The Top Ten Blog Posts of 2024

2024 has been a bumper year for this blog. According to Google Analytics, the blog has 175,000 active users, an increase of 30% over 2023, with near 300,000 views and a million interactions and so, as usual, I share the most read blog entries at the end of the year.

Here are the Top 10 posts:

#10: Stop talking about Open Banking

Salt Edge just sent me some interesting stats about Open Banking and Open Finance (there is a difference). They start by quoting that inconsistently reliable source Statista, who claim that the number of open banking users worldwide was expected to grow by an average of 50% per year between 2020 and 2024, with 12.2 million users in Europe in 2020. In 2024, the number of open banking users is close to 64 million, 70% more than predicted.

#9: The problem with PayPal

I made a payment with PayPal to my wife a month ago. Unfortunately, I used her old email address, which was the default on my PayPal account. She no longer uses that email address. Could I get that money back? No ...

#8: Is technology making our lives better or worse?

I had a debate around the enshittifying dialogue the other day. At dinner with an executive from a Big Tech firm, he said that our world is made better with technology, not worse. So, I asked him to give me five examples of how it makes our world better. Here’s what he came up with.

#7: Anyone want to hire an old man who knows COBOL?

Seven years ago, I was citing the fact that 43% of the global financial system runs on a computer language no-one speaks anymore. Seven years later, PC Magazine (are PC’s still a thing?) picked up on this theme with the headline: The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore …

#6: What does Kamala Harris think of crypto?

It seems weird to debate a US presidential election based on attitudes towards cryptocurrencies but, as previously blogged, Donald Trump is very pro-crypto. His attitude turned with NFTs of his image. Nothing like narcissism. But what does Kamala Harris think?

#5: Where is Wirecard’s Jan Marsalek?

After yesterday's chat with Dan McCrum of The Financial Times who broke the Wirecard story, wrote the book about it, helped create the documentary on Netflix and is an all round good guy, I wondered whatever happened to the key instigator, organiser and mastermind behind the fraud, Jan Marsalek.

#4: Why Revolut needs a banking licence

I’ve been having an ongoing debate with a Revolut fan about the fact that they have an emoney licence, as an EMI (Electronic Money Institution), and that they are not a bank in Britain. It’s part of the ongoing debate about their attempts to get a full banking licence from the FCA and, so far, failing …

#3: The day the digital died #Crowdstrike #Microsoft

I was talking with my 8 year-old son and said that the whole world had just stopped. He asked what do you mean? I replied that everything stopped. Airlines, banks, shops, trains, hospitals and more. He asked what happened? I said that an update from a company to the core of the computer systems of the world had broken all of the computer systems, and nothing worked anymore. He replied but my brain and my heart still works.

#2: The Dunning-Kruger effect, as inspired by a bank robbery

I had never heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect until the other day. Inspired by a bank robbery, Professor David Dunning worked out that people sit at opposite ends of a spectrum of confidence. Some are hugely confident and competent whilst, at the other end of the spectrum, they are hugely confident but completely incompetent. How could a bank robbery inspire this?

And here we go. The #1 blog entry of the year!!! Oh ...

#1: Who invented WiFi?

Historically, there are some technology stories that stand out. Alan Turin; Tim Berners-Lee; Bill Gates; Mark Zuckerberg; Jeff Bezos; Elon Musk … but what about Hedwig Kiesler a/k/a Hedy Lamarr?