A decade after Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), one of the world’s biggest paper producers, launched its landmark no-deforestation policy, the company continues to clear forests to feed its mills and drain and develop peatlands,

Report alleges APP continues deforestation 10 years after pledge to stop

There’s bad economic news for Orange County. International Paper Company has announced the closure of their containerboard mill which has been in operation for many years in the northeast portion of the county. The closure will come by the end of this year.

International Paper to close operation in Orange County

Oct. 18, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- International Paper (NYSE: IP) today announced a series of actions to further strengthen and optimize its manufacturing system to meet customers' needs. The company ...

International Paper Announces Strategic Actions

About International Paper International Paper (NYSE: IP) is a global producer of planet-friendly packaging, pulp and other fiber-based products, and one of North America's largest recyclers. Headquartered in Memphis, Tenn., we employ approximately 39,000 ...

BREAKING: International Paper closing containerboard mill in Orange

International Paper announced Wednesday a series of closing company actions, which includes permanently closing its mill in Orange. Chairman and CEO Mark Sutton said decisions like these are ...

International Paper announces closure of Southeast Texas mill

International Paper Co. announced Wednesday plans to close a containerboard mill in Texas and cease production on two pulp machines in North Carolina and Florida — impacting 900 positions as ...

International Paper shuttering plant, cutting close to 1K jobs in 'strategic actions'

International Paper announced Wednesday a series of closing company actions, which includes permanently closing its mill in Orange. Chairman and CEO Mark Sutton said decisions like these are extremely difficult, because of the impact on employees ...

International Paper announces closure of Orange mill

(RTTNews) - International Paper (IP) announced Wednesday a series of actions to further strengthen and optimize its manufacturing system to meet customers' needs. The company will permanently ...

International Paper To Permanently Shutter Orange Mill; To Impact 900 Positions

Oct. 18, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- International Paper (NYSE: IP) today announced a series of actions to further strengthen and optimize its manufacturing system to meet customers' needs. The company will permanently close its containerboard mill in Orange ...

International Paper Company operates as a paper and packaging company primarily in United States, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Pacific Rim, Asia, and the Americas. It operates through three segments: Industrial Packaging, Global Cellulose Fibers, and Printing Papers. The Industrial Packaging segment manufactures containerboards, including linerboard, medium, whitetop, recycled linerboard, recycled medium, and saturating Kraft. The Global Cellulose Fibers segment provides fluff, market, and specialty pulps that are used in absorbent hygiene products, such as baby diapers, feminine care, adult incontinence and other non-woven products; tissue and paper products; and non-absorbent end applications, including textiles, filtration, construction material, paints and coatings, reinforced plastics and more. The Printing Papers segment produces printing and writing papers, such as uncoated papers for end-use applications comprising brochures, pamphlets, greeting cards, books, annual reports, and direct mail, as well as envelopes, tablets, business forms, and file folders. It sells its uncoated papers under the Hammermill, Springhill, Williamsburg, Postmark, Accent, Great White, Chamex, Ballet, Rey, Pol, and Svetocopy brands. The company sells its products directly to end users and converters, as well as through agents, resellers, and paper distributors. International Paper Company was founded in 1898 and is headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee.

International Paper

Sampada "Sam" Kapoor recently led a presentation on Freedom in the Law for the Mississippi Humanities Council's "Ideas on Tap" Series. Ms. Kapoor gave the perspective of freedom through the lens of a litigator and discussed concepts of law and liberty. She was joined by co-panelists Rob Hill (American Civil Legal Union or "ACLU" Director), Russ Latino (Business and Constitutional Lawyer), and Charles Taylor (political data analyst). The three panelists were chosen for their expertise and background in policy and/or law. Ms. Kapoor was selected as a panelist due to her extensive experience in the law as a seasoned litigator. Ms. Kapoor is a 2017 graduate of the University of Mississippi School of Law, where she graduated with distinction. Ms. Kapoor currently works at Forman Watkins & Krutz, LLP, one of the premier law firms in Mississippi. Up to recently, she was teaching simultaneously at the University of Mississippi School of Law, using a combination of legal research and litigation experience to connect law students with real-world cases. Who Is Sampada "Sam" Kapoor? Sam is a talented young attorney who has shown extraordinary competence in her short legal career. After getting full scholarships in both college and law school and graduating with distinction, Sampada has shown an equal amount of proficiency in her legal practice. In just a short span of time, she has successfully defended large corporations, including Fortune 500 companies like Google, Chevron, International Paper Company, Georgia-Pacific, and Weyerhaeuser Company, among others. Her legal prowess is also reflected in numerous awards that she has won both during her legal education time and her practice. In her firm Forman Watkins & Krutz, LLP, Sam was invited to become a senior associate. Recently, Sam was listed in the 2023 Best Lawyers "Ones to Watch." list, which basically selects the best of the best lawyers in the USA who have been practicing law for less than 10 years. This is just one feather on her hat, and she was also recognized by the Mid-South Super Lawyers as a "Rising Start" in the year 2020. She has been getting recognized for this title ever since 2020. She was also recognized as one of the top 40 under 40 leaders in law by the Mississippi Bar Journal. Serving On The Board of Directors of Mississippi Bar's Young Lawyer Division (2021-2022) Sam has served on the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Bar Young Lawyers Division. Appointment to the board is done by the president of the Mississippi Bar and undergoes a rigorous process. The Division plays a crucial role in the overall legal workings of the Bar and the Courts. Sam was appointed to the 'Budget and Fi Committee' of the Mississippi Bar as well as the High School Mock Trial Committee. She actively worked on preparing and presenting the annual budget for the Mississippi Bar Board of Commissioners Her role included other activities like budgeting for all projects of The Mississippi Bar, allocating funds to the Young Lawyers Division, special work committees, pro-bono activities, community outreach, as well as planning and funding the Mississippi Bar's annual conference in Sandestin, Florida. Launching a Legal Pipeline Program For Minority Students Sam has been experiencing a huge gap in terms of diversity in both law schools and legal firms. As a first-generation attorney, she experienced the challenges a student and lawyer faces during the start of their career and law school. To address these challenges and contribute back to society, Sam designed a legal pipeline program at the local HBCU. This program gives minority students the opportunities they need to enter law school and build promising legal careers. This program is helping a lot of students, and in 2021 alone, 8 students were able to join reputed law schools with the help of this program. 3 of the 8 students were selected for Ivy League schools. Going forward, Sam plans to further increase her societal contributions through student mentoring and pro bono volunteerism, along with building her labor and employment legal experience.

