Snippings

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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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Cybercriminals can already read information from the card chip  Artyom Sychev, Deputy Director, General Directorate of Security and Information Protection, Bank of Russia 

From Cash circulation: from robotization to countering “black box” attacks against ATMs. First summary of PLUS-Forum 2016

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With the blockchain, you gain access to two things. On one hand, you could select only the pertinent information required for that transaction-and entering a bar through a bouncer is a transaction. In this case: name, picture, and age. On the other hand, the bouncer can rest easy knowing that once something is hashed into the blockchain, it can’t be changed; new information can only be appended and there is a transparent record of all changes.

From Blockchain: An Answer to Identity? – NASDAQ.com

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