This week’s main blog discussions include … Designing our next banknotes: Notey McNoteFace? The Bank of England launched a platform yesterday for anyone to suggest who should be on Britain’s next generation of banknotes. Here’s the verbatim: As we begin to design the next series of banknotes, we invite you to share your views on potential…
I just booked a hotel stay in London the other day, confirmed with PayPal but then, shortly after checking my PayPal account, it showed two transactions. Thinking I had paid for the booking twice, I raised a dispute with hotels.com and PayPal about two charges. Now, as regular users of PayPal would know, it’s not…
I’ve been wondering a lot lately about the balance between privacy and permission in banking. The fact is that we don’t want people having our account details and yet, on certain occasions, it is necessary. So, what to do? In today’s rapidly evolving financial landscape, the dichotomy between privacy and permission access has emerged as…
Trust in the news services has dropped from 51% to 35% over the last decade, according to Oxford University’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report. The headline paragraph can be summarised as it’s 2025 and we live in a time of deep political and economic uncertainty, changing geo-political alliances, climate breakdown and many destructive conflicts around the…
For most of the last decades, I’ve been having arguments about control versus freedom; government versus the individual; the state versus the libertarian. It began in earnest with the launch of bitcoin, where my position is always that you cannot have money without government. Then, as most of you will know, the question is: which…
I would love to walk into a bank’s boardroom with my opening slide explaining: “Step confidently into the future of Web3 with Zond, a quantum-resistant Layer-1 blockchain* engineered to transcend today’s security limitations and safeguard your dApps, from DeFi protocols to NFT marketplaces, while powering the next generation of smart contracts in tomorrow’s digital economy.”…
Everything I read talks about simplified customer experience in payments and yet, when I look at it, the process of payments is becoming far more complicated. You made a payment in the old world with a bank note or cheque, and it was a simple transaction over the counter. Cash involved two parties: the customer…
I’m discussing a lot about digital currencies these days, and the future of CBDCs, Stablecoins and Crypto. The conversation generally goes along the lines of central banks issuing digital currencies is really unnecessary. No one wants them and no one trusts them. The whole thing is just a scam for governments to track and trace…