Sam Kapoor Leads Presentation On Freedom And The Law

Welcome to part two of the Dreams of Crypto Spring series. Part one covered the cyberpunk nightmare of Libra and its sudden rise to power.  In part two I cover Telegram, a new hope to strike a blow against the Libra empire.  This is an expanded version of the story I did for Cointelegraph , with increased coverage of the privacy debates over Telegram and WhatsApp. ###################################################### Last month, Facebook rocked the world with . Even a year ago, the idea that an iconic United States company would launch a digital currency or that a sitting president would about it seemed insane. its blockbuster Libra announcement tweet Welcome to the new normal. The Libra announcement sent , hit the like an atom bomb, and left many crypto influencers wondering if the social network giant just turned 90% of altcoins into shitcoins. What tiny crypto project with a few measly programmers and a few million bucks can stand against the combined might of not just Facebook but also the titans of the like Uber, Lyft, Paypal, Visa and Mastercard? politicians scrambling mainstream media tech and payment processing world But there’s a new hope on the horizon. One company on the planet has the power to take on the social media monster and win: Telegram. If Libra is the Empire Strikes Back, Telegram is A New Hope While Facebook has 1.8 billion users, Telegram . raised $1.7 billion While Facebook has the unwashed masses who’ve never held a Bitcoin, Telegram has the entire crypto community that lives and breathes altcoins for breakfast. While Mark Zuckerberg is the poster child for the internet as a surveillance economy, Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, is a , with privacy woven into his DNA. fight-the-power renegade While Zuckerburg looks like someone doing a , Durov looks like . bad impression of Data from Star Trek he just stepped off the stage of Magic Mike If you’re a pioneering member of the crypto community, you might have looked with scorn on the Telegram fundraiser, which beat the initial coin offering by raising all of its money from private , rather than crowdsourcing it from the people. Maybe you only read the that looks and reads more like a marketing slick than a detailed deep dive? regulatory backlash accredited investors short Telegram white paper You should take a look closer. The Dark Knight Rises The more you look, the more you realize there’s a lot to root for if you’re longing for a legitimate top contender to take on . the cyberpunk nightmare of Libra Start with Pavel Durov. The man built two successful companies, including VKontakte ), the Russian equivalent of Facebook, and he followed that up with Telegram. That means he knows how to build real, working, scalable platforms when most crypto projects can’t even get their testnets off the ground. He’s also an and iconoclast with a philosophy of radical individualism and self-sovereignty that matches that launched Bitcoin and a thousand other crypto ships. (aka VK anti-hero the cypherpunk ethos Even better, he backs that philosophy up with action. While Facebook faces a for protecting users’ data the way . Durov when the Russian Supreme Court demanded it and even as and yanked Telegram from the app store.  While Zuckerberg built his company on surveillance as a business model, Durov built . $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission the mob “protects” small businesses refused to create a backdoor to Telegram American companies like Apple, who normally stand tough on privacy, caved his company on privacy If you only skimmed , you might have missed that Durov isn’t alone. He's backed by a bevy of math geniuses and hardcore programmers who started coding in diapers and won strings of gold medals at the while you were watching Saturday morning cartoons. One of those folks is Pavel's brother , chief technology officer of Telegram, who solved cubic equations at the age of eight, started coding at nine, and wrote his first operating system at 13: the short white paper International Math Olympiad Nikolai Durov In . assembly language Nikolai Durov also wrote the much longer and more comprehensive that weighs in at a whopping 132 pages. It’s a dense, complex and ambitious outline for the new Telegram Open Network (TON) platform. Some folks in for promising a sci-fi utopia that solves every single problem in crypto. technical white paper the Miasma bashed it as a fantasy and nothing but “fun fiction” But let's look deeper and see if they're right. Crypto Wars Redux It’s not the first time Telegram faced criticism for their architecture choices, with Gizmodo’s William Turton once writing “ ." The article hits them hard for choosing client-server encryption instead of end-to-end encryption by default. Why You Should Stop Using Telegram Right Now There's a lot of debate in the security community about whether we can or should trust Telegram versus WhatsApp or or . Signal Wire The Electronic Frontier Foundation did for their and they found it wasn't all that simple and clear cut because "secure messaging is hard to get right—and it’s even harder to tell if someone else has gotten it right." a series of studies and surveys of secure messaging apps Surveillance Self Defense Guide The WhatsApp faithful generally just forward the Gizmodo article and call it a mic drop but a little critical thinking about the article reveals some fundamental flaws. It fires the first shot by saying Telegram "doesn’t encrypt chats by default." That's just not correct.  The chats are encrypted client to server and stored on the company's virtual machines which are distributed all over the world.  Saying they don't encrypt chats is straight up wrong. But that doesn't mean the article doesn't have a point. It means we have to trust Telegram's servers and trust is tricky. A woman and her business partner might have ten years of trust between them but if one partner steals from the company bank account then all that trust burns up over night.  Trust is not fixed. Trust is a moving concept. If Telegram's servers are compromised, so are your chats. We also have to trust that they really make only of those servers, which they claim to do in their security FAQ.  Client-server encryption also uses symmetric keys instead of asymmetric public/private keys, which means if the key gets compromised it's compromised for both the client and server, whereas with asymmetric encryption your privacy remains secure as long as you protect your private keys. encrypted backups Telegram as giving people the best of both worlds with , which do offer end-to-end encryption and don't store chats on their servers.  They also offer a way to delete messages and chats immediately.  Either party can kill the entire chat with a few clicks, erasing it from their servers for good. defends the architecture choice the choice of secret chats All of this is a trade off.  Telegram wanted a way to restore chats and sync them to different devices.  End-to-end encryption makes this a lot harder.  If you switch your phone number on WhatsApp your chats go bye-bye (or you have to unencrypted to Google Drive) because the phone number acts as your personal ID. go through a procedure that backs those chats up Security versus usability is an age old dilemma.  They're inverse properties. The more secure you make something the more hoops you have to jump through to use it.  Make it easier to use and you just compromised the app's safety exponentially.  Programming teams always have to pick between security and making it easier for users.  Make it too secure and people won't adopt it, which is why Signal and other super privacy conscious apps never reach critical mass and remain niche. Most regular people, aka non-privacy conscious, the vast majority of the world, won't use Signal. It's got a clunky interface and and restore your old profiles. That makes it more secure but a lot harder to deal with on a day to day basis. it's complicated to setup a new phone number WhatsApp is based on Signal but it makes compromises to make it easier for users which . WhatsApp offers .  Even if you turn it off, you can't be sure that your friend on the other side did the same.  That means most of your secure end-to-end chats are probably compromised. the EFF flagged as major concerns unencrypted backups to the cloud Paul Manafort .  Even next-gen quantum encryption won't save you if you back your chats up to the cloud. learned this the hard way There's another problem with WhatsApp too.  Facebook has shown a willingness to with ease when authorities comes knocking.  That means they turn over who you talked to and when. From there it's not hard to look for the weak links in your security chain. hand over metadata If you really want to take a stand on hardcore encryption then you probably shouldn't use either WhatsApp or Telegram and you should switch to something like Wire or Signal and just deal with the lack of a pretty interface and the fact that 99% of your friends won't join you there. Telegram's architecture is a compromise between usability and security.  That criticism dogs them to this very day and colors people's perception of the new TON platform before it even gets off the ground. even as nothing but a bunch of buzzwords and hand waving. Redditors and other voices in the Din panned the technical white paper But read through it closely and you’ll realize that if Telegram pulls off even a quarter of what they propose it's revolutionary. For one, they solve the whole debate about whether you need to trust Telegram's servers or not because instead of servers setup by the company and their IT staff, you get a distributed messaging and smart contract layer that serves the entire TON platform instead of a cloud platform. And it doesn't stop there.  