I merely have been investigating the mechanisms at work that enable us to collaborate - and allowing us to cater for increased complexity and efficiency in our collaborations - and now suddenly I found myself taking a moral utilitarian position! What the hack!
Human nature and our abilities are intertwined with collaborability. My statements about them are scattered all over Red Planet Dust. I wondered if a consistent image would arise when I would collect my statements.
Mintchip and cryptocurrcies urge us to better understand how money and payments relate. We have taken both for granted as separate topics; but they are like two sides of the same coin. Mintchip can provided useful insights in existing payment practices.
Walking to the office this morning it struck me that the evolution of (physical) currency in relation to payments could show us the long term development of digital money as well: step by step the currency has been developing until at a certain moment in time the transaction will be done directly between the payer and the payee.
...you could miss the major contribution of bitcoin as it presses us to reassess the way we have been doing things for years where all those little and some bigger inconveniences build into the current payment industry have to be discussed again and seen for the real merit they have.
Once in a while I listen to Daring Fireballs' podcast The Talk Show by John Gruber. Walking to my office today I started to listen to episode #74, I kept [...]
A year ago, in march 2013, the US Department of the Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) published a paper FIN-2013-G001 on crypto currency defacto regulating bitcoin in the US [...]
The removal of the middle man function in an exchange based on the bitcoin protocol does not automatically lead to the disappearance of the companies (and their interests) performing these today. The middle man function will slowly but surely erode with the advent of the bitcoin protocol, the middle man of today (parties) will be the gate(way)keepers of tomorrow.
Wolfram language, as the engine/lanquage driving WolframAlpha, has become a very powerful coding environment indeed. It is not available yet but the introduction by Stephen Wolfram is mouth watering... I [...]
Many years ago in a contribution to a corporate strategy I postulated payments should be redefined to the “transfer of property rights”. At that time smart metering for utilities and [...]
Our societies and economies are impacted heavily by technological change, they always have been. While some technologies - like the bitcoin protocol - allow for smaller economic actors to be relatively more economically viable then before other developments go in different directions.
Question of the day (III) Let’s be honest; if a long time senior payments professional asks the title question after you have spend an hour explaining the significance of the [...]
Looking at a wallet based payment chain (P2P) the central pivot point is the wallet itself. The wallet needs to have the values available either in the wallet or immediately on call by a service provider. Euro’s – or any other currency for that matter – could be provided by a gateway provided per bank based on the PAAS conception.
The acceptance of Bitcoin protocol currencies and Ripple like networks is dependent on trust even if trust is said not to be necessary for the value to be transferred between two actors. Neglecting this will hamper adoption of the Bitcoin protocol by the masses.
(1 minute reading time + 15+ minutes external article) As with Marc Andreessen's article "Why bitcoin matters" from three weeks ago I can recommend an other landmark article on crypto [...]
(Utopia Wallet Part III) (3 minutes reading time) In part II of this miniseries on Electronic Wallets I promised to have a look at the contours of the Ultimate “Electronic [...]
Often antitrust is connected to behaviour in the disadvantage of competitors – and hence the dis-economies this brings for consumers – we should have a wider perspective at the (potential) negative impact companies have on society. Slowly but surely we should start looking at the disadvantages to society’s ability to collaborate as well.
(2 minutes reading time) Since having spend some early years of my professional life in a technical wholesale company I have been following the incredible developments of Amazon with great [...]
A long time friend who had just returned from a business trip to the USA to discuss various business development opportunities on two sides of the big point. He was wondering why certain types of innovation are typically initiated in the USA and not in the EU (or ROW). He pointed at PayPal as an example. I think I understand where his question is coming from and at first glance would agree to the gut feel expressed with this question that the conditions in the EU for innovation especially in payments are less favourable. But once you start thinking about it various inroads are possible:
(3 minutes reading time) When electronic wallets are discussed between people within the payments industry there always seems to be one big white elephant in the room: Apple. Intuitively many [...]
(1 minute reading time + 1 minute video) The outline of the Utopia Wallet aims to solve payment fragmentation both for Payers as for Payees. Coin has introduced a card [...]
(4 minutes reading time) Picking up the glove I threw in front of myself in my previous post on Clinkle to describe “the contours of the ultimate payment method” I [...]
Sometimes you are made aware of an article very worthwhile (Thank you Henk!). Marc Andreessen (from Andreessen Horowitz) has written a pretty balanced and informative piece on Bitcoin (BTC) via [...]
(4 minutes reading time) Basically we only know a few things about Clinkle. Firstly it is a payments start-up based in San-Francisco promising “something that’s fundamentally different from everything else [...]
(3 min. read) Yesterdays post dealt with MintChip, the new Canadian digital currency based on a secure element on a chip to make payments. The novelty of this scheme is [...]
