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I'll always remember the time when the tourist town of Ely, Minnesota, USA had it's single fiber internet cable cut. Pretty much all the groups there trying to

I'll always remember the time when the tourist town of Ely, Minnesota, USA had it's single fiber internet cable cut. Pretty much all the groups there trying to rent canoes, equipment, hotels, etc with corporate cards weren't able to do it. We were lucky our group brought cash. A society depending entirely on corporations for currency function is incredibly fragile in addition to corporate payment services being rent seeking, privacy invading, transaction morality deciding monsters. At least in the USA. Governments should definitely be regulating and requiring those offering paid goods and services to accept cash. And not just for paying debts.

SchemaLoad 1y ago
This seems like the ideal use case for satellite internet like starlink though. Main fiber connection, but a satellite backup. The trend I predict is just more robust redundant connections, not people giving up on cards.
- frosted-flakes 1y ago
  Anyone who tried to pay for anything in Canada on 8 July 2022 knows that it's not that simple. The entire Interac network was shut down for over 15 hours, which meant that debit and credit payments through POS terminals were halted nationwide. It was chaos, I was away from home and was unaware that anything had happened because I had no phone service. There were long lines everywhere, and a stranger paid for my coffee with cash, because the single toonie I happened to have wasn't enough. The cause of the failure was multi-fold: all of Interac's Internet links relied on the Rogers' network in one way or another, so when one went down, so did the other.
traeregan 1y ago
I never thought I’d see Ely mentioned on HN. http://moosebay.com http://moosebay.com is a close family friend who lives in and guides out of Ely. I had a great trip there many years ago. I’ll have to ask them about your story, surely they remember it happening.
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
I remember the day I took someone on a date, only to run into a state-wide power outage. We found a restaurant that had gas grills. They couldn't make french fries, because their fry machine was electric. They couldn't make shakes. They were pouring soda from bottles they had bought at a grocery store. They were working by candlelight and adding up the bill on a hand calculator, but they were doing business like crazy. I think they were not doing credit cards, but it was long enough ago that they might have been taking imprints. Certainly today they would not be able to take cards, unless they had battery backup or a generator, since many cards don't have the raised digits any more.
hedora 1y ago
At the very least, they probably should require all vendors to accept imprints (the old offline compatible paper-based credit card protocol). It’d better if the government just mandated the eCash system in the back half of Applied Cryptography (which is similar to the Japanese system discussed elsewhere in this thread).
cyberax 1y ago
And we had a power/Internet outage here after a heavy snowfall. My local bakery simply wrote down my credit card number and then did a card-not-present transaction later. Contactless cards can also do offline transactions, without any Internet connectivity. We support that in our app via https://docs.stripe.com/terminal/features/operate-offline/collect-card-payments https://docs.stripe.com/terminal/features/operate-offline/co...

SchemaLoad 1y ago

This seems like the ideal use case for satellite internet like starlink though. Main fiber connection, but a satellite backup. The trend I predict is just more robust redundant connections, not people giving up on cards.

frosted-flakes 1y ago
Anyone who tried to pay for anything in Canada on 8 July 2022 knows that it's not that simple. The entire Interac network was shut down for over 15 hours, which meant that debit and credit payments through POS terminals were halted nationwide. It was chaos, I was away from home and was unaware that anything had happened because I had no phone service. There were long lines everywhere, and a stranger paid for my coffee with cash, because the single toonie I happened to have wasn't enough. The cause of the failure was multi-fold: all of Interac's Internet links relied on the Rogers' network in one way or another, so when one went down, so did the other.

traeregan 1y ago

I never thought I’d see Ely mentioned on HN. http://moosebay.com http://moosebay.com is a close family friend who lives in and guides out of Ely. I had a great trip there many years ago. I’ll have to ask them about your story, surely they remember it happening.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago

I remember the day I took someone on a date, only to run into a state-wide power outage. We found a restaurant that had gas grills. They couldn't make french fries, because their fry machine was electric. They couldn't make shakes. They were pouring soda from bottles they had bought at a grocery store. They were working by candlelight and adding up the bill on a hand calculator, but they were doing business like crazy. I think they were not doing credit cards, but it was long enough ago that they might have been taking imprints. Certainly today they would not be able to take cards, unless they had battery backup or a generator, since many cards don't have the raised digits any more.

hedora 1y ago

At the very least, they probably should require all vendors to accept imprints (the old offline compatible paper-based credit card protocol). It’d better if the government just mandated the eCash system in the back half of Applied Cryptography (which is similar to the Japanese system discussed elsewhere in this thread).

cyberax 1y ago

And we had a power/Internet outage here after a heavy snowfall. My local bakery simply wrote down my credit card number and then did a card-not-present transaction later. Contactless cards can also do offline transactions, without any Internet connectivity. We support that in our app via https://docs.stripe.com/terminal/features/operate-offline/collect-card-payments https://docs.stripe.com/terminal/features/operate-offline/co...