As someone working at a very large bank. I strongly disagree.
The bank spun up a new business to experiment with blockchain technology and went hard at it for several years until they recently sidelined those projects...
In favour of AI
The amount of internal hype across all areas of the business (especially in the tech areas of the business) with regards to AI has been frankly stunning to witness.
My speculation on this is that China/Russia/whoever targets ISP's in order to identify people by IP that have come to their attention somehow.
Your credentials aren't the only point of interest, your credentials gives up subscriber information name/email/address/etc. That's pretty valuable from an intelligence standpoint.
You might be surprised to learn that a lot of the world uses polymer banknotes which are siignificantly more durable and last a lot longer than traditional 'paper' based currencies. The are incredibly hard to tear/break and they do not wear out or stretch. We've been using these in Australia since 1996.
Having handled a fair amount of US currency I can say it _feels_ disgusting to handle after a certain amount of wear and often reminds me of a moist tissue. It also doesn't help that visually the notes all look very similar (as opposed to on polymer notes which have significantly different appearances and colours)
I wish, although I'm totally aware it'll never happen, that there were no time zones, just UTC and that's it.
One clock for the world. If that meant you started work at 0900 UTC and finished at 1700 UTC then fine, but if you lived in a different part of the world your work day might be 0100-0900.
It'd definitely take a bit of getting used to, but as the world becomes more intertwined, timezones are a pain and constant source of confusion.
The amount of internal hype across all areas of the business (especially in the tech areas of the business) with regards to AI has been frankly stunning to witness.