If half of what Telegram wants to do works, they’ll solve the scaling, storage, and protect the platform against constant assault from hostile powers. decentralized identity Sure, the paper is a grab bag of ideas, some of them unique and some taking inspiration from a wide spectrum of sources, which they openly acknowledge in the white paper as they directly address everything from Polkadot to Ethereum - but building on other people’s good ideas isn’t a problem, it’s a virtue. It’s only a problem for people suffering from , a debilitating mental disease that makes people think they have all the answers and that nobody else has any idea worth doing. not-invented-here syndrome Libra and the Compromises of a Compromised Company While Libra’s white paper can’t even figure out if its a “blockchain” or a non-blockchain “cryptographically authenticated ," the TON team knows the difference between a blockchain and a hole in the wall. database Telegram is looking to deliver a massively that sends and receives not only money, but encrypted messages and a kickass sticker collection that makes the emojis from WhatsApp’s messenger look like ASCII art. It wants to do all that while enabling robust peer-to-peer encrypted storage for your important documents and . sharded and scalable "fifth generation" blockchain and app ecosystem even allowing for decentralized virtual private networks And yes stickers matter. Remember that UI/UX drives adoption. Regular folks don't care about what makes an app go in the background.  They'll pick usability over security every time if they have a choice. A beautiful interface is the answer. Pretty stickers can gift the world privacy as a trojan horse. And while Facebook soaks up the punishment and pressure from hysterical governments and politicians who with a straight face that they’re worried that Libra’s wallet, which is compliant with Know-Your-Customer and Anti-Money Laundering laws, can be used for “terrorism," Telegram’s team wisely stays out of the spotlight, just like Satoshi Nakamoto did with Bitcoin. say If you want to build a platform in peace, it is better to do your work in private and not draw the attention of publicity-seeking politicians trying to get reelected in battleground states. Governments love . If you don’t give them a head to cut off, then they don’t know where to strike. cutting off the head of the snake But even with all that going for them, does Telegram have the power to build a true platform for e-commerce and the decentralized applications of tomorrow? Can it stand against the titanic forces behind Facebook's nascent digital currency and the masters of the e-commerce universe backing it? That's the trillion dollar question, as the platforms that win the day will control a massive chunk of the world economy and will make or break nations, companies and people. With so much at stake, it’s going to be a war. The Man in the Arena To win, it will take a hero. The might of is nearly absolute. Nation states print money, and printing money is the power of God. the old world guard To break the stranglehold, you need to build a perfect platform: one that’s easy to use, scales massively and is impossible to bring down — a Hydra with a thousand regenerating heads. It must have all the features of the old financial system and new ones nobody can resist. It’s got to bring in people and businesses with ease so it grows too big to fail. At the dawn of the Internet age, technologist and utopians imagined a global network of free services and information, a golden age of openness and democracy.  But all those free services needed bandwidth and servers and people to run them and that cost money. To fund it they pioneered a new business model: Surveillance. Now, the age of is upon us, and it’s growing stronger every day, a dragon that’s eaten the world. surveillance capitalism Facebook is the dragon’s head. There isn't much hope to turn back the tide of Big Brother as a Business (BBaaB) because both big business and governments want to watch us 24x7.  The rise of AI and blockchain will only make scaling surveillance easier and it will prove too tempting for governments and companies alike to resist. But if there’s a knight left among us that can bring that dragon crashing from the skies, the early odds go to Telegram. While Libra can and will leverage Facebook’s 1.7 billion users to rapidly accelerate adoption, Telegram’s user base of over is a growing force in its own right. 200 million people And even with less users, Telegram has one major advantage: Most Facebook users wouldn’t know a Bitcoin from an while Telegram has a vibrant, technically savvy community, including most of the world’s crypto-faithful who host their user groups and do their day-to-day business there. Alf Pog That means when TON drops a bunch of coins in its Telegram attached wallet, a bigger percentage of those users will know how to spend, save and send that money, while Facebook’s users will start ringing the support lines wondering how to reset the password on their private key. That’s not to say Telegram’s team is perfect by any means. They’ve faced intense criticism for a hand-waving white paper that promises much without telling people exactly how it will work. Beyond that, we’ve gotten since their mega ICO. There’s but it’s closed to the wider public for now. In the end, the project might prove too ambitious even for a talented team with a lot of capital on hand. mostly radio silence from the team a private beta They’re also running out of time to deliver. If their team is going to succeed they need to step up now.  The stakes have never been higher. People willingly sacrifice privacy for convenience without a second thought because they've got "nothing to hide." The original crypto dream of self-sovereignty is slowing warping into a terrifying Black Mirror episode, where blockchains don’t enable privacy, they enable ubiquitous surveillance on an unprecedented scale. Chain analysis tools peer deeply into transactions and dedicated to chain analysis. Facebook will happily give them that convenience and a two-way mirror into all of our lives. the SEC is looking for teams and tools Telegram might not be the hero we expected or even the one we wanted, but they might be the very best hope we’ve got for a future that doesn’t look like a dystopian nightmare of panopticoins. They’ve got the programming chops, the money, and a founder with the will to take on the kings of the world. The crypto revolution started idealistically with a twinkle in Satoshi’s eye, hoping beyond hope that technology could save us all from ourselves.  There’s always a certain naivety in revolutions.  You have to be crazy to take on entrenched powers. The kings of the world have the money and guns and the legal hammers and they’re willing to use them at all costs to keep a firm grip on the royal scepter. But some revolutions find a way. And in the coming crypto revolution, Telegram just might be the guerrilla warriors who leads us out of darkness and up into the light. ###################################################### "Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light." - Milton, Paradise Lost #################################################### If you love my work please because that’s where I share special insights with all my fans. visit my Patreon page Top Patrons get EXCLUSIVE ACCESS to so many things: You read it and hear first before anyone else! Ask me anything and I’ll answer. I also share everything I’m working on and give you a behind the scenes look at my process. Early links to every article, podcast and private talk. A monthly virtual meet up and Q&A with me. Access to the legendary Coin Sheets Discord where you’ll find: from me and other pro technical analysis masters. Market calls The only . Coin’bassaders private chat The . private Turtle Beach channel, where coders share various versions of the Crypto Turtle Trader strategy and other signals and trading software look at how I and other pros interpret the market. Behind the scenes #################################################### I’ve got a new podcast, , covering crypto, AI, tech, the future, history, society and more! Check it out for expanded coverage of my most famous articles and ideas. Get on the RSS feed and never miss an episode and stay tuned for some very special guests in the next few months! The Daily PostHuman #################################################### A bit about me: I’m an author, engineer, pro-blogger, podcaster and public speaker. You can check out my latest novel, an epic Chinese sci-fi civil war saga where China throws off the chains of communism and becomes the world’s first direct democracy, running a highly advanced, artificially intelligent decentralized app platform with no leaders. when you join my Readers Group. Readers have called it “the first serious competition to Neuromancer” and “Detective noir meets Johnny Mnemonic.” You can get a FREE copy of my first novel, The Scorpion Game, ################################################# Lastly, you can , where we discuss all things tech, sci-fi, fantasy and more. (And yes we are trying to move it off of Facebook so don't even ask. Security versus usability.  See above debate.) join my private Facebook group, the Nanopunk Posthuman Assassins

