Guardian

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The ‘no change given’ rule at Chichester car park meters saw the council earn an extra £17,000 last year

From Council earned £17,000 from ‘no change’ Chichester car parks – Chichester Observer

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Now, in an effort designed to provide an extra layer of trust, a pilot will see members who bank with CBA able to add a ‘CommBank Identified’ badge to their Airtasker profile if the two firms have the same name and date of birth on file.

From CommBank provides ID verification for gig economy marketplace users

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Tim Fung, CEO, Airtasker, says:

“We’re creating a reputation passport, which will help people know exactly who they are dealing with and what they are qualified for.”

From CommBank provides ID verification for gig economy marketplace users

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As my former colleague Salome Parulava rather succinctly described last year, we must distinguish between two different areas of overlap between 

First, “Identity for Blockchain”, assumes that if blockchain platforms… gain adoption that is at least 10% as widespread as the industry’s attention to them today, there will be a need for a robust and reliable identity layer to manage KYC, AML, authentication and authorisation processes for shared ledger applications.

From “Identity for Blockchain” vs “Blockchain for identity”. What’s in it for Airbnb? | Consult Hyperion

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Second approach could be called “Blockchain for Identity” and it formulates a separate self-sustained class of use cases. It assumes that blockchain technology can enable solutions to known identity problems

From “Identity for Blockchain” vs “Blockchain for identity”. What’s in it for Airbnb? | Consult Hyperion

It’s this latter category that interests me at the moment. As Sally pointed out last year, there are some specific problems to do with interoperability and discoverability that might be approached in a different way. Let’s to pause to clarify a couple of definitions. First, I want to distinguish between attributes (such as IS_OVER_18) and credentials (such as dave.birch!Barclays#IS_OVER_18).

Oh wait. As you can see here, I’ve invented a new shorthand. So the attributes are facts about me (the first party) that you (the second party) want to know. Credentials are attributes about me that are not useful to you unless they are attested to by a third party and they can be presented by the first party for verification by the second party. So you, the pub, want to see an IS_OVER_18 credential and I present you with an identity dave.birch!Barclays (that’s a public key of mine signed by Barclays private key) and you can check that identity, see that it includes the IS_OVER_18 attribute and then (assuming that the identity hasn’t expired ) you can serve me a drink. In the case of some other credentials (IS_A_UK_RESIDENT) you might want to ping Barclays to make sure that the identity has been cancelled (because I’ve moved out of the UK). So you get the general idea.

Note one particularly interesting aspect of this architecture. In the example I used, my identity was dave.birch!Barclays but it could just as easily have been mr.x!Barclays and that wouldn’t make any different whether you serve me a drink or not. As I have written here approximately monthly for a decade or so, we need to make our transactional space one where attributes, not identities, are transaction enablers.

My good friends at Meeco along with a group of people I take very seriously in this space have just published their report “The Rise of the Attribute Economy 2.0” that explores and examines this kind of thinking.

Now, suppose all of the banks issue these credentials to their customers. This would be immensely useful for several reasons. 

 

I could store the CRUD on my phone or on my laptop. But then I might lose it. So instead, let’s assume that the banks get together a create a shared ledger to hold all of their CRUD in one place. Now, when I want to open a new bank account or start internet dating or put a monkey on Man City half way through a game courtesy of noted actor Ray Winstone, all I have to do is point to a relevant piece of CRUD. Now the pointers to the CRUD will easily fit on my phone so no problem – I can download them from my bank whenever I get a new phone, it’s no big deal –

Let’s try a worked example. I want to start internet dating. I go to Ashley Match and click to open an account. Ashley Match Asks for a virtual identity. I choose Mr X at Barclays, an identity that contains only two facts about me: that I’m over 18 and I am resident in the UK. The fact that the credentials are attested to by Barclays also tells Ashley match that Barclays know who I am, which as I have mentioned before, means that I cannot misbehave behind my pseudonym. Ashley match now go to the chain and look for this identity. They find the Mr X creation records and look along the ledger to see if that identity has been updated or deleted (they don’t care if it’s been read by someone else). It hasn’t. But now they need to know that I am the actual owner of Mr X so to speak

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210000UK card payments continued upward trend in 201602 March 2017  |  1961 views  |  0Source: UK Cards AssociationConsumers spent £647 billion using payment cards in 2016, new figures show. There were 14.8 billion card transactions in 2016, equivalent to 40.5 million transactions a day or 469 a second, data from The UK Cards Association shows.

Three-quarters of retail spending (76.4 per cent) was on payment cards. Retail spending on cards in 2016 was £298 billion, compared to £290 billion in 2015.

The majority of card spending in 2016 was made via debit cards, which accounted for £461 billion of spending. Total card spending in 2015 was £620 billion.

Contactless payments accounted for £25 billion of spending

[From

UK card payments continued upward trend in 2016

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A Norwegian news site is now asking its readers to take a short reading comprehension quiz before allowing them to post comments below certain articles

[From

Commenters don’t read articles. Here’s how one site is fighting back.

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Research has revealed that pensioners in the UK are now an average of £20 a week better off than working households.

[From Pensioners incomes exceeds working families | Government Business]

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Median income among pensioners is projected to rise twice as quickly as that for the rest of the population

[From Historically weak growth in living standards set to continue; low-income households with children to fare worst – Institute For Fiscal Studies – IFS]

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The news that somewhere in South Korea some sort of local government had some sort of election and recorded the votes on some sort of blockchain restarted some discussions about whether electronic voting might be just around the corner. As I have often suggested, the idea of using smartphones instead of ballot papers seems rather obvious.

With a sample ballot on their smartphone a voter will only need to bring their phone with them when the polls open;

[From New Blockchain Partnership Proposes Solution for Remote Voting – CryptoCoinsNews]

Great. But hold on…

it’s projected that through an app built on the blockchain voters won’t have to make the trip to polls in the future.

[From New Blockchain Partnership Proposes Solution for Remote Voting – CryptoCoinsNews]

Oh dear. This sort of system might be acceptable for shareholder voting and that sort of thing, but it certainly isn’t acceptable for either local or national government elections for a variety of reasons all of which have been reiterated endlessly on this very blog (principal among them the issue of voter intimidation). I am firmly of the opinion that voting should be a public act.

That doesn’t mean, however, that new technology cannot make a very big difference to the electoral process. Just to illustrate on sensible use of blockchain technology in this context, imagine a voting system whereby the elector authenticates access to a private key and is returned a cryptographically-blinded permission to vote. They go down to the polling both a tap their phone or bluetooth or QR or whatever to communicate their vote. Then they choose their candidate. Let’s say they vote for President Camacho. When they get home they can log in to traverse the election block chain and they can see if their vote has indeed ended up in the right bucket. In fact, they can see every vote in every vote (although they don’t know who those votes came from).

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Users of WIRcard plus can pay at approximately 10,000 WIR acceptance points in Switzerland, but moreover, the card can be used worldwide through the V PAY network.

From SIX to support WIR Bank in launch of SME payment card WIRcard plus – FX-MM

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