I’ve been asked the same question twice this week in two separate conferences (one in Vienna, the other in San Francisco): “how will we deal with the corruptive forces when we are all on the net?” The second questioner clarified what she meant by referencing the film Enemy of the State, where Will Smith gets…
I attended a great meeting in Austria with Google yesterday. There were a number of Google Vision presentations and discussions, along with nice vignettes from Accenture and Raiffeisen Bank. One slide particularly caught my attention however, as I’ve just started to see a cycle in Fintech and this slide from Google’s Creative Evangelist (really?) Jeremy…
Welcome to bankcoin Much to the dismay of the liberati, bitcoin is flatlining. After dipping down to the $250 per bitcoin price earlier this year, it’s stayed there ever since. Noteworthy is the all the marketing spin of announcements of We take bitcoin payments, has died down and the use of bitcoin is not moving. …
I have seen several banks note, and particularly two in the past week, that shows the shift of thinking as we move to the hybrid world of technology and finance. Most talk about Fintech start-ups but these two show a different perspective. First, Derek White of Barclays talks a lot with Business Insider about blockchain and…
I was recently interviewed by Emerging Markets Review just before travelling to Korea in July. The interview lasted a while, but stunned me when they produced the magazine with yours truly front page and centre. Rather than saying anything more, here's the interview which you can download as a PDF if you prefer. The global…
Having noted that most bankers are now saying bitcoin bad, blockchain good, here’s a nice set of quotes I’ve been gathering of what banks are actually saying: “At its core, Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol that enables exchange of value among parties around the world, giving it the potential to alter the financial services landscape,” Jay…
I can’t attend every conference everywhere, but I have just found an interesting one I missed recently in New York on July 28. This was American Banker’s Digital Currencies and the Blockchain Conference, previously known as just Digital Currencies. It’s gained quite a lot of coverage, with a great summary of the whole day over…
Following our regular weekly interview, the Finanser talks this week with recently elected Chairman of The Bitcoin Foundation, Brock Pierce. Photo from Business Rockstars Brock Pierce is an American entrepreneur and former child actor. As a child actor, he was in Disney films The Mighty Ducks (1992), D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994) and First Kid (1996). Brock has been involved in the establishment…
For the past two months, Wired has published a detailed account of how the FBI, DEA and other US authorities tracked and traced Ross Ulbricht, the libertarian founder and owner of the Silk Road. For those who have not heard of it, Silk Road is the notorious website that exploited the dark net to sell…
I've recently been saying that the Uber of Finance is not a company, but the Blockchain. Many people have tweeted and asked what I mean, so here's the explanation. Various stories appear about money but the first mentions appear to date back over 12,000 years ago, when ancient tribesmen in Antonia swapped Obsidian stones to store value. What…