Telegram and the Cypherpunk Rebellion Against the Libra Empire

Authors: (1) William P. Wagner IV, Claremont Graduate University. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Definition of Key Terms Fundamentals of Internet Operation Encapsulation Usage-Based Economic Models Net Neutrality Legal History Researcher Conclusions Areas for Further Exploration & References 6. Net Neutrality The debate in the U.S. has moved to the courts and is grounded in a few basic concepts. The basics of the debate are not usually contested, it’s the results of any changes and the legal foundations for either preventing or allowing those changes that is cause for debate. Net Neutrality enters the equation when the network providers want to charge based on content. 6.1. Content Based Subscription Packages The National ISPs want to be allowed to charge certain Content Providers more than others at one end, and charge consumers at the other end for access to that same content. In both cases this might be in addition to any usage fees. Those opposed to net neutrality regulation argue that ISPs need to be able to charge both consumers and providers based on content because certain content providers use more network resources than others, putting un-acceptable demands on the ISP to provide network resources [12]. They claim that regulation will stifle competition amongst ISPs, slowing the spread of broadband and increasing costs to consumers. Those in favor of net neutrality legislation argue that the network resources should be allocated and paid for based solely on usage rather than content. Further, they argue that the networks need to remain content neutral in order to ensure true competition, innovation and investment along the “edge” of the internet. Proponents argue that this edge activity is what spurs network growth and user need, not the other way around. 6.2. “Fast lanes” The National ISPs want to be able to throttle the speed or charge extra based on content or content provider to provide “fast lanes.” Opponents of net neutrality legislation argue that the content does not always originate on their network, so they are forced to absorb increased network traffic and allocate resources without seeing any direct benefit. Proponents of net neutrality argue that the ISPs bill their customers based on a usage plan that measures both speed and total data. The consumer is paying for a certain size pipe. The ISP does not refund money when the pipe is un-used, and the consumer cannot exceed the size of the pipe, so why should the ISP charge the consumer more when they maximize their purchased allocation? 6.3. ISP Content Providers Some of the National ISPs are also Content Providers. Opponents of net neutrality argue this has no bearing on the previous two changes. They argue that this will not lead to ISPs increasing prices to their competitors, but instead will offer consumers discounted prices for in-house entertainment. Proponents of net neutrality argue that most of the country is only served by one or two high-speed solutions per location, so allowing an ISP to throttle or surcharge their consumers based on content or creator is monopolistic. Most consumers simply do not have any option to change to. They argue this would lead to less competition and innovation, and higher prices to the consumer for less bandwidth. 6.4. International ISPs The National ISPs want regulation to prevent similar billing structures from the International ISPs down to the National level. The National ISPs argue that National ISPs provide the necessary link to needed customers while International ISPs are basically just networking between National ISPs. The National ISPs argue they provide the crucial link to the consumers of both networking and application services and in many cases they are the sole provider, so the International ISPs need them to reach the consumers. The International ISPs argue they need to absorb network traffic from all National ISPs and that some National ISPs use far more resources than others. Further, they argue that very little of the traffic they carry originates on their network – affording them little opportunity to charge at the source. Proponents of network neutrality in the US would argue that the National ISPs represent themselves as competition to themselves when discussing U.S. Net Neutrality, however they present themselves as the sole provider in many cases when negotiating with the International ISPs. This paper is under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED license. available on arxiv

The Net Neutrality Debate: Content Charges, Fast Lanes, and ISP Content Providers

