Disqus - Latest Comments for sytaylor

Re: Fat Protocols

sytaylor — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 12:17:50 -0000

Wayne, as ever I think you talk a lot of sense here. As tempting as it is to follow this blog post (which is by the way to the OP - a very neat and compelling narrative)... I don't think it's workable to assume token sales will create value for a wide stakeholder base in the short to medium (3 to 7 year) time frames.

Bearer assets are not fun, IOUs are fun.

Re: Blockchain Inside Regulations Is NOT Innovation

sytaylor — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 10:08:54 -0000

I don't disagree the best use cases will be outside regulated financial services. Much like the best users of cloud and big data are not the incumbent blue chip organisations. Still their curiosity is valuable for funding and driving forward the entire space.

Re: Think The Blockchain is Interesting But Bitcoin Isn’t? Think Again

sytaylor — Sun, 17 May 2015 10:27:26 -0000

But then - what else is there that has the hashing power (Scale) and permissionless nature of Bitcoin?

Those properties are at least interesting. Granted, they're not proven.

Re: Think The Blockchain is Interesting But Bitcoin Isn’t? Think Again

sytaylor — Sun, 17 May 2015 10:26:25 -0000

Agree Brett - in fact Tim Swanson (@ofnumbers) has some excellent charts that show Bitcoin isn't liquid, it's just being hoarded or used as profit for miners and is a circular economy.

My follow up will be "things wrong with Bitcoin" or what it needs to do to go mainstream or something to that effect.

I also didn't ham up enough the role of a Ripple, Stellar or Eris in the short term for banks :)

Re: Banks Can’t Have Innovation Because? False Certainty Kills It

sytaylor — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 06:05:11 -0000

Regulation is simply public opinion on a 24 month delay. How regulation is implemented is a separate issue though.

Why does proving to the regulator that a bank is meeting its requirements require so many spreadsheets? Is it not within the gift of those subject to regulation to simply provide open transparent databases using modern technology? The issue is one of culture. Implementing the letter of the law rather than to it's intention through dialogue with regulators.

Re: 2.0 in 2015: Industry Seeks Massive Investments to Turn Theory Into Reality

sytaylor — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 09:15:03 -0000

Is bitcoin a currency or a platform for apps? It's neither. It's a protocol for trustless value exchange at scale. The layers above that have yet to be built, but there is a real need to do so. If W3C had an open source competitor I'd love to see it get off its backside and make a difference.

The guys at Chain.com have the right idea, but I sense there's a massive gap between what they're building and what needs to be built.

This argument basically splits into 3

1) Can / should you use bitcoin?
2) Can /should you use something similar?
3) How do 1 and 2 play together?

There are good answers to all of the above depending on what you want to achieve. For example, if you're creating a family budget, an hadoop cluster is a remarkably inefficient way to do so. If you want to read in all of the weather data for the last 10 years, and cross reference that with every credit card transaction made at 10am in Western Europe then a NoSQL architecture might be the way to go...

SImilarly, there are design trade offs to be made when selecting a distributed ledger or consensus based technology to solve a given problem.

The work that hasn't been done is to look at the strengths and weaknesses of each and try to break those out.into business language. I'm sure it exists in the minds of a number of core Devs and journos, but if you're going to attack anything other than the margins with this technology you need to understand where its strengths are and how to play to them.

Re: The Flaw With HCE

sytaylor — Sat, 05 Jul 2014 08:45:57 -0000

Isn't the way more interesting thing BLE for merchants at least?

Re: The Bank to Developer (B2D) SDK and Business Model

sytaylor — Sun, 11 May 2014 09:26:21 -0000

Thanks for the comment Adrian. I'd like to challenge the premise that APIs are only useful for a subset of consumer functionality. In the very short term, banks could take out a ton of "keeping the lights on" cost by sorting out their own internal systems integration with APIs.

Once that bedrock is in place then I can see small companies like Moni technologies, Transferwise or Azimo actually using the APIs a bank exposes on the consumer level. At enterprise level, organisations like SAP or Salesforce would be a great home for FX capability, FPS, SWIFT or CHAPS capability.

Bank's APIs could flow upstream or downstream. Up into services like SAP, or down into consumer / commercial Apps.

Re: Musings on Full Stack Financial Services startups

sytaylor — Mon, 05 May 2014 16:10:47 -0000

So I think there is a huge opportunity for any bank that really 'gets' the need for the above. Counter Intuitively I think the road to a full stack FS start up, is for the incumbents to become more horizontal in how they offer services.

The "wholesale banking" term doesn't really describe wholesaling in the way it would apply in say the Telco sector. There's the bit that runs the pipes, and the bit that sells the service over the top of the pipes.

You can be both, but you have to create a logical, physical and software separation between those two parts.

Banks don't do innovation well but can raise capital and are fully up to date with regulation and compliance.

Startups don't do regulation particularly well, struggle with the scale of finance needed to offer a decent breadth and depth of financial services but are great at innovation.

I know some banks are starting to offer out APIs to solve this, but it's not got the rocket skates it needs to really really take off.

