The banks have also cited the absence of a law as basis for their posture.

There have been calls on the central bank to allow the use of crypto currencies due to the uptake in the currency, globally.

The CEO of Groupe Nduom, Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom has disclosed of plans to venture into crypto currency transaction.

But the Executive Director of Retail Banking for West Africa at Standard Chartered Bank, Henry Baye tells Citi Business News they will not hook unto the adoption in the absence of any accommodating law.

“But for us as a bank, we are keenly aware of the risks that today, crypto currency poses in the space of money laundering, terrorist financing, in the space of human trafficking and many other crimes that are related to moving money around,” he explained.

Mr. Baye added the decision is also expected to protect consumers who risk to suffer greatly if their deposits are not duly protected.

“… At this point in time, it is not regulated and for that reason we are not going to play in anything that is not regulated. I think at this point in time that is clearly our position because we would want to protect the consumer, and our world from money laundering and terrorist financing and not until there is any law, we will just not play.”

Henry Baye was speaking at the Bank’s Breakfast meeting with stakeholders in the digital financial ecosystem on Friday, March 16, 2018.

This also formed part of the visit of the Global Head of Digital Retail Banking at Standard Chartered, Aalishaan Zaidi to Ghana.

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By: Pius Amihere Eduku/citibusinessnews.com/Ghana

The post Banks resist crypto currency use in Ghana appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.

If a reader chooses to block its advertising, US publication Salon will use that person’s computer to mine for Monero, a cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin.

Creating new tokens of a cryptocurrency typically requires complex calculations that use up a lot of computing power.

Salon told readers: “We intend to use a small percentage of your spare processing power to contribute to the advancement of technological discovery, evolution and innovation.”

The site is making use of CoinHive, a controversial mining tool that was recently used in an attack involving government websites in the UK, US and elsewhere.

However, unlike that incident, where hackers took control of visitors’ computers to mine cryptocurrency, Salon notifies users and requires them to agree before the tool begins mining.

“I’ve opted-in to Salon’s new revenue model using Coinhive,” wrote security researcher Troy Mursch.

“100% of my CPU is now used by them to mine cryptocurrency. As my computer slows to crawl and quickly begins to heat up, I struggle to navigate their website.”

‘Recouping revenues’

The approach harnesses a computer’s spare processing power when the user is browsing Salon.com after a user accepts a prompt asking for permission.

Shortly after, the computer is put to work. Readers will likely hear their machine’s cooling fans kick into action, and it will use more power.

In a Frequently Asked Questions page on its website, Salon told readers the idea was part of a trial.

“For our beta program, we’ll start by applying your processing power to mine cryptocurrencies to recoup lost ad revenue when you use an ad blocker,” the company said.

“We plan to further use any learnings from this to help support the evolution and growth of blockchain technology, digital currencies and other ways to better service the value exchange between content and user contribution.”

Blocker beating

Many internet users decide to install ad-blocking software to hide ads that appear within websites. However, for many companies, advertising is the only way to make money from readers.

Several publications have experimented with ways around this, the most successful being complete paywalls – where users must pay a subscription to access the site – or metered systems where after a certain number of articles are accessed, the user must pay to carry on reading.

Technology publication Wired predicted that around 20% of its readers accessed the site using adblockers, and so restricted the number of articles those readers saw unless Wired was added to a whitelist that would let advertising through.

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Source: BBC

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