#hashbased is a blockchain innovation newsletter provided by HashBased.com, an OKA innovation brand

Here they come: Peter Rudegeair and Liz Hoffman report in WSJ on Google’s ambitions to move into fintech and banking. The company is launching “Cache”, a service that will allow users opening checking accounts. This follows a similar announcement from Amazon, while Apple is already offering financial services in collaboration with Goldman Sachs. At the same time Facebook is launching Libra, its own digital currency and blockchain technology for payments and financial services, but is facing a significant pushback from politicians and regulators. It is expected that the Google collaboration with Citibank on checking accounts will face similar opposition.

Worth Reading

• Fascinating paper on how relatively easy it is to investigate a Ponzi scheme on Bitcoin
• The Strange Life and Mysterious Death of a Virtuoso Coder

Jerold Haas was on the brink of blockchain riches. Then his body was found in the woods of southern Ohio.

(…)

Haas had vanished only months after he’d been on the verge of a life-altering triumph. He was a cofounder of Tessr, a buzzed-about Columbus startup that aimed to use blockchain technology to streamline data sharing in higher education.

• Moneyness on People’s Bank of China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) feature called controllable anonymity
• Banking the poor….
• … and bitcoiners (Matt Levine on Bloomberg via JP Koning).

All the crypto exchanges that are enabling "financial freedom" use the same bank—Silvergate—to make instant transfers between each other, notes @matt_levine: https://t.co/IoE31ItOuS

For more on this contradiction: https://t.co/XXeodUCfxX pic.twitter.com/PnMD6qwgg5

— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) November 16, 2019

• A warning about stablecoins in the November edition of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board of Governors’ “Financial Stability Report“.

Infographic

$69 Trillion of World Debt in One Infographic via Visual Capitalist