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Historical data of domain name purchases suggest that Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin (BTC), had an alternate naming option in mind that did not make it to the whitepaper. Bitcoin.org, the website domain linked to the original Bitcoin, was created on August 18, 2008, a day after the creation of Netcoin.org using the same registrar.

"Bitcoin is a "Money Over Internet Protocol," as is Ethereum, potentially. Just as VOIP moves voice data around the internet natively, Bitcoin and Ethereum move value data around the internet natively. Most people disparage Bitcoin, Ethereum, et al. as protocols that can't scale and can't possibly threaten the incumbent financial industry, just as they denigrated VOIP. But the scaling technology is now here - it's called the Lightning Network, which is a Bitcoin layer 2 protocol. Its throughput capacity roughly equals that of Visa, and payments made over Lightning cost virtually zero. There are other scaling technologies, too. If I'm right and scaling technologies for internet-native money protocols have arrived, then many legacy systems operating in the financial system today will be obsolete within a handful of years." (Caitlin Long)

"Differential privacy is a definition used to describe various methods and techniques for analyzing data sets and extrapolating aggregated results, without directly affecting the privacy of any specific individuals contained within the original data sets."

The European Commission has reportedly put out a tender for a study on embedded supervision of decentralised finance. The study will entail a six month pilot project to develop, deploy and test a technological solution that would enable regulatory bodies to automatically monitor compliance by reading public blockchain data.

The BIS Innovation Hub published a report on Project Leap, a joint project with the Banque de France and Deutsche Bundesbank that addresses the threat that future quantum computers represent to today's cryptographic algorithms, and thereby to the confidentiality of financial data. The report presents a comprehensive overview of the experiments conducted and the initial technical findings, including the successful set up a quantum-safe communication channel between the project participants that shields financial data.

An article by Raphael Auer, Rainer Böhme, Jeremy Clark and Didem Demirag explores the multiple dimensions of retail CBDC privacy considerations. They point to the number of distinct stakeholders, combined with the technical challenges, as possibly responsible for stalling progress toward deploying retail CBDC. One step forward is understanding who the key stakeholders are and what their interests are in payment records. Knowledge of conflicting interests is helpful for developing requirements and narrowing the range of technical solutions. This article contributes to the literature by identifying three stakeholder groups - privacy enthusiasts, law enforcement, and data holders - and exploring their conflicts. A main insight is that nuanced data-access policies are best to resolve the conflicts, which in turn rule out many technical solutions that promise "hard privacy," meaning solutions relying on cryptography and user-guarded secrets without room for human discretion. This observation shifts attention to a softer form of privacy-enhancing technologies, which gives authorized stakeholders the capability to access certain payment records in plaintext under defined circumstances. Such a system depends on compliance and accountability, supported with technically enforced access control, limited retention periods, and audits. This is referred to as "soft privacy".

"The achievement of policy aims associated with a CBDC will require adoption by end users. The user value proposition relies in large part on frictionless satisfaction of key payments use cases. The associated CBDC transactions necessitate interoperability along - and most crucially between - payment rails. Harmonization of data models, via international standardization efforts, is a necessary underpinning of effective interoperability."

"Now that the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, Americans are raising concerns about what data police and prosecutors could access to incriminate people who seek abortions, which has happened before. If law-enforcement officials can't access medical documents, they could turn to financial services companies for data on payment transactions. With abortion now illegal in several US states, paying for abortion services with cash could be one way to avoid detection, posing a challenge to the idea that cash is on its way out."

"This analysis shows that permissioned and private ledgers form a subclass of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), which are distinguished from the original blockchain. DLTs operate with databases known as "ledgers," copies of which are distributed among multiple nodes, but not anyone can create and validate new blocks of data in such a ledger; they are not decentralized. On the contrary, blockchain was designed as a decentralized, open, and competitive peer-to-peer system. The widespread misconception is to call any technology "blockchain" when it has some chunks of data connected through cryptographic hashes. The technology of creating a sequence of timestamped records connected with hashes is not new, it was designed in the early 90s, but nobody has ever called it "blockchain," as it has never dealt with decentralized consensus protocols and did not operate in a distributed network. Hence, not every chain of blocks is the blockchain. The paper dives into the details of various of DLTs and blockchains. It aims to bring rigor into terminology and academic discourse. It also raises the alarm on false expectations that may appear across industries and the public about a decentralization effect that some DLTs might not bring."

