Offline Digital Currency Transactions

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on · · 2 comments · 850 words
A tiny lego Storm Trooper eats a chocolate coin.

Wouldn't it be good if digital currencies worked offline? I'm going to talk through a proposed user experience, and then discuss how it would work in practice. Let us imagine a future digital currency ₢. It might be fiat, it might be crypto, doesn't really matter. Alice loads up a smartcard with ₢100 and locks […]

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What is the user need for cryptocurrency?

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on · · 1,150 words · read ~256 times.
A tiny lego Storm Trooper eats a chocolate coin.

I was at an event a few months ago, where someone from the Bank of England was talking about understanding the user needs for cryptocurrency. One of the things people do when trying to create a new product or service is to write little user stories to illustrate the problem they're solving. You've probably seen […]

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People Don't Want To Run Their Own Bank

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on · · 14 comments · 650 words · read ~8,702 times.
Photos of some porcelain piggy banks in the shape of pigs in clothes. Photo taken by William Warby.

When I was young, I had a piggy bank. A piggy bank is incredibly secure. It's fairly big - so it is hard to lose. It is brightly coloured - so you can find it easily. No one else can see how much money there is in there. The only way to get money out […]

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An NFT without a Blockchain. No gas fees. No Eth. No gatekeepers

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on · · 13 comments · 800 words · read ~10,503 times.
A blocky image of Rembrant.

This is a small proof-of-concept. It relies on PGP - but you could use Keybase, GPG, or any other hard-to-use encryption program. Background Suppose you want to support an artist and give them money. That's easy. Most artists take PayPal, bank transfer, or cash. But how can you prove that you've paid an artist for […]

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Authorisation vs Consent

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on · · 5 comments · 600 words · read ~177 times.
A tiny lego Storm Trooper eats a chocolate coin.

I recently read this interesting, and distressing, story of a man who was drugged and robbed. A form of crime which has been going on for centuries. But the 21st Century twist is that the thieves forced him to transfer large sums of money via his phone's banking apps. While under the influence, the victim […]

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And now it's… Springtime For Crypto

By
on · · 650 words · read ~291 times.
Still from the movie "The Producers".

You've heard of the AI Winter, right? The period where funding for AI dried up due to products failing to meet their hype. I think we're now in Springtime For Crypto1 - named after the musical "Springtime for Hitler" from movie The Producers - where scams abound. You should take a couple of hours to […]

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Investing In People

By
on · · 4 comments · 650 words · read ~316 times.
A tiny lego Storm Trooper eats a chocolate coin.

David Bowie invented the NFT in 19971. The "Bowie Bond" allowed you to directly invest in an artist's catalogue and receive royalty payments based on their sales. Here's how it worked2: You pay money to the artist (Bowie) Artist uses that money to buy the rights to their back catalogue Every time one of the […]

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Home brewing and Cryptocurrency

By
on · · 3 comments · 400 words · read ~169 times.
A tiny lego Storm Trooper eats a chocolate coin.

This is a thought experiment inspired by the sort of rambling and speculative conversations my wife and I have been having in lockdown. Most countries in the world place legal limits on alcohol production at home. There are, usually, several good reasons for this: Improperly brewed alcohol can cause severe health problems - including death. […]

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Questions to ask before launching a crypto-payments feature

By
on · · 5 comments · 850 words · read ~315 times.
A tiny lego Storm Trooper eats a chocolate coin.

Messaging app Signal is launching a payment service in the UK. This will allow users to send each other money cryptocurrency. Many people have written about why this is a daft idea. But they've mostly talked about why cryptocoins corrupt everything they touch. I want to talk about why this is a shitty idea from […]

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Crypto Investment Scammers calling from 02085044434

By
on · · 2 comments · 300 words · read ~253 times.
Fraud alert warning signs.

Another day, another phone scam. Yesterday, I received a call from +442085044434 by someone trying to get me to "invest" in BitCoin and other Cryptocurrencies. I managed to drag the call out for 6 minutes - have a listen: The caller admits the trading and advice isn't regulated. That they don't need permission to make […]

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