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Stripe Sees Former BoE Governor Mark Carney Join Board Of Directors

February 22, 2021 by Blockchain Consultants

Stripe, a US-based payments company dedicated to the development of new commerce solutions for the Internet, has recently added a brand new member to its Board of Directors: Mark Carney. Carney joins up with Stripe after having served in the Bank of England (BoE) as one of its crypto pioneers.

Carney’s Still A Big Fish

The official introduction of Carney as a Board Member occurred on Sunday, standing alongside names like Diane Green, Christa Davies, Sir Micheal Moritz, Jonathan Chadwick, as well as the two co-founders of Stripe: John and Patrick Collison.

In the mandatory public statement, Stripe cited Carney’s extensive experience regarding global governance and financial systems, which will be especially useful with the payment firm’s rollout of new climate efforts.

The Mandatory Kind Words

In a public statement, Carney declared that commerce by its very nature has changed within these past ten years. He praised Stripe, as one always does in this situation, stating that the firm has been at the forefront of this change. He said the firm helped enable this digital economy, explaining that it provides both small and large businesses across the globe with both resilient and innovative global payment solutions.

In his mandatory kind words, he declared his eagerness to work alongside Stripe and support it throughout the coming years. He stated that the firm will develop and construct a global infrastructure that will allow the Internet at large to become an engine for inclusive and robust economic growth.

Stripe itself was founded back in 2011, marketing itself as an all-encompassing payments processing platform dedicated to various forms of online business such as e-commerce. Stripe even dabbled in Bitcoin payments for a time, rolling out BTC payment options back in 2015. However, Stripe had also pulled out of Bitcoin in 2018 due to the platform’s issues with the network in terms of slow processing time and high transfer fees.

Stripe even had its finger in Diem, back when it was first announced and was still known as the Libra Project. Massive pressure from various global governments had completely crippled Libra, before the entire project built itself back up. Time will tell how Libra, or rather Diem, will fare in the future.

Stripe Still Positive About Crypto

It should be noted that John Collison, one of the co-founders of Stripe, has been giving positive sentiments regarding crypto for some time now. The man is hopeful for crypto’s future in general, even if Stripe was forced to pull out thanks to the ever-expanding problem of transaction fees within the top crypto networks out there.

Carney himself had already expressed positive sentiments toward none other than Central Bank Digital Currencies, or CBDCs. Indeed, he expressed a vision of the future back in 2019 at the Jackson Hole Symposium, one where the great US Dollar was replaced by some sort of CBDC as the global reserve currency.

It should be noted that it’s been almost a year since he stepped down from his position of Governor of the Bank of England. Carney was there to help tackle the BoE’s problems regarding Brexit and COVID-19’s initial impact on the global economy.

Stripe Sees Former BoE Governor Mark Carney Join Board Of Directors

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Law Decoded: Police and thieves on their screens, Oct 2–9

October 9, 2020 by Blockchain Consultants

Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law.

Editor’s note

Historians typically date the birth of international policing as we know it today to the 1800s, a response to the explosion in nationalist movements and non-governmental political radicalism in Europe. Just as new linking technologies like the telegraph and the steam engine aided and abetted new networks of political deplorables and any number of Sherlock Holmes plots, the explosion of communications tech of the last quarter-century has brought about new forms of crime.

Which is, y’know, something everyone passively knows. In crypto, association with crime is a familiar reputational issue that is present but certainly not unique. New technology giveth and taketh away. Law enforcement’s interest in controlling new networks also grows. Paranational organizations like drug cartels and terrorist cells come to mind.

This week saw the U.S. Department of Justice press criminal charges against ISIS agents behind American deaths including James Foley’s, a move that expands their power to prosecute foreign agents as criminals under U.S. law. The FBI also busted up a home-grown far-right conspiracy to kidnap the governor of my home state of Michigan. In crypto, several jurisdictions have laid claim to new authority, with the DoJ in particular making a number of moves to expand its jurisdiction.

DoJ vs. everybody

The Justice Department’s new “Cryptocurrency Enforcement Framework” laid claim to a whole host of powers over crypto businesses that had previously been in limbo. Most notable is the generosity of what the DoJ is calling its own jurisdiction — basically anything that touches a U.S. server.

The new framework heralds a new era in the department’s crypto authority, but it’s just the clearest summary of a growing body of precedent that U.S. regulators from the SEC to the IRS have been building out for years.

