One of the developing themes on Red Planet Dust is the way our personal and company decision-making is being influenced and even replaced by software. We are getting more dependent on software based decision making by the day.
As noted on Red Planet Dust previously we are becoming ever more dependent on internet based systems to provide for basic utilities like communications and payments. Last week The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved new rules governing IT policies and procedures at ‘key market participants’, in an effort to better insulate the markets from vulnerabilities posed by systems technology issues. see Finextra: SEC sets out new tech rules.
Today Finextra reports a Bitcoin sell-off sparked by a technical glitch:
The problem caused some temporary panic, with the currency briefly losing nearly a third of it value, dropping from more than $48 to less than $37. However, within hours it recovered to around $44.
How we are going to cope with this type of “systemic vulnerability” is not yet clear, looking at the new policies of the SEC in the USA at least it has regulators attention.