Typography

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...

A few weeks back Vice had an interesting story about Valve, a game maker, putting an end to trade in various in-game items because "worldwide fraud networks" had been using these items to "liquidate" their gains. You can see the blog post from Valve here : "Why make this change? In the past, most key trades we observed were between legitimate customers. However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced." Having not played a video game since the original Super Mario Bros, this all sounded all very strange to me. But I couldn't resist digging a little deeper. After all, strange media-of-exchange are a major theme here on the Moneyness blog. Let's set the stage. Anyone who plays Valve games can access something called the Steam Community Market . Players can go to this market ...

Antony Lewis recently published a useful article on stablecoins. In it he describes something called "permissioned pseudonymity". In traditional payments systems, people only get to access to payments services after opening an account. This requires that they provide suitable identification. So these systems are not pseudonymous. Usage and personal identity are linked. Stablecoins operators, on the other hand, sever this link. Users can transfer stablecoins to other users without providing personal information. John Doe can pay Jane Doe, no questions asked. Antony calls this permissioned pseudonymity because regulators permit pseudonymous usage of stablecoin networks. 🚨 🚨 30,000,000 #USDC (29,926,581 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet Tx: https://t.co/ujdi6cvpZ8 — Whale Alert (@whale_alert) October 9, 2019 The above payment is an example of permissioned pseudonymity. It is a $30 million transfer between two unknown wallets along the USD Coin stablec...

I recently spent some time on Twitter discussing the monetary wonders of Starbucks. In this post I'll bring a bunch of tweets together into a single blog post. I don't go to Starbucks very often, so I only recently learnt that the company has succeeded in getting many of its customers to stop using cash and debit/credit cards to buy coffee. Instead, they are using  Starbucks's own payments option: Wow Starbucks, what a great gig. Starbucks has ~$1.6 billion in 'stored value card liabilities' i.e. the Starbucks Card. So ~6% of the firm's liabilities are comprised of coffee addicts paying 0% for the privilege of lending to their supplier. Source: https://t.co/nGH2arujYz pic.twitter.com/cGcSW3L4MM — JP Koning (@jp_koning) August 11, 2019 Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer's wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Star...