The DoJ’s criminal charges against Seychelles-registered BitMEX’s leadership last week in some ways telegraphed their particular interest in combatting crime in crypto wherever in the world it may be. Most earlier involvement in crypto-linked prosecutions abroad had been focused on networks the DoJ saw as being primarily designed to finance terrorism or funnel money to sanctioned individuals. While the DoJ accused BitMEX of being a means for such action, the allegations against the leadership are not really accusing them of ideological or political illegality, but rather old-fashioned greed.

Distressing for the crypto community is, as always, the association with criminal activity. The DoJ’s report pays lip service to blockchain technology’s ability to revolutionize payments, finance, international trade, shipping, trust, consensus et al — I assume that this readership is familiar with the myriad use cases — but the report pivots compulsively to crime. From the DoJ’s side of things, that is their trade, so it makes sense, but it also adds to the unfair stigma against a technology.

Another cause for concern is that tech-savvy people in the U.S. can get around the barriers by really any crypto company, given enough time and potential profit. So as with the general trends of the last year, U.S. authorities really do seem to be building out the legal framework to give themselves jurisdiction over crypto basically anywhere. World Police indeed.

UK shuts door on whole genre of crypto investment

The United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority nixed trading of crypto-based derivatives — including futures, options and swaps — for all retail investors starting in January.

While the FCA may not be as globally hawkish on crypto as its U.S. analogues, London remains Europe’s financial center. Much like Brexit itself, the predicted exodus from London has seen delays that seem to mock all bold predictions.

With its focus on retail investors, however, the FCA has obviously designed its new ban to be more of a protective maneuver for regular Britons rather than a handicap on the reigning heavyweight champs of the London Stock Exchange.

Nonetheless, as the UK’s position within both Europe and the global economy is vulnerable, implementing a stringent ban on a new asset class seems like yet another way of recusing itself from the financial future. As mentioned earlier, determined UK crypto investors will almost certainly be able to get around the new ban to access offshore exchanges with less legal accountability to the UK and more extravagant and risky leveraged offerings.

But maybe a somewhat built-in assumption is that, while the technological implementation of any ban is going to be slow and imperfect, a retail investor capable of working around it is not exactly the person the FCA is most worried about protecting.

DoJ vs. the elusive Mr. McAfee

After decades of intercontinental outrageousness, John McAfee was arrested in Spain for tax evasion. He also faces a suit from the SEC for fraudulent ICO promotion.

McAfee first found success in the 80s at the head of the firm that produces the antivirus software that still bears his name. He left the company in the 90s and has been bouncing around the world more or less ever since, racking up guns, substance addictions, and allegations of sexual assault and murder. Also not paying his taxes, allegedly. He was posted up in Cuba out of the reach of U.S. authorities for a while.

Despite his early successes in technology, McAfee has for decades built a personal brand on foundations of infamy. The SEC’s allegations suggest that he managed to translate that megaphone into millions of dollars by plugging into the curious hypedraulic mechanics of the ICO boom. Earlier this year, he tried to launch a privacy token that he admitted was largely taken from another project. McAfee is hardly what you would call a builder. While everyone is innocent until proven guilty, McAfee’s absence from the crypto scene would be a blessing for the industry’s reputation.

Further reads

The Bank for International Settlements put out a new and extensive report on Central Bank Digital Currencies and the associated risks and prospects.

Tax attorney Jason Freeman runs down the latest memorandum from the IRS on how to get your taxes on virtual assets in order.

Writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Rainey Reitman talks problems with the extradition hearings for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Law Decoded: Police and thieves on their screens, Oct 2–9

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The Great Hack: Netflix doc unpacks Cambridge Analytica, Trump, Brexit and democracys death

July 26, 2019 by Blockchain Consultants

It’s perhaps not for nothing that The Great Hack — the new Netflix documentary about the connections between Cambridge Analytica, the U.S. election and Brexit, out on July 23 — opens with a scene from Burning Man. There, Brittany Kaiser, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, scrawls the name of the company onto a strut of “the temple” that will eventually get burned in that fiery annual ritual. It’s an apt opening.

There are probably many of us who’d wish quite a lot of the last couple of years could be thrown into that temple fire, but this documentary is the first I’ve seen to expertly peer into the flames of what has become the real-world dumpster fire that is social media, dark advertising and global politics which have all become inextricably, and, often fatally, combined.