TL;DR: To what extent do digital designers and user researchers in industry make use of AI-powered systems to support their work? The answer seems to be “not much,” as we found in a survey with 34 practitioners. In general, there seems to be little awareness of the specific advantages AI can bring to a design process and which tools are already out there, despite significant issues with existing processes that could be well mitigated with the help of AI. However, designers and researchers are very open to the topic and would appreciate AI-powered systems to support them in both ideation and evaluation. Providing practitioners with such systems that are easily accessible and demonstrate added value holds great opportunities. This article describes research that has been conducted in collaboration with , , and . The [2] was published at the (ICWE). Maxim Bakaev Johanna Jagow Sebastian Heil research paper 2022 International Conference on Web Engineering Design and research are a thing. (AI) is a thing. But they’re not quite a thing together yet. There have been massive advances in AI over the past decades. Yet, designers and user researchers in the digital industry still often execute human-centered design processes manually and tediously — from clicking together prototypes to conducting fiddly usability tests to adjusting a design to different screen sizes. (If they have the time and resources to do it properly, that is.) The specific software designers and researchers are using has changed, and there are advances in, e.g., remote asynchronous user testing. But apart from that, the way design is being done, by and large, still doesn’t look much different from what Alan Cooper described in the first edition of in the 1990s (except for design thinking, but that’s ). While that’s not a bad thing at all (you should really listen to Alan Cooper when you wanna design properly), in today’s fast-paced, dynamic environments with their ever-growing amounts of devices, user segments and personalization strategies, tight budgets, and even tighter timelines, we could all use some help. And in the case of digital design and user research, that is where AI comes into play. Artificial intelligence that About Face a different story Or so we thought. There’s a variety of tools out there that leverage the power of AI and aim at supporting designers and researchers in their processes. Some strive to progress the automatic creation of wireframes and interfaces (e.g., [3] and [4]). Some aim at being able to replace traditional approaches to usability testing (e.g., [5] and [7]). Still others automatically generate interface-related performance metrics (e.g., [1] and the [6]). Yet, none of these seem to be overly popular among practitioners. There’s a clear gap between what’s already out there in terms of AI-powered tools and what designers and researchers rely on in their daily work. Is this a marketing problem, since most of these tools stem from academic projects? Or do practitioners see no added value in them? Paper2Wire Chen et al. ’s work USF WaPPU Bakaev et al. ’s work Aalto Interface Metrics To get to the bottom of this, my colleagues Maxim Bakaev, Johanna Jagow, and Sebastian Heil and I initiated a research project in which we set out to answer two research questions: and, more importantly Do practitioners indeed not have the time and resources to follow proper design processes? Why don’t they leverage AI-powered tools to mitigate that issue? What did we find? Based on an online survey we conducted (we’ll get to the details later), first of all, designers’ and researchers’ processes in industry indeed seem to be pretty “standard,” as mentioned in the introduction above. That is, we mostly heard about some kind of human-centered design done along some variation of the double-diamond model. There was no mention of AI when asking about existing processes. Second, the major obstacle to a proper design process seems to be (easy) access to the right users for research; and if there is access and proper user research could be done, conflicting corporate timelines and limited resources. Third, a considerable amount of designers and researchers seem to know and use validation and checking tools such as or the . Also, tools for automatically generating UX-/UI-related metrics are relatively well known. However, the opposite hold for tools that enable automated (i.e., “user-less”) usability evaluation and the like. Overall, the AI-based kinds of tools we were after in our survey seem to be virtually unknown to designers and researchers in industry. Test.ai W3C Validator Fourth, when asking about the reasons for not working with AI-powered tools, the top three responses were a lack of familiarity (cf. point 3 above), cost considerations, and a perceived lack of added value. Based on these findings (please refer to for a more detailed analysis), we formulated three challenges and three opportunities w.r.t. existing design processes and how to potentially support them with AI (taken from [ ]): the actual research paper 2 “– CHALLENGE 1. Finding and recruiting relevant participants for user studies, especially for specialized products. Availability of users. “– CHALLENGE 2. Tight deadlines and timeframes limited by stakeholders and processes, and a lack of user research resources Lack of time and resources. . “– CHALLENGE 3. There seems to be little awareness of what exactly ML-/AI-based systems constitute and in which ways they can support design processes. Designers’ unfamiliarity with ML/AI. “– OPPORTUNITY 1. In principle, digital designers and user researchers welcome tools that support their processes and they do follow the topic (e.g., ). Openness to new things. “Not a part of our current process, but open to trying them if they can mitigate our issues finding qualified users.” “– OPPORTUNITY 2. New AI-/ML-based tools do have a chance to gain traction as currently, there seem to be no established players. Open playing field. “– OPPORTUNITY 3. Specifically ideation (in the sense of creating wireframes, mockups, and prototypes) and evaluation (of design artifacts) are mentioned as the activities in which practitioners would appreciate support.” Support for ideation & evaluation. How did we find it? Our findings are based on a survey we conducted with 34 digital designers and user researchers from industry, a majority of which came from Germany or the U.S. While this is not exactly the largest sample size we’ve ever worked with, our participants had a lot of experience in their field (more than 8 years on average), with several reporting to work for major companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Meta, and Bosch. The survey itself comprised 28 questions that could be completed in 20–40 minutes, hence the relatively small sample size (boy, it’s really difficult to get people to fill out surveys that take longer than 5 minutes!). It inquired into participants’ design processes, their familiarity with common design tools like InVision and Figma, their familiarity with a set of “user-less” tools, and demographics and open-ended feedback. Of these, the third part — familiarity with “user-less” tools — was of particular interest to us since it contained all of the AI-powered tools for supporting design processes. It’s no exaggeration to say it was the core of the whole exercise. Overall, we identified a set of 61 “user-less” tools and platforms — both academic and commercial — that supported at least semi-automation and were further classified into categories such as “generative tools based on AI/ML,” “automated usability validation/evaluation,” “behavior simulation/GUI testing automation,” etc. For each of the 61 tools, we asked the survey participants whether they know them and whether they actively use them, with the sobering result described above. For a complete list of the tools and categories, please check out our . online appendix What comes next? We’re well aware that we didn’t run a representative study and that there is, among other things, still a need to gain deeper qualitative insights about designers’ and researchers’ processes and (potential) interactions with AI-based systems. Yet, our research has already yielded some valuable indications. Mainly that restricted timelines and resources in industry are a major and very real obstacle to the proper execution of design processes (a confirmation of what everyone knows already); access to appropriate users for research is often a pain point; and AI could help with the above two, e.g., by automating tedious, mechanical parts of a design process and providing access to “user-less” evaluation. Yet, there seems to be a lot of room for improvement when it comes to leveraging this support to alleviate strain from practitioners. As next steps in our research agenda, we plan to extend the set of 61 “user-less” tools and platforms into a fully-fledged taxonomy, gather the above mentioned deeper qualitative insights, and work towards a specific set of requirements that practitioners have for efficient and effective AI support of their everyday work. With all of these, we want to work towards a deeper understanding of what the specific problems with existing AI-powered systems are and what needs to change so that they gain more traction among designers and developers in industry. So, stay tuned, . there’s more of this research to come In the meantime, you can head over to ResearchGate and give our paper “ ” [2] a thorough read for more detailed information on our research and its results. We Don’t Need No Real Users?! Surveying the Adoption of User-less Automation Tools by UI Design Practitioners ☕ I love coffee, and if you want to support my work, you can always , or subscribe to . 🗞️ spend me one my newsletter References Bakaev, Maxim, Sebastian Heil, Vladimir Khvorostov, and Martin Gaedke. “ .” 17, no. 6 (2018): 561–590. Auto-extraction and integration of metrics for web user interfaces Journal of Web Engineering Bakaev, Maxim, Maximilian Speicher, Johanna Jagow, Sebastian Heil, and Martin Gaedke. “ .” In , pp. 406–414. Springer, Cham, 2022. We Don’t Need No Real Users?! Surveying the Adoption of User-less Automation Tools by UI Design Practitioners International Conference on Web Engineering Buschek, Daniel, Charlotte Anlauff, and Florian Lachner. “ .” In , pp. 33–41. 2020. Paper2Wire: a case study of user-centred development of machine learning tools for UX designers Proceedings of the Conference on Mensch und Computer Chen, Chunyang, Ting Su, Guozhu Meng, Zhenchang Xing, and Yang Liu. “ .” In , pp. 665–676. 2018. From UI design image to GUI skeleton: a neural machine translator to bootstrap mobile GUI implementation Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering Grigera, Julián, Alejandra Garrido, José Matías Rivero, and Gustavo Rossi. “ .” 97 (2017): 129–148. Automatic detection of usability smells in web applications International Journal of Human-Computer Studies Oulasvirta, Antti, Samuli De Pascale, Janin Koch, Thomas Langerak, Jussi Jokinen, Kashyap Todi, Markku Laine et al. “ .” In , pp. 16–19. 2018. Aalto Interface Metrics (AIM) A Service and Codebase for Computational GUI Evaluation The 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology Adjunct Proceedings Speicher, Maximilian, Andreas Both, and Martin Gaedke. “ .” In , pp. 93–110. Springer, Cham, 2014. Ensuring web interface quality through usability-based split testing International Conference on Web Engineering Originally published here.