Re: Bitcoin: what happens when the miners pack up their gear?

sytaylor — Sat, 03 May 2014 07:47:40 -0000

Makes sense you couldn't actually cap the G/hs, but you could limit the reward per node. Which got me thinking then you'd get miners who scale horizontally or who transact between each other to be allowed to mine more.

I don't know what - it - is, but there has to be some way to commoditise mining.

Re: Bitcoin: what happens when the miners pack up their gear?

sytaylor — Fri, 02 May 2014 06:50:50 -0000

Great article

Isn't the solution stunningly simple?

Commoditise mining at the minimum secure viability of the network. The difficulty number is the issue, the maths for it as you point out is very crude.

My idea is what if you only allowed commodity miners on the network, by capping the Gh/s per node, or better only allowing a block to be verified by "active" wallets or nodes transacting x times per y blocks verified.

Think about it as a retailer. Credit Card fees are my enemy, but I have a whole bunch of ecom hardware sitting there at 10% CPU utilisation 98% of the time. If the price of free was 10% CPU I'd pay it.

The current banking model penalizes the seller on the assumption they are profiting from the transaction. Why does that payment have to be in currency. Couldn't it be in Gh/s?

This way you remove the need for, and value of mining as a sport or money making endeavor, and replace it with the cost of doing business.

I'm fairly certain my phone could be using x% of CPU mining, when charging for example as a cost of being able to send money for free...?

I don't know if the BTC Foundation would ever go for it, but to me, it's a no-brainer surely? Or am I missing something?

Re: The Bank to Developer (B2D) SDK and Business Model

sytaylor — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 14:13:29 -0000

The banking system is already highly fragmented, the cracks are papered over quite well because

1) Banks are Big
2) There aren't many of them
3) They're quite fond of meeting up once a year in Dubai to make up arbitrary standards

Opening APIs will bring oxygen into the space and developer demand will create both opportunity and a significant degree of challenge for banks. Fragmentation will be an issue, but it is already. Standards will emerge, but so long as this pain is hidden from the consumer and indeed most developers it shouldn't be a huge problem.

Re: The Bank to Developer (B2D) SDK and Business Model

sytaylor — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 07:01:36 -0000

Thanks :@dmgerbino I wonder how many internal projects are being built in readiness for the coming of a B2D model and how much is business as usual?

Re: How to Fix NFC and Help it Go Mainstream…

sytaylor — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:29:30 -0000

Ray, thanks for your thoughts. I guess I should qualify my statement. The use of NFC and Trusted Service Managers has thus far been largely driven by MNOs because of the SIM card relationship.

With OEMs looking to remove the SIM card from the equation, it is likely that NFC has a future as a P2P transfer protocol / mechanism, but if we're doing P2P only, wifi direct or BT4 qualify equally over the longer term. Since all standards will face the security question and are currently wanting, for NFC to thrive it needs to add more strings to it's bow.

I hear a lot about innovation at companies who haven't traditionally embraced it. Yet I see very little. Looking at how Google solved some of the NFC problems, could help NFC in more traditional organisations.

Re: Peer Index launches PeerPerks - exclusive rewards for the “influential”

sytaylor — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:51:28 -0000

By twitter I meant klout. Not sure why I said twitter. It was there in the cache of my pre frontal cortex and had to come out.

Re: Peer Index launches PeerPerks - exclusive rewards for the “influential”

sytaylor — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:57:14 -0000

I like them too, although both PeerIndex and Twitter are heavily activity biased.

If I lose myself in a project and life for a couple of weeks (a fairly healthy pursuit in my view) - peer index see's this as a negative.

Re: Distraction-Free Reading With Chrome Extension Evernote Clearly | HackCollege

sytaylor — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 11:39:49 -0000

OOO I like this! Evernote rocks.

Re: Hey Techrunch: This is What’s really happening in Payments in 2011

sytaylor — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:34:01 -0000

What's not sensible about using Facebook? The worlds largest brands use it. Why should a bank miss out?

Re: Are we influenced by friends – or the crowd?

sytaylor — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 06:49:26 -0000

Ideas are mimetic. We're looking for authority based on trust. Who or what we trust is an individual value. To set a golden rule is tough.

If only there was some way to profile someone's like's / dislikes and tendencies so you could alter your offering to suit their purchasing style?

Sounds like a job for... OPEN GRAPH (I feel like it needs theme music)

Re: The Future of NFC, From Mobile Wallets to Angry Birds

sytaylor — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:44:43 -0000

Thank you, I just so happen to be in the middle of a very small ven diagram. People who've worked in Payments, and people who get start up tech...

Master of neither, but they always say... play to your strengths :)

Re: The Future of NFC, From Mobile Wallets to Angry Birds

sytaylor — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 05:22:43 -0000

The issue with NFC has always been the commercial model, not the technology. The ability to issue NFC SIM cards, plastic cards, or chips has been around for at least a decade.

Two commercial models have emerged
1) Constoria (Like ISIS, Sixpack in the Netherlands, Everything Everywhere in the UK - with more likely in the next year). These are stop gap solutions. Usually one or two banks, one or two mobile networks and a TSM.