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) published an update on implementation of its standards on virtual assets (VAs) and virtual asset service providers (VASPs), with a focus on the travel rule. The travel rule requires VASPs to collect and share with each other personal data on participants (both senders and receivers) in transactions exceeding USD/EUR 1,000. In other words, the personal data of the transacting parties is supposed to "travel" along with their transfers. The report that notes only 11 of 98 surveyed jurisdictions are enforcing and supervising it. The also report highlights the continued need to monitor monitor the growth of, and illicit financing risks associated with DeFi and NFTs markets and unhosted wallets.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published its Report on the distributed ledger technology (DLT) pilot regime. It provides guidance on certain technical elements and makes recommendations on compensatory measures on supervisory data to ensure a consistent application by DLT market infrastructures from the start of the regime. The report presents ESMA's proposed way forward and concludes that there is no need to amend the regulatory technical standards (RTSs) on transparency and data reporting requirements before the DLT pilot starts applying in March 2023.

"MPs urge the government to alleviate privacy concerns that organisations or the Government could misuse personal data generated by the introduction of a retail digital pound, for example to monitor or control how users spend their money. These concerns could be mitigated through robust regulation and legislated protections related to the ability of any future government to access people's data.  "

"The 2022 Federal Reserve Payments Study (FRPS) collected data for the 2021 calendar year. This initial release includes top-line figures for the core noncash payment methods used in the United States by consumers, businesses, and governments, including payments by general-purpose and private-label cards, automated clearinghouse (ACH) transfers, and checks. This release also covers automated teller machine (ATM) cash withdrawals. Wire transfers, used primarily for large financial transactions, are excluded from these data."

The current draft of the digital euro legislation calls for increased privacy for close-proximity offline payments, which is seen as consistent with the European Union AML/CFT framework risk-based approach. The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) suggest increased privacy for low-value online payments too, but not as private as offline transactions, because online transactions would not be limited to proximity payments, resulting in a potentially attractive model for criminals. Hence, they recommend transaction size limits above which complete checks can occur that are lower for online than offline transactions. However, Atakan Kavuklu suggests equalizing the limits at the higher level for all low-value proximity payments (e.g., those using NFC and Bluetooth connections). He believes this could benefit the acceptance and success of a digital euro.

The IMF and World Bank published a paper that outlines their multi-year strategy to provide technical assistance (TA) to help member countries meet the G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-border Payments. A stocktaking exercise shows that their TA supports the Roadmap's three interconnected priority themes: (i) payment system interoperability and extension, (ii) legal, regulatory, and supervisory frameworks, and (iii) cross-border data exchange and message standards. Going forward, the TA will focus on access to payment systems, extending and aligning operating hours, interlinking of payment systems (especially fast payment systems), promoting the access to and use of digital ID and data exchange across borders, ISO 20022 message standards harmonization, and the application of Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) rules.

"We provide practical insights for investors seeking exposure to the growing cryptocurrency space. Today, crypto is much more than just bitcoin, which historically dominated the space but accounted for just a 21% share of total crypto trading volume in 2021. We discuss a wide variety of tokens, highlighting both their functionality and their investment properties. We critically compare popular valuation methods. We contrast buy-and-hold investing with more active styles. We only deem return data from 2017 representative, but the use of intraday data boosts statistical power. Underlying crypto performance has been notoriously volatile, but volatility-targeting methods are effective at controlling risk, and trend-following strategies have performed well. Crypto assets display a low correlation with traditional risky assets in normal times, but the correlation also rises in the left tail of these risky assets. Finally, we detail important custody and regulatory considerations for institutional investors."

China is once again contributing a significant chunk of the world's bitcoin mining operations despite the ban last year, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI), which maps the mining activity around the world based on the geolocational data reported by partnering pools. Following the crackdown on bitcoin mining in the country last year, China's share was reduced to 0% in July and August. However, the CCAF's latest data show that the figure was up to 22.29% in September and fluctuated around 20% in October-January.

The Bank for International Settlements published an analysis of a new data set on retail holdings of crypto-assets that reveals that in the wake of the Terra/Luna collapse and the FTX bankruptcy, crypto trading activity increased markedly, with large and sophisticated investors selling and smaller retail investors buying. Data on major crypto trading platforms over August 2015-December 2022 show that, as a result, a majority of crypto app users in nearly all economies made losses on their bitcoin holdings.

The European Commission has released its proposal for the union's new Data Act. Among other things, it would mandate that applications using smart contracts include "internal functions which can reset or instruct the contract to stop or interrupt the operation to avoid future (accidental) executions." Fears are being expressed that such "kill switches" could threaten the promise of immutability because, with the ability of a single source to make a change, the contract is no longer autonomous.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub Singapore Centre and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) have developed a new prototype platform that integrates regulatory data and analytics. Known as Project Ellipse, the platform successfully demonstrates how regulatory and other data, such as articles and news, can be integrated into a single platform to help regulatory authorities identify potential risks to individual banks and the banking system. The new prototype is the first to be published on BIS Open Tech, a new platform for sharing software as public goods for further testing, customizing and scaling.