What Needs to Happen Before AI Becomes a Thing in Design and Research 

In March 2022, Joe officially asked the Federal Reserve (FED) to urgently begin developing plans for a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), or a so-called ‘digital dollar’. The US government is now starting to recognize the latent possibilities of the burgeoning digital asset market and hopes to use this technology to create a CBDC that will But what is a CBDC? How does it relate to cryptocurrency, and what are the latest developments in the great CBDC experiment? Biden “preserve the dominant role of the U.S. dollar.” What is a CBDC? The FED a CBDC as “a digital liability of a central bank that is widely available to the general public.” The ‘digital’ part is not so innovative insofar as most people these days already hold money in a digital form one way or another, such as commercial bank accounts. The uniqueness of a CBDC primarily lies in the fact that it is a central bank liability rather than a classic commercial bank liability. defines When a person holds money at a commercial bank, the commercial bank itself has an obligation to ‘pay out’ upon request and exchange the digital record of money for physical cash. However, in a system like ours today, banks have a limited asset pool with which to fulfill these obligations and they must rely on mechanisms like deposit insurance to maintain consumer confidence and avoid . Hence, the ‘digital money that is the liability of a commercial bank comes with a great deal of systemic instability. At any moment, an event could cause consumers to get spooked. fractional reserve banking bank runs People queue around the block to get USD from an ATM in St Petersburg, Russia on  March 8, 2022. Image credit: ‘Нетиптчный Питер’ Telegram Channel For a CBDC, the issuing central bank is the institution with an obligation. Unlike commercial banks, a central bank possesses a monopoly on increasing the monetary , and thus holding a CBDC entails far fewer confidence-related vulnerabilities and no obligation to maintain an underlying asset pool since the central bank could always just issue more CBDCs. A CBDC is, therefore “analogous to a digital form of paper money” as it can be used without a “credit or liquidity risk.” base While acknowledging the huge successes and “explosive growth” of digital currencies like Bitcoin, the President expressed concern about the risks of unregulated cryptoassets for “consumer protection, financial stability, national security, and [the] climate.” In the hope of mitigating these risks, as well as “harnessing the potential benefits” in order to “reinforce American leadership in the global financial system,” Biden asked federal agencies to explore the creation of a US CBDC. How does it relate to the rest of the crypto industry? Despite these recent announcements from the U.S. administration, the FED is late to the CBDC party. In a , released in January 2021, 56 of the 65 central banks surveyed were engaged in some kind of CBDC development. One of the major motivations spurring central banks to continue research in this area are the “cross-border [payment] implications” of CBDCs. The FED that current cross-border payments “remain slow and costly.” Improving cross-border payments relies on fully utilizing “new technologies,” which is where private crypto firms come into the picture. BIS Paper recognized The development of a CBDC is not the only form of payment modernization that could bring about improvements. A written by an Arab Monetary Fund advisory group listed 3 alternatives including improvements to messaging protocols, coordination of existing RTP (Real Time Payment) systems, and the use of cryptocurrencies. white paper Messaging protocols include providers like , , and that essentially increase the efficiency of the old-style model where banks use their deposits in different countries to pass-along funds through a chain of intermediaries to the final recipient. SWIFT Revolut RippleNet correspondent banking ‘Coordinating RTP systems’ is the approach taken by providers like and is based upon promoting cross-border interoperability between instantaneous, domestic payment systems. The Clearing House Finally, although usually used more often as a speculative investment, specialist cryptocurrencies designed as a payment solution, like , have the potential to bypass the entire legacy payment system. They operate as standalone currencies that can be instantly passed between digital wallets across national borders. Ripple XRP Image credit: blokt These potential solutions are important to note because, to put it simply, CBDCs may well become redundant if one of these alternative forms of payment modernization is adopted by mainstream financial institutions. For example, major banks like and are already adopting new RTP systems and the FED’s white paper even named The Clearing House’s a successful “real-time interbank payment system.” Likewise, if the court rules in favor of Ripple in a now infamous , then XRP could face fewer impediments to widespread adoption. Wells Fargo J.P. Morgan RTP network SEC lawsuit So where are we now? CBDCs are by no means faltering despite having plenty of competition in the FinTech arms race. Perhaps the most promising recent development for future CBDCs is the paper, titled ‘International settlements using multi-CBDCs’, published by the in March 2022. In this paper, BIS presents its latest project that aims to create a digital currency platform that would “facilitate cross-border transactions between financial institutions.” They have already successfully developed 2 working prototypes, including . Project Dunbar Bank for International Settlements Patior I’m very optimistic on this matter if you dig into my exploring the uses of blockchain technology in the modern monetary policy you can probably find: paper “The use of blockchain technology…in the monetary policies of states can be implemented by issuing a digital currency that can become an alternative to the current dollar settlement system.” Although the potential of CBDCs is debatable, it is worth considering whether we should be skeptical about the idea of government-supported CBDCs and question whether they would be aligned with the general ethos of cryptocurrency.

How’s the Great CBDC Experiment Going?

