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Paying for things online usually means giving up plenty of privacy. But this needn't always be the case. Last night I donated to a local charity via their website and didn't have to give up any of my personal information. The trick for achieving a degree of online payments anonymity? Not bitcoin, Zcash, or Monero. I used a product created by old fashioned bankers: a non-reloadable prepaid debit card. (I wrote about these cards here and here ). Had I used a credit card or PayPal, all sorts of parties would have gotten access to my personal information including the site owner, the payments processor, my bank, the site owner's bank, the credit card networks, my partner, and many more. To get a good feel for how many different parties touch an online payment, check out this graphic by Rebecka Ricks, which shows how PayPal shares your information. A powerful visualization by @baricks showing how PayPal shares your data: https://t.co/vd8w8d8xn6 ht @akadiyala Due to Europe...

Every few days for the last month or so I've been refreshing a Federal Reserve page that shows data about daylight overdrafts. For some reason the Fed only updates it every few months. I had been getting quite curious to see what happened during the great September interest rate spike. Well, finally the Fed has uploaded the data. If you don't know about the September rate spike, I'd suggest reading Nathan Tankus's tweet , listening to David Beckworth's podcast with Bill Nelson, or picking through this blog post from Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz. In short, there was a sudden increase in the demand for Fed balances (also known as reserves), and the Fed was slow to react by increasing the supply of balances. And so the rate at which banks were willing to borrow balances spiked to desperation levels. Why did the demand for balances increase? That's where daylight overdrafts can inform us. By way of background, the Fed has had a long-standing policy of...