The documentary is also the first that you could plausibly recommend to those of your relatives and friends who don’t work in tech, as it explains how social media — specifically Facebook — is now manipulating our lives and society, whether we like it or not.

As New York Professor David Carroll puts it at the beginning, Facebook gives “any buyer direct access to my emotional pulse” — and that included political campaigns during the Brexit referendum and the Trump election. Privacy campaigner Carroll is pivotal to the film’s story of how our data is being manipulated and essentially kept from us by Facebook.

The U.K.’s referendum decision to leave the European Union, in fact, became “the Petri dish” for a Cambridge Analytica (CA) experiment, says Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr. She broke the story of how the political consultancy, led by Eton-educated CEO Alexander Nix, applied to the democratic operations of the U.S. and U.K., and many other countries, over a chilling 20+ year history techniques normally used by “psyops” operatives in Afghanistan. Watching this film, you literally start to wonder if history has been warped toward a sickening dystopia.

The Petri-dish of Brexit worked. Millions of adverts, explains the documentary, targeted individuals, exploiting fear and anger, to switch them from “persuadables,” as CA called them, into passionate advocates for, first Brexit in the U.K., and then Trump later on.

Switching to the U.S., the filmmakers show how CA worked directly with Trump’s “Project Alamo” campaign, spending a million dollars a day on Facebook ads ahead of the 2016 election.

The film expertly explains the timeline of how CA first worked off Ted Cruz’s campaign, and nearly propelled that lack-luster candidate into first place in the Republican nominations. It was then that the Trump campaign picked up on CA’s military-like operation.

After loading up the psychographic survey information CA obtained from Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, the world had become their oyster. Or, perhaps more accurately, their oyster farm.

Back in London, Cadwalladr notices triumphant Brexit campaigners fraternizing with Trump and starts digging. There is a thread connecting them to Breitbart owner Steve Bannon. There is a thread connecting them to Cambridge Analytica. She tugs on those threads and, like that iconic scene in The Hurt Locker, where all the threads pull up unexploded mines, she starts to realize that Cambridge Analytica links them all. She needs a source though. That came in the form of former employee Chris Wylie, a brave young man who was able to unravel many of the CA threads.

But the film’s attention is often drawn back to Kaiser, who had worked first on U.S. political campaigns and then on Brexit for CA. She had been drawn to the company by smooth-talking CEO Nix, who begged: “Let me get you drunk and steal all of your secrets.”

But was she a real whistleblower? Or was she trying to cover her tracks? How could someone who’d worked on the Obama campaign switch to Trump? Was she a victim of Cambridge Analytica, or one of its villains?

British political analyst Paul Hilder manages to get her to come to the U.K. to testify before a parliamentary inquiry. There is high drama as her part in the story unfolds.

Kaiser appears in various guises, which vary from idealistically naive to stupid, from knowing to manipulative. It’s almost impossible to know which. But hearing about her revelation as to why she made the choices she did… well, it’s an eye-opener.

Both she and Wylie have complex stories in this tale, where not everything seems to be as it is, reflecting our new world, where truth is increasingly hard to determine.

Other characters come and go in this story. Zuckerburg makes an appearance in Congress and we learn of the casual relationship Facebook had to its complicity in these political earthquakes. Although, if you’re reading TechCrunch, then you probably know at least part of this story.

Created for Netflix by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, these Egyptian-Americans made “The Square,” about the Egyptian revolution of 2011. To them, the way Cambridge Analytica applied its methods to online campaigning was just as much a revolution as Egyptians toppling a dictator from Cario’s iconic Tahrir Square.

For them, the huge irony is that “psyops,” or psychological operations, used on Muslim populations in Iraq and Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks ended up being used to influence Western elections.

Cadwalladr stands head and shoulders above all as a bastion of dogged journalism, even as she is attacked from all quarters, and still is to this day.

What you won’t find out from this film is what happens next. For many, questions remain on the table: What will happen now that Facebook is entering cryptocurrency? Will that mean it could be used for dark election campaigning? Will people be paid for their votes next time, not just in Likes? Kaiser has a bitcoin logo on the back of her phone. Is that connected? The film doesn’t comment.

But it certainly unfolds like a slow-motion car crash, where democracy is the car and you’re inside it.