I wrote this article for Stable Report back in September 2019. I am reposting now since it is a good primer for where we are, and I will be posting a update that will reference this article soon. Please note, that the Digital Euro was not live when I first write this article, but China's CBDC is already functional, and the Digital Euro is expected to go live in the coming few years. In a quest to decentralize the globe, entrepreneurs have strived to create a new status quo for the world. Money, and the functions money serve, have been the main target of innovation. In the half decade past, the industry has blossomed tremendously, with projects like Ethereum, R3’s Corda, Hyperledger and more, becoming platforms for a new generation of high tech solutions facilitated by Blockchain and cryptography. These innovations, although initially supported by small teams working on relatively fringe projects, has now reached highs that seems impossible a few years back. Market behemoths, like JP Morgan Chase, Facebook, Walmart, and more, have all become involved in the space with their own blockchain projects. Although Stable Report focusing on stablecoins, and we see the introduction of large corporates as validation of the potential of this market, we recognize that private corporation are not the only players entering the space. Central Banks and their Digital Currency projects are very real, and will enter the market sooner rather than later. The introduction on Facebook’s Libra (read Stable Report’s article on ) has been a wakeup call for Central Banks around the world. The People’s Bank of China has been leading the way, and the industry media are buzzing with updates on their upcoming plans. But what are Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), and how do they function? Who are the key players in the market, which Central Banks will act first, and what is the expected timeline of CBDCs? Is Bitcoin dead again? Libra here Types and Functions of CBDCs: Through a Bank of International Settlements’(BIS) paper on , a breakdown of money types was presented. The “Money Tree”, a Venn-like diagram the divided money characteristics into four separate categories, is presented below. These characteristics are a) digital, b) central bank issued, c) token/value-based, and d) widely accessible. Central Bank Digital Currency The Money Tree, which should be familiar to researchers of CBDCs, is a good tool for differentiating cryptocurrencies, traditional bank deposits and CBDCs from each other. In this diagram, three separate CBDC categories emerge: a) Central bank, account-based CBDCs, b) Token-based CBDCs for commercial banks, and c) Token-based CBDCs for general use. The differences between the two token-based models is slight but important, since the proposed use of the two models focuses on different users. The commercial bank token model is focused on maintaining the Bank’s reserve targets and alleviating the settlement delays between the central bank and commercial banks. This solves pain points like overnight loans, cross-back payments, and more. The general purpose token-based CBDC model, however, would expand these uses to everyday transactions within the market – something like a central bank-sponsored Venmo, PayPal or CashApp using CBDC tokens. The benefit of this model would be the continuation of existing banking practices with little deviation from today’s banking state of affairs. The third option, Account-based CBDCs, however, would expand the functions of central banks in way not seen in the past. This CBDC model would allow citizens and CBDC users to hold their funds in central bank-based accounts, potentially cutting into the market share of commercial banks. As presented in the BIS survey on CBDCs, the potential for users to shift funds from commercial bank accounts and into CBDC accounts can be quite high in certain occasions. There are a lot of other factors a Central Bank needs to be mindful of before issuing a CBDC, but in many ways, selecting which of the above models a central bank will develop is the most important determinant to how significant a CBDC will be to the banking sector and the future of monetary policy. Key Projects and Players in CBDCs: So which Central Banks are exploring CBDCs, and how close are they to being officially issued? As mentioned above, the interest towards CBDCs skyrocketed when the People’s Bank of China announced that it is expediting the launch of their own project; a decision which in turn was fueled by Facebook’s Libra stablecoin. Media coverage seems to suggest that the CBDC will be launching in late 2019, namely around November, and specifically before the launch of Libra in 2020. Official designs for The People’s Bank of China’s CBDC are still not public, but reports dictate that it will be a two-tier system, with tokens being issued to banks and large telecommunication companies directly from the central bank, and through a private blockchain. The second tier system, from banks and telecom business to users, is still no known, although the PBoC aims for a transaction rate of around 300.000 per second. A more in depth analysis can be found in . Binance Research’s dedicated segment on the topic Although PBoC’s CBDC is the world’s leading CBDC project, with research starting all the way back in 2014, you will find, unsurprisingly, multiple other banks extensively researching CBDCs. In the aforementioned BIS survey indicates that out of the 63 central banks which partook into their research, a whopping 70% (or 44 central banks) are currently, or soon to be, engaged in serious CBDC research. In fact, the first consumer-based pilot CBDC program was launched by the Bank of Uruguay in late 2017. The program, otherwise known as the e-Peso, was an effort to increase financial inclusion in the country, and 20m e-Pesos were minted and distributed to businesses and individuals. The fund transfers were instant and peer-to-peer, either through text messages or through a dedicated e-Peso mobile app. The pilot was a success and was concluded in April of 2018. No further trials or plans are public as of yet. An additional CBDC pilot project is underway in Sweden, however no official date is set as of yet. With the ever falling use of cash throughout Sweden, Sveriges Riksbank is exploring a e-Krona CBDC as a digital cash alternative. For Sveriges Riksbank, the rise of private payment providers, namely Swish - and app that has achieved near 60% market penetration by 2018 – brings with it unwanted third party risk, and the e-Krona could be a more secure solution as money enters the digital age. However, the number of projects being researched and tested are plentiful and quite diverse. Accenture’s Global Blockchain Technology division has been particularly invested in CBDC research and implementation. Their reports and do a great job exploring the technical setup and social need for smart CBDC development by central banks. (R)evolution of Money (R)evolution of Money II (R)evolution of Money II lists a myriad of projects Accenture has been a part of. Often times in partnership with R3, Accenture has been instrumental in leading Project Jasper, Project Jasper-Ubin, Project Stella and more, paving the way for CBDC experimentation and proving that the technology is mature enough to handle the volumes of transactions expected by CBDCs. This report mentions the exploratory work on CBDCs by the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, the European Central Bank, the Riksbank, the Bank of Japan, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank; and is highly recommended reading for anyone that wants to learn more about CBDCs. This piece would be amiss if it didn’t mention the work being conducted by the Bank of Russia, the Bank of Iran, and Venezuela’s Petro. Although the aforementioned projects are under development, little is known about the structure of Iran’s and Russia’s CBDCs, except that both have been touted as responses to US-imposed financial sanctions. Venezuela’s Petro, although state-sponsored, has more characteristics similar to a traditional asset-backed stable cryptocurrency than a CBDC, and has been highly controversial and mistrusted. On a final note, CBDC exploration does not end there, with multiple other Central Banks reviewing the technology and gradually moving forward with it. The Hackernoon article “ ” is a good resource for anyone seeking to explore country-specific projects. CBCD: 19 Countries Creating or Researching the Issuance of a Digital Decentralized Currency The expected timeline for globe-wide CBDC development is yet unknown, but the space in heating up. China, which is leading the way, is expected to launch before 2020, but the timeline for CBDC issuance by western central banks still seems far away. Expected Timeline of CBDC Launch: In conference, the topic of CBDCs was discussed. Michael Warner, strategist for the San Francisco Fed, argued that a FedCoin is still at least a decade way, and that the Fed will be the last institution to explore CBDCs since the US Dollar is already leading the traditional global financial market. IBM’s Think 2019 In the Europe front, the ECB has mentioned that Wholesale CBDCs are a viable option for the future. In most cases, wholesale CBDCs between commercial banks and central banks seem to be the technology that central banks are most excited to explore. All signs show that these will lead the way. Therefore, it seems safe to say that the 2020s might be the decade of financial innovation on money, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and CBDCs. Everything seems to align with this trajectory, and money is due to change forever. Get ready. Conclusions and Other Thoughts So, where do we stand? CBDCs seem to be becoming a reality sooner rather than later; at least in the East and in emerging markets. What is holding their development back, and are CBDCs a threat to cryptocurrencies? What about stablecoins? The answers are not yet known, but with the information available, let’s try to speculate. For most cases, CBDCs will start through wholesale, with Central Banks issuing token to commercial banks long before you, the end user, gets a hold of them. Why is that? Well, mostly because the technology can help elevate pain points in the settlement process between banks and central banks. Will general purpose, token-based CBDCs enter the retail market? Yes, but probably after wholesale CBDCs become the norm in the back-end of intra-bank and cross-bank transaction. Commercial bank account (or an alternative) will be needed to access these CBDCs when they come. What about the third option? CBDC accounts in the Central Banks for general purposes? The future for such project is unknown, but it seems to bring an unnecessary risk with their implementation. It will be a financial innovation that commercial banks won’t be ready for, since Central Bank accounts will inherently be less risky; and of course less profitable, with no interest returns offered to account holders. But will a meager interest rate counter the uncertainty of keeping your money in commercial bank accounts? Not in times of economic downturn, nor when interest rates are in near historic lows, like today. In most cases, account-based CBDCs will interfere with fractional reserve banking, and I expect them to be the last CBDC version to be explored, and only in countries where financial uncertainty is at its peak. What about Stablecoin competition? CBDCs might just be the main competitor to fiat-backed stablecoins as long as high trust toward the Central Banks exist. However, the cryptocurrency industry was built as a hedge to the whole industry, and decentralized stablecoins will provide exposure to an asset that is theoretically uncorrelated to CBDCs. Would you trust your money with the Central Bank of Greece during the early 2010s financial crisis if they had a CBDC, for example? What about Bitcoin and other pure cryptocurrencies? CBDCs are simply a different beast altogether. No one can offer the privacy protection of Monero, Z-Cash and Dash, and Bitcoin’s value is proven to be uncorrelated to traditional markets and will lead the price of the rest of the blockchain industry. Virtual Machine platforms, like Ethereum, EOS and Cardano, are also significantly different to non-smart contract capable CBDCs, and it looks unlikely that any of the CBDCs researched as the moment will aim to create the smart contract functionality Ethereum or stablecoins like Libra and Terra are focusing on. Lastly, non-backed, algorithmic stablecoins are multi-coin systems that aim to stabilize their price by expanding and contracting the supply of their token. Isn’t that similar to what central banks do since the end of Bretton Woods? It seems that highly innovative projects, like said algorithmic stablecoin, will only flourish when trust and ever expanding usage of their system is established. For that to be the case, it is very likely that a central bank will have to support it – which does beat the purpose initially, but these systems can then be tested accurately, iterated upon securely, and decentralized later on. Does this seem like an impossibility? Well, surprisingly no! Outgoing head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, has brought up the possibility of as they enter the mainstream financial markets. Of course, existing regulations will need to apply to these companies before any such formal action takes place. But as Ms. Lagarde takes the helm of the European Central Bank, the world will follow closely and monitor the way she handles an industry created to leave her out of a job. Until November 1st, when she takes over the ECB, the IMF paper on is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic. Central Banks acting as a lender of last resort to blockchain businesses the Rise of Digital Money As a final word, the world of money is changing, and the efforts of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs seems to have been successful in pushing the status quo in ways that seemed impossible a few years back. CBDCs, in retrospect, seem like an inevitable response to Bitcoin and Stablecoins. Now is the time. Let’s see what these entrepreneurs can accomplish, and how CBDCs will affect their projects’ future. Editorial note: Since the creation of this article, a number of key steps have been taken. First of all, the Digital Euro seems well on its way in Europe. Libra has intentionally reissued it's whitepaper and rebranded into Diem, and Algorithmic Stablecoins has started to remerge as potentially viable money alternatives. This was Xenofon Kontouris. To follow up on my work on Stabelcoins, CBDCs and Crypto, please follow me on Twitter at @XenofonOfAthens

