dear hackers,

first of all,
in case you follow the Gregorian calendar,
happy new 2016, Annus Domini :^)

here I put briefly forward an initiative brewing in Europe which I
believe should concern us, especially those living and working here:

http://www.betaalvereniging.nl/giraal-en-online-betalen/idin/

(pardon the Dutch) some of us in north-EU already know iDEAL as a
payment platform that acquired natural leadership through the years not
for being particularly secure, but versatile and easy to use, so it is
establishing itself as the de-facto standard for C2B transactions
(online shopping and so) in the hand of an association of banks.

Until here there is nothing new under the Sun, banks have always had the
monopoly of transactions and with iDEAL they finally managed, after many
fails and lots of money wasted on pseudo-research groups of mindless
yuppies with a success rate of 1% just like their composition in
society. after all, iDEAL was their only succesfull headshot.

But iDIN is different now and should really concern us, since its the
move of the old-world banks (a consortium of banks) to create a network
for unique identification and rating of organizations and products.

This is something definitely beyond the domain of banks. It is something
so far handled in a terrible way by conglomerates of insurance
corporations. Of course it is also something that has a lot to do with
the cryptographic technologies we deal with, from the blockchains to the
good work Caleb is doing on cjdns etc. etc.

I think we need to keep an eye on this initiative, because iDEAL is very
powerful and they may succeed in riding their horse with an attack to
conquer more territory. we need to keep the banks in their corner and
not make them advance into the domain of identification, which offers
space for new developments and distributed responsibility and
decentralized rating schemes that should have nothing to do with the
overly failing handling of trust the banks have been doing so far.

In these regards, many of the people into blockchain that worked for the
advancemend of the corporate-banking domain in that of identification
should really think twice about what side of the world they are standing
and if they are not going to become part of the problem in 2016.
We are still in time to change how this is going to look like!

ciao

p.s. if you pass by here on the 16th january you are all invited to our
new year's reception in Amsterdam, at dyne.org's headquarters on the old
port of the city. Just let me know you are coming I'll give coordinates.

-- 
Denis Roio aka Jaromil   http://Dyne.org think &do tank
  CTO and co-founder      free/open source developer
加密  6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10