6 ms·

In Europe it's more common to have an EC card, which doesn't have any necessary secrets printed in plain sight (you need a TAN to complete a transaction over 25

by zaarn 7y ago

In Europe it's more common to have an EC card, which doesn't have any necessary secrets printed in plain sight (you need a TAN to complete a transaction over 25€ or total 100€ per day). We also have SEPA Inst which allows me to send people money instantly for no fees (atleast at my bank), faster than Bitcoin ever could. I'm insured against the bank being hacked. I'm also insured against the ATM's being hacked. If I'd open my bank account today and found 0€ via hacks, I'd get it all back in 99.9% of cases. If I loose my card I get back everything too. If I loose my bitcoin wallet, I'm SOL and should be sorry for not making backups and using a multisig wallet with 2FA!

acqq 7y ago
I’ve read somewhere that regarding the way the cards, checks and transfers work the U.S. is not only behind Europe but even the African countries. And that the chip cards were invented and used in Europe decades before they started to be spread in the UK and the U.S. I don’t know why but somebody with more insider information can maybe explain?
- arcticbull 7y ago
  Same-day ACH took a while AFAIK because of fraud risk especially to smaller banks and credit unions, although we've moved into phase 3 of the work last year so that's happening now. I think the push-to-debit functionality pioneered by the likes of Square Cash helped hurry this along but I'm only speculating. It's not particularly insider information, the reason America was slow to the chip card game was pragmatic. The US is a very low fraud rate market, and re-issuing all 1.43 billion credit cards [1] and 14M payment terminals [2] was going to cost an awful lot of money. Further, major industry players like McDonalds weren't interested in seeing line speeds go down at point of sale as they switch from mag stripe payments which happen real fast to EMV chip transactions which, at the time, were really slow. Think <1s for magstripe to 10s of seconds for EMV. NFC helps mitigate this, but again, dual-interface cards (EMV + NFC + Mastripe) are a few dollars a piece. tl:dr; it wasn't until a few years ago that the cost of the transition outweighed the cost of the fraud that would be mitigated as a result. [1] https://wallethub.com/edu/cc/number-of-credit-cards/25532/ https://wallethub.com/edu/cc/number-of-credit-cards/25532/ [2] https://gomedici.com/steady-growth-in-nfc-pos-terminals-in-the-us-in-the-last-six-months/ https://gomedici.com/steady-growth-in-nfc-pos-terminals-in-t...
vsl 7y ago
> In Europe it's more common to have an EC card, which doesn't have any necessary secrets printed in plain sight This is not true. All you need to do online transactions is the number, expiration and CCV, all of which is printed on EC cards.
- zaarn 7y ago
  You think of CC cards but an EC card is connected to your bank account, so you require the bank account number on the card plus a valid TAN number or the pin number of the card. Alternatively you need a SEPA merchant account, but running fraud on that gets you sued to hell and back. EC cards do not have a CCV number.

by zaarn 7y ago

acqq 7y ago

I’ve read somewhere that regarding the way the cards, checks and transfers work the U.S. is not only behind Europe but even the African countries. And that the chip cards were invented and used in Europe decades before they started to be spread in the UK and the U.S. I don’t know why but somebody with more insider information can maybe explain?

arcticbull 7y ago
Same-day ACH took a while AFAIK because of fraud risk especially to smaller banks and credit unions, although we've moved into phase 3 of the work last year so that's happening now. I think the push-to-debit functionality pioneered by the likes of Square Cash helped hurry this along but I'm only speculating. It's not particularly insider information, the reason America was slow to the chip card game was pragmatic. The US is a very low fraud rate market, and re-issuing all 1.43 billion credit cards [1] and 14M payment terminals [2] was going to cost an awful lot of money. Further, major industry players like McDonalds weren't interested in seeing line speeds go down at point of sale as they switch from mag stripe payments which happen real fast to EMV chip transactions which, at the time, were really slow. Think <1s for magstripe to 10s of seconds for EMV. NFC helps mitigate this, but again, dual-interface cards (EMV + NFC + Mastripe) are a few dollars a piece. tl:dr; it wasn't until a few years ago that the cost of the transition outweighed the cost of the fraud that would be mitigated as a result. [1] https://wallethub.com/edu/cc/number-of-credit-cards/25532/ https://wallethub.com/edu/cc/number-of-credit-cards/25532/ [2] https://gomedici.com/steady-growth-in-nfc-pos-terminals-in-the-us-in-the-last-six-months/ https://gomedici.com/steady-growth-in-nfc-pos-terminals-in-t...

vsl 7y ago

> In Europe it's more common to have an EC card, which doesn't have any necessary secrets printed in plain sight This is not true. All you need to do online transactions is the number, expiration and CCV, all of which is printed on EC cards.

zaarn 7y ago
You think of CC cards but an EC card is connected to your bank account, so you require the bank account number on the card plus a valid TAN number or the pin number of the card. Alternatively you need a SEPA merchant account, but running fraud on that gets you sued to hell and back. EC cards do not have a CCV number.