A Primer on Central Bank Digital Currency – What’s going on? 

AI in Biotech: Challenges, Use Cases and Prospects

I asked myself this question recently, which of course led me to thinking about the possible answers. I asked a colleague, and they said that they supposed it would be a case of  ‘same old, same old’, if bitcoin didn’t exist, or that something else might have emerged. In fact, I can’t think what that alternative might have been, because blockchain seems to me an entirely logical consequence of a matured worldwide web. I’m using ‘bitcoin’ in the question as a kind of shorthand for ‘blockchain’, because they are inextricably connected. Blockchain is the software protocol that is the foundation of cryptocurrencies, and it couldn’t exist without the Internet. When I considered the question, it struck me that the best way to answer it is to look at all the positive benefits that blockchain has brought us: in other words, what would we be missing if it didn’t exist? Although, let’s remember that we are still in the early days of blockchain, and we are nowhere near understanding its full potential. Who invented blockchain? The answer to that is a person or group of people called ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’.  This name is of course synonymous with bitcoin, because its first use was to build the public transaction ledger for the bitcoin cryptocurrency. It is an open, distributed ledger that records transactions between two parties in an efficient, verifiable and permanent way. It’s this characteristic that made it ideal for financial services. To put it simply, as Guru99’s blockchain tutorial does: “The blockchain is used for the secure transfer of items like money, property, contracts, etc. without requiring a third-party intermediary like bank or government.” Why invent blockchain? The desire to remove third-party intermediaries was a response to the global financial crisis caused by the big banks back in 2007. Public opinion quickly went through a 180-degree turnaround and respected institutions became pariahs. So, there is a case for claiming that if the bankers hadn’t almost crippled the developed world, perhaps we might have had to wait for another Big Event before the technology-minded developers considered creating what became known as the blockchain. Up until then, banks served as intermediaries between us, the customers, whether business or consumer, and people or companies we needed to send money to, or receive it ourselves. What the financial crash revealed to everyone is that the banking operations were not at all transparent, because they were centralized systems operated by a cabal with over-inflated salaries. Then we were told what they had been doing, especially with sub-prime mortgages that disadvantaged the most financially vulnerable sections of society, and the feeling that they couldn’t be trusted grew. But what could we trust? The answer emerged as the blockchain, which is ‘decentralized and trustless’, partly because the whole blockchain is pure maths, and the numbers don’t lie. That is one way to put it. Decentralization is also key to the blockchain. Rather than a single entity controlling it, the blockchain operates on a network of computers with no overarching control centre. The birth of Fintech Meanwhile, bitcoin and the other emerging cryptocurrencies became a hot topic, with bankers such as Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan famously loathing it, a sentiment shared by Warren Buffet who called crypto “rat poison squared”, while a swathe of Bitcoin Bulls, such as Max Keiser, have talked it up. Moreover, because people like Keiser came from a financial services background, he and similar supporters made more solid claims for the leading cryptocurrency than bitcoin’s initial support community, which mostly consisted of cypherpunks and libertarians. As crypto shifted towards the mainstream, Fintech emerged. This shortened form of ‘financial technologies’ soon demonstrated how blockchain could be used to provide more efficient transaction options to businesses and consumers. The arrival of companies such as Transferwise threatened the bank’s monopoly on financial services, because with their cumbersome legacy systems, they simply couldn’t compete with a platform that could provide same-day international currency exchanges for fees up to 90% less than those charged by banks for the same service. The mobile world of neobanks Consequently, Fintech has made a dent in the retail banking sector. The blockchain made possible the birth of neobanks, typically digital-only banks, accessed by customers via an app on a mobile device. A report by Medici published in 2019 suggested that neobanks are having the same effect on banking, as quantum theory did on our ideas about reality. It also explains that the neobanks have gained their successes because they are meeting the customer where they are and are finding ways to connect advice, banking, and investing in one experience. Europe, and in particular the UK, is leading the charge of the neobanks, or challenger banks, as some people refer to them, with the leading brands being Atom Bank, Tandem Bank, Monzo, Starling Bank, Revolut, and N26. However, the developing world is where the use of blockchain-based banking services can potentially have the most impact. Worldwide, some 1.7 billion adults are unbanked. However, two-thirds of them have mobile phones, and this makes digital banking an attractive proposition if financial inclusion is to be achieved. A white paper by Network International says “The amount of money processed through point of sale (POS) devices – such as card machines – remains only 5% of GDP in Africa, compared to over 30% in some countries.” Commenting on this, Andrew Key, MD of Network International’s Africa division said, “Cards have a long future ahead, but I predict that in Africa a large portion of the population will start with a digital version of an account.” No blockchain? Whilst blockchain has become a force to reckoned with in the financial world, whether from a financial services perspective, or from that of the acceptance of digital currencies, this is not the only sector where blockchain has had an impact. Medical records, legal documents relating to contracts and property, taxation and the tokenisation of anything from an Aston Martin to a private mansion are all examples of other blockchain uses. And there will be more to come. To sum up, if blockchain didn’t exist, then we wouldn’t have fintech, neobanking, smart contracts or any of the other myriad ways of using this technology. Perhaps most significantly, we wouldn’t have what I think of as the democracy of a decentralized system that is inclusive, and where ‘trust’ is no longer required. We would not have that if bitcoin didn’t exist.

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