Reputation, ratings and currency
I had the great pleasure of sitting next to Cory Doctorow once. We were taking part in some sort of roundtable about privacy and surveillance. I was excited about this because of my Edwardian policy on...
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Don’t judge mobile payments by the way they work now
A few people tweeted and e-mailed to point out how app-centric commerce can be perversely annoying, citing the example of car parking given in this recent British newspaper piece. The competitive...
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Taxis, Boris Johnson and another step closer to VC Day
Speaking at the European Payment Summit this year, where he was chairing the panel discussion on Mobile Digital Payments, Michiel Verhaagen (Chief Commercial Officer at AirPlus International) told a...
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A manifesto for cashlessness in Europe
My good friend Geronimo Emili invited me along to a session at Money2020 in Copenhagen today to deliver a manifesto for cashlessness in Europe. He challenged me to come up with a five minute talk...
View ArticleCash, CHF and chuffing hell there’s a $1000 bill
This time last year there were approximately £70.5 billion in notes and coins “in circulation” in the UK. Now, there are approximately £74.5 billion in notes and coins “in circulation” in the UK....
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Is bitcoin money? The debate continues…
Back in January, the International Monetary Fund published a report “Virtual Currencies and Beyond” which concluded that a currency such as bitcoin does not fulfil the economic roles associated with...
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Steam and shared ledgers
In my first official engagement as the Blockchain Meldrew, I was invited to the London Business School (LBS) to take part in a panel discussion on the technology with Ross Laurie from the accountants...
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You can’t handle the (single) truth
Another week, and another tidal wave of blockchain articles that I’ve been trying hard to keep up with. After chairing the session on the R3 Initiative at Money2020 Europe in Copenhagen, I’ve been...
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A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum
The Tomorrow’s Transactions Forum, that is. I arrived in good time (it’s always best to add on a few minutes to give yourself time to buy a ticket) for the 7.39 Flying Glacier to Waterloo via Misery...
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Old lags and new tricks
I imagine you are all familiar with the story of the Hatton Garden robbery in London. A group of elderly criminals with long police records (“old lags” in the English vernacular) staged the biggest...
View ArticleAre the banks telling you that you may as well use bitcoin?
Back on “frictionless payments” again. The bitcoin dream of instant (well, sort-of-instant) value transfer from anyone to anyone else with no third party that might be able to censor the transaction in...
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There’s more than one way to skin a blockchain
To make a very great generalisation, there are two ways to get the kind of security that we need to do clever transaction stuff. We have a tamper-resistant hardware in the loop (like the chip on your...
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Chips, contactless, cards and confusion
Well, I’m back in America again and I can’t help but notice that the retail point-of-sale (POS) experience is getting weirder week by week. I’ll show you why in a moment, but first of all, just to...
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Mining for what?
(Updated 6th May with reference to post by Dr. Craig Wright.) As I am sure you know, the security of the bitcoin blockchain rests on a consensus protocol that includes a proof-of-work algorithm, and...
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Shared ledger applications and the Bouvier-Sams boundary
Way, way back in October 2015 (and that’s a million in blockchain years) I read a piece by Pascal Bouvier. It contained an interesting term. Robert Sams inspired this post. As we were discussing stacks...
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The U.K.’s Faster Payments Service (FPS) has been very successful. The ability to send money from one account to another account instantly is actually quite transformational, but I still think that the...
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Payment competition and banking in a post-PSD2 world
I happened to be talking about access to payment infrastructure (something I blogged yesterday) at a client event yesterday, and got involved in a discussion about how the fintechs might begin to work...
View ArticleThe internet of blockchains, or something
I’ve said a few times that I think the Internet of Things is where mobile was a couple of decades back. Some of us had mobile phones, and we loved them, but we really didn’t see what they were going to...
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We might want an irreversible anonymous blockchain but not for irreversible...
I think I’ll just read John Lanchester’s superb piece about bitcoin in the London Review of Books one more time. It’s hard to choose a favourite part of such an excellent article, but if I was pressed...
View ArticleFixing the “Twitter problem” isn’t that hard
There’s a problem with social media generally and Twitter in particular. The problem is abuse. I posted a screenshot of the email, and a few lines about how I would not be using Twitter until they...
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