I love it when there’s a case study about animal behaviours. Bearing in mind that apes are our closest relations, when scientists try experiments to see how they behave towards money, it is fascinating. This is something I’ve blogged about many times before, with a favourite example being the Capuchin monkeys who discovered that they…
I just had a new dawning, but maybe not. The realisation was that the decentralisation of everything – finance, money, government, service, chat – is all down to technology. Centralisation of everything is all down to physicality. It’s like the dichotomy between the State, which is analogue, and Society, which is now digital. This is…
Last week the European Central Bank issued a report on the state of digital transformation across European banks, and announced that they were not only interested in this space but would be supervising it. Yay! Disappointingly for me, the report and perspectives fell well short of what I think of as truly digital. Here’s their announcement…
I recently stumbled across traceable-time-as-a-service (TTaaS) and found it fascinating, especially as time is purely something we invented. “Time does not exist. We invented it.” Some guy called Albert pic.twitter.com/JS9JMfEyJk — Chris Skinner (@Chris_Skinner) August 28, 2021 That’s why China – the fourth largest country on Earth – has one single time zone. At 7:00,…
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak posted an update on LinkedIn the other day, saying how brilliant Britain is for foreign investments. That’s kind of no surprise, coming from the office of the person who wants foreign investment, but I did take note of one paragraph specifically: Despite challenging economic times, lots of sectors are flourishing. As…
I watch the Ukraine-Russia conflict with anguish. The loss of life and property is appalling, and the bombing seems relentless. But I wonder why we fight wars with bombs today, when we could just as easily fight with computers. If you bring the network down, you win. Suffice to say that in the Ukraine-Russia war,…
Technology markets in 2022 were decimated. Tesla share price collapsed. Netflix stock has dropped more than 50% in the last year. Facebook is in freefall. Even TikTok might be in trouble. Oh, and cryptocurrencies lost 50%-80% in value. Will 2023 be better? I believe it will be and, continuing this week’s mop-up of the main…
Brushing FTX and the crypto winter to one side, a couple of other crypto-related headlines caught my attention recently. The first is America’s oldest bank, BNY Mellon (founded 1784), is offering digital custody services. BNY Mellon, America’s oldest bank, launches crypto service The bank will store private keys to access the funds and provide the same bookkeeping…
There are so many people who have been saying banks are boring, unable to change, incapable of being truly digital and challenged by challenger banks and fintech. Yet, here we are, almost at the start of 2023, and all of the challengers and start-ups are begging for banks to work with them. What’s happened? In…
