Had to read surprisingly far before there was a mention of transit cards — which is the first thing that comes to mind when I think about stored-value cards. I

Had to read surprisingly far before there was a mention of transit cards — which is the first thing that comes to mind when I think about stored-value cards. In my city's implementation the offline-ness of the system is very apparent. If you add value to your card online, you have to come to a subway station to stick the card into a reader to have your new balance written. The turnstiles at the same station don't do that either despite definitely having a network connection, you have to specifically use the balance-checking or ticket-selling machines. The only application I've seen that isn't transit is at arcades. You'd buy a "member" card that you'd put money into. Each machine would have some sort of terminal where you tap or swipe that card to add credits to the game. But then I'm not quite sure if these systems are offline or these terminals are connected into a network.