15th June 2023 > > Apple Inc.

tl;dr

Apple is no fan of the decentralised world.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

A hawkish Fed announcement – despite the pause in rate rises – took BTC below the all-important $25k for the first time in three months. The Fed appears to be adopting Mark Carney’s approach of forward guidance, a disastrous policy and one that I thought had been consigned to the dustbin. Mark Carney used to be the Governor of the Bank of England, but his primary concerns were climate change and diversity. Laudable though those aims may be, that wasn’t supposed to be his day job.

Occasional Series – UK Covid enquiry

I read that lateral flow tests are required before attending in person at the UK Covid enquiry, along with face mask and hand sanitisation measures.

Dearie, dearie, me.

I can write the conclusion to the enquiry now and save us all an estimated half a billion quid:

“Not enough lockdown, not draconian enough, forget about the kids. And the grannies too.”

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This is the first piece of evidence before the enquiry, a diagram attempting to explore responsibility for pandemic preparation and response:

That’s an awful lot of non-jobs funded by taxpayers just making the situation worse. This is what the technocratic and bureaucratic dystopian suppression of democracy looks like.

There is no mainstream political party that has the cojones to change this for the better.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary - Apple

I have long been surprised at big tech’s seemingly apathetic approach to cryptos. Now the situation seems to be taking a turn for the worse.

Damus – a decentralised social media platform – has had its upgraded app rejected by the App store following the introduction of a tipping feature, much like the one seen in Twitter. The difference being of course that tips in Damus are made in BTC, facilitated by Lightning, a Layer-2 solution that makes the transfer of BTC fast and cheap.

This functionality already existed in Damus, but at a profile level. The latest app allows for users to tip at content level, which Apple has interpreted as selling digital content for cryptos, which apparently breaches its rules. Make sense of that if you can.

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Apple has also rejected a Lightning enabled self-custody wallet named Zeus:

The key issue here is that custodial wallets (e.g. Coinbase and Binance amongst others) need money transmitter licenses but you won’t be surprised to hear that the rules and regulations around decentralised wallets are unclear.

Apple does have form when it comes to centralisation and control. For many years, if I recall correctly, standard windows programs (Excel, Word, etc.) could not work using iOS. The situation has improved, but the functionality seems to me to be limited, but maybe my tech skills need developing.

The question we need to ask is this.

Is Apple Gary Gensler in disguise?