Over the weekend, I received a couple of interesting emails about things happening in Asia. The first is a translation of an announcement from the People’s Daily, the most official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, discussing digital currencies. The article is fairly high level and makes no commitment to …
Read More »Ant Financial’s Strategy for AI, Blockchain, Cybersecurity and more
I’ve been flying around a bit and was lucky enough to find myself onstage the other day, chairing the Ant Financial Technology Forum at Money20/20 Singapore. I was honoured to accept to be the moderator of the afternoon and guess I was chosen because Alipay and Ant Financial are a …
Read More »How quantum will change everything (including banking, money and security)
I know that we deal with quite complicated things in financial technologies. AI, AGI, ASI (Artificial Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, Artificial Super Intelligence); machine learning and deep learning; blockchain, shared ledgers and distributed ledger technologies; cryptocurrencies, virtual currencies and digital currencies; Open Banking and Open APIs; and so on and …
Read More »The lies spread by bankers about cryptocurrencies
I had a chat with The Financial Times the other day, and provided lots of background as to why I don’t think cryptocurrencies are the choice of criminals. The comment that was reported was the following: Chris Skinner, a financial technology author, said it was “complete rubbish” to suggest the main …
Read More »bitcoin you say? Bah, humbug!
I’m not saying I’m always right. In fact, I love it when someone points out I’m wrong, and shows me why, because I learn something. So, I was particularly interested when in Sunday’s Guardian, I saw the headline Blockchain: hype or hope. It’s quite a good article, and talks about …
Read More »Making a hash of it
I’m having lots of discussions about tokenisation and cryptocurrencies, and it often boils down to hashing the data. Hashing data is taking the source information which may be your account details or card information and shortening it into a machine-readable link that doesn’t share the original data. It’s a little …
Read More »What’s next for blockchain?
I recently wrote an article for Bloomberg’s Business Week, and thought it worth sharing with y’all here: What’s next for blockchain? Everyone got very excited a few years ago about blockchain technologies, the ledger system that was spawned by the arrival of bitcoin in 2009. It allows the recording of …
Read More »Mark Carney slams bitcoin
The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has slammed the rise of cryptocurrencies insisting the costs to mine bitcoin is ‘enormous‘ and that the energy consumption is worrying, declaring current costs of electricity consumption used to mine the coins are “double the electricity consumption of Scotland.” The UK’s leading …
Read More »9 out of 10 blockchain trials go nowhere
I just read an interesting new report from Deloitte about blockchain. They tracked the history of 86,034 blockchain projects hosted on GitHub since 2009 to pull out “key lessons” on where the blockchain industry is going and its long-term prospects. Here are some of the highlights: More than 26,000 blockchain …
Read More »Everything you need to know about bitcoin
I’m often asked how bitcoin works, where to buy them and how does it relate to blockchain and differ from ethereum, etc, etc. I was going to write a blog about it but Daniel over on Invest in blockchain beat me to it. He has also kindly let me republish his blog …
Read More »Why bitcoin is not a ‘fraud’ or ‘bubble’, but something you should take seriously
Unless you have been asleep for the last year, you cannot have failed to catch the buzz around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum’s Ether and Ripple’s XRP. There are even some coins that were created as a joke that are getting significant investments, such as Dogecoin. Dogecoin was …
Read More »Regulating the cryptocurrency markets
Someone made the comment on my platform piece about what happens when there are no Jack Ma’s or Mark Zuckerberg’s, as the whole thing is decentralised? I guess that this is logical as my last line was that government control of cryptocurrencies is “not so easy for cryptocurrencies that have …
Read More »FinTech, cryptocurrency and corporate change
I was recently recorded on Roger Edwards’ podcast talking about FinTech, cryptocurrency and corporate change. Roger is a marketing strategist focused upon the insurance industry, and produces regular podcasts about said subject. You can checkout his website here, and here’s the low-down of our chat: On the show this week, I …
Read More »Bitcoin: More electricity consumption than the entire planet?
I am tempted to predict the price of bitcoin for the end of 2018 but know I’d be wrong, so I’m not. It could be $1 or $1 million. I’m not going to forecast it, as there are over 1,000 digital currencies out there and who knows which will be …
Read More »The driving force behind creating digital identity schemes
I’m often talking about digital identity and struggle with the subject. This is because the meeting of ID2020 I attended at the United Nations 18 months ago, talked about the issues of digital identity and poverty, and how the poorest are the most susceptible to human trafficking and slavery: How the …
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