Trust

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…

Some years ago an elderly gentleman entered the lobby of one of Britain’s biggest banks demanding to talk to someone about the £5 million he had been given by David Cameron. A senior manager at the bank took the gentleman to a consultation room, and it turned out that the man had been notified of…

There’s a very interesting analysis of the cyber attacks on Marks & Spencer, the Co-op and Harrods on the BBC this week. If you have access to their iPlayer, then it’s well worth a watch: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002d2lh/inside-the-high-street-cyberattacks If you don’t, then here’s the summary as it illustrates our fragile digital world today. In April, Marks &…

The internet was launched in the 1990s based upon generations of technologies that went before. It was designed for the exchange of information, not value. Now, we live in a networked world of information and value exchange, and are trying to retrofit the mechanisms for commerce to a flawed structure. That is why we are…

For centuries, we’ve relied on paper, plastic, and people to prove who we are. A signature, a passport, a nod from someone who knows you — the analogue scaffolding of identity. But in a world where everything is going digital, why are we still treating identity like it’s 1995? Let me be blunt: digital identity…

In a disturbing new development using AI, I can generate a fake passport in minutes that would fool Revolut and Binance for account opening. This was a discovery by Polish researcher Borys Musielak using ChatGPT-4o, who created a fake passport in five minutes You can now generate fake passports with GPT-4o. It took me 5…

I’m working on my next book which is due for release in spring 2026. The theme is all around how to trust in a deep fake world. As a result, I’ve been talking to a lot of people – technologists, bankers, policymakers, ethicists, hackers (some reformed, some not) – and the conversations is around the…

Been having lots of conversations about digital identities and digital wallets lately. It is a theme that has been bubbling for years, yet seem to now be coming to a head. From the EU Digital Wallet and Identity program to India’s Aadhaar and UPI to Brazil’s Pix, there’s definitely something afoot. The core of the…

A phrase that’s been rising recently is digital twin. My definition of a digital twin is not the same as others. I would define a digital twin as the digital version of you or your organisation. Over time, you build up a complete digital profile. It can be anything from the holistic version of you…