2) Technology companies disrupting. Square and others have gone for a ground up approach, while PayPal created their own prepaid accounts to try and buffer your access to the internet with a PayPal account. They all want you to sign up to something new, with the exception of Google Wallet, which is the first company that makes money in a different way (not from credit or debit interchange).

Mastercard and TFL have been at loggerheads for 5+ years over the Oyster card replacement, and mobile networks want to play there too. The problem is, they all want to make money on it, and to do that, someone has to lose, and lose heavily... Unless that someone has a different way to make money.

Google make money from data... Other companies that can make money advertising using data for me... would be ideal candidates to produce a wallet - provided they had partners with the experience that a Mastercard & Citi group have. Although again, you'd want it to be scheme and bank agnostic.

None of these solutions let you pay more than $15 or £15 at a time because they use the newer contactless standards (Like PayWave from Visa in Everything Everywhere) - which don't yet link back to the Authourisation engine through the scheme (because the bank haven't outsourced the Auth's to the scheme nor linked their Auth's to the TSM). The transaction is handled by the Merchant's POS device. When someone gets the PIN part right & is able to connect that through social networks or loyalty schemes like Google Offers. Then you have yourself a party...

Which is why it's interesting Google have gone with First Data...
Facebook, Apple / Twitter if you're listening. Holler...

Re: Recommending People: Is Klout punching above it’s influence?

sytaylor — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:41:06 -0000

Any score or metric is hard to ignore. It's validity is much easier to question. Which is why despite tireless work, engagement is only measured in some circles, and businesses can still grind out a living focussed entirely on their balance sheet.

I know for a fact I could pump that klout number by adding friends on facebook like a maniac. A friend of mine has 3000+ he used mostly for promoting student nights (as he himself was a student). That boosts his klout score incredibly, despite having never touched twitter, and not caring about or knowing any of these people.

It's a flawed metric, and one that geeks can use as "Hey I do well in a room full of people" - as Robert Scoble argued at me on Quora... (Several answers down, I fear you may have to dig...)

http://www.quora.com/What-i...

I'm a believer in depth of relationship, not breadth. 10,000 followers you don't know are of no value. 200 you know, and who interest you, are much more valuable.

Re: Hey BT, we put a countdown clock on your ineptitude – Let’s see you beat it

sytaylor — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 06:06:38 -0000

There is no limit to BT's suck.

I speak as a liberated former employee.

Break it up already. More. Openreach is still the crap bit. The way they manage work out to the engineers is prehistoric. 100 mile radius, next job falls into the next employee, based on a 20 year old piece of software called work manager. Ancient central CMS & an ageing work force. They keep hoping that some how 'natural wasteage' will solve their issues.

It needs a reeboot. Fast.

Re: COMMS corner: What does your daily media diet look like?

sytaylor — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 04:34:34 -0000

Swings wildly, from something about as action packed as the above...

To not touching any Social Media for days on end, outside of maybe checking facebook on my phone.

Depends how busy I am. I fall into Social when I have some spare capacity, it's not hygiene for me yet.

Re: Productivity vs creativity and the creative’s problem

sytaylor — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 05:41:36 -0000

An interesting if somewhat sideways observation from Ceasar Milan... 'The Dog Whisperer'

“Mother Nature always wants to be balanced. So there's no age where they don't want to return back to normal. I have worked with dogs that are 11 years old, 13 years old, which you witness in the show. I worked with a dog that was 13 years old that was extremely territorial to her food. And I was able to accomplish a calm, submissive state, which is allowing for you to create rules, boundaries and limitations. The mind backs away from the food. So in their world, they are always ready to balance. It's the human who fights it.”

It is in our nature to find balance, but our social conditioning has made us seek social reward, which is given for adhering to the norm. The 'Overworked' - work hard - play hard attitude prevails. Although there are nuances.

The nature of corporate driven consumer based capitalism, sucks value into monopolies and rewards hoarding. Capitalism needs balance. Democracy and the judicial system alone are not enough, since political parties and judicial review is blinded by the status quo.

The very measure of success being more money = more rewarding is causing the problem.

The act of making money alone isn't the problem. The systemic ability to hoard, capture, and suck that money up the wealth chain is. There has to be a reward for building, maintaining & improving. However, the system that needs to sell a consumable product, in order to improve next quarters revenue figures also has to socially condition you with advertising to want to buy that product.

I don't believe for a second there was ever a master plan to get to this point, it just happened. As a system gets larger it gets more complex.

The problem is, growth alone has been attributed to improved living standards. Growth = better life has been the economist's, politician's and business man's Modus Operandi for decades, without clear evidence of that being the case. Growth = Better life FOR SOME.

Growth needs balance. Human's are a creative species and will invent. This invention needs reward. A well timed reward reinforces good behavior. Yet our rewards system is geared towards hoarding finance. You can earn twice as much by knowing how others will do, than by doing.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/...

Our Academic education system, has produced adults who have not been rewarded for doing regularly enough. Our social reward system (pay) is geared towards hoarding that pay towards those who can predict and engineer business reality.

The recent 'Start Up Britain' initiative is nice, but what we really need to do is re-dress this imbalance in society. I'd argue Game Theory and rewards in education have a role to play here, as well as rewards outside of money.