5 ms·

You would not. But in the US paying with card is crazy "slow," especially with the new chip.

lucideer 9y ago
> in the US paying with card is crazy "slow," especially with the new chip. Does anyone know why this is? Chip cards have been widespread in Europe for over a decade (in some places they've been around over 20 years). As pleasantly convenient as the new tap cards are, I've never found chip to be slow as long as I can remember. Sometimes a wireless terminal will have momentary connection problems but this is rare enough to be acknowledged by the shop as a clear technical fault and apologies given for the delay.
- ygra 9y ago
  IME this mostly depends on the terminal and/or how the store chooses to handle transactions. Some terminals see to first need to establish some kind of connection to a server during the transaction, which can fail or take time. Some seem always connected or they batch the transactions and perform them at some point in the future. (Could be that batching cannot be done anymore, though.) E.g. at Aldi here (Southern Germany) paying with card including entering the PIN isn't really slower than paying cash (and the Aldi cashiers are crazy fast in handling cash). At other stores the card terminals seem awfully slow, though.
  - lucideer 9y ago
    As far as I had assumed (don't have any in-depth knowledge though), all chip systems required a challenge response with a server, so this couldn't be batched I don't think. I can imagine it being related to internet connection speed if it was a minor delay, but people seem to describe really significant delay, even in major US cities where you'd imagine that shouldn't be a problem.
  - acdha 9y ago
    I’m used to the dialup-style delays but these are longer and happen at places with new equipment and high transaction volume, and they seemed to be doing real-time transactions before because even the magstripe transactions would immediately trigger the push notification to my phone. I’ve been assuming this is some new, unoptimized codepath kludged into a legacy system because it’s very common but doesn’t seem to affect new products – e.g. Square systems are always a fraction of a second. The one part I can’t explain is why at the subset of places which support both NFC and chips, the NFC transactions are at least as fast as magstripe when the chip transactions are so much slower.
- Mashimo 9y ago
  I once heard the conspiracy that that the large banks in America want to keep the magnetic stripe because it's easier to do credit card fraud that way. It cost millions for the bank, but keeps newcomers away from the market.

> in the US paying with card is crazy "slow," especially with the new chip. Does anyone know why this is? Chip cards have been widespread in Europe for over a decade (in some places they've been around over 20 years). As pleasantly convenient as the new tap cards are, I've never found chip to be slow as long as I can remember. Sometimes a wireless terminal will have momentary connection problems but this is rare enough to be acknowledged by the shop as a clear technical fault and apologies given for the delay.

ygra 9y ago
IME this mostly depends on the terminal and/or how the store chooses to handle transactions. Some terminals see to first need to establish some kind of connection to a server during the transaction, which can fail or take time. Some seem always connected or they batch the transactions and perform them at some point in the future. (Could be that batching cannot be done anymore, though.) E.g. at Aldi here (Southern Germany) paying with card including entering the PIN isn't really slower than paying cash (and the Aldi cashiers are crazy fast in handling cash). At other stores the card terminals seem awfully slow, though.
- lucideer 9y ago
  As far as I had assumed (don't have any in-depth knowledge though), all chip systems required a challenge response with a server, so this couldn't be batched I don't think. I can imagine it being related to internet connection speed if it was a minor delay, but people seem to describe really significant delay, even in major US cities where you'd imagine that shouldn't be a problem.
- acdha 9y ago
  I’m used to the dialup-style delays but these are longer and happen at places with new equipment and high transaction volume, and they seemed to be doing real-time transactions before because even the magstripe transactions would immediately trigger the push notification to my phone. I’ve been assuming this is some new, unoptimized codepath kludged into a legacy system because it’s very common but doesn’t seem to affect new products – e.g. Square systems are always a fraction of a second. The one part I can’t explain is why at the subset of places which support both NFC and chips, the NFC transactions are at least as fast as magstripe when the chip transactions are so much slower.
Mashimo 9y ago
I once heard the conspiracy that that the large banks in America want to keep the magnetic stripe because it's easier to do credit card fraud that way. It cost millions for the bank, but keeps newcomers away from the market.