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It's not about paying by cash but paying by card offline. How is this going to be implemented I wonder. On planes they often accept credit cards even when ther
by mrtksn 1y ago
It's not about paying by cash but paying by card offline. How is this going to be implemented I wonder.
On planes they often accept credit cards even when there's no internet. I assume this is a trust in-credit-based system because they don't accept debit cards, i.e. if you are worth being trusted with a card you can have your sandwich now and we will take care of the bank processing once we are on the ground. So maybe this will be like we trust you enough with basic goods that once we get a connection things will be sorted out situation?
- samus 1y agoRe paying on the plane: yes, that's how credit cards work. The question of the solvency of the customer becomes the problem of the payment processor.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoRestaurant POCs have an offline mode. They had to ask my zip code so I suppose it just counts as a "card not present" transaction that goes through later. Does present the question of whether that data is temporarily stored unencrypted or if it's immediately encrypted to be sent to the bank when it comes online
- eszed 1y agoI, for my sins, have had to read PCI certification standards, and they're required to be encrypted, or not stored at all. Not that every implementation follows that, of course, but that's the expectation.
- joshstrange 1y agoI work for a POS company and we support offline payments. The SDK(s) we use for our card readers give us an encrypted block of data that we can store and retry when back online. We don’t support “Card Not Present” when offline, we always tokenize cards if we enter them manually (HPP) which we can’t do when offline.
- lxgr 1y agoThat sounds like security theater. What would asking for the ZIP code help if it can't be validated on the spot? If the terminal submits the transaction in batch later, it's too late for that to catch a stolen card. Providing an incorrect ZIP code also makes the transaction more likely to be declined than not providing one at all for card-not-present transactions (and is also allowed), so it really makes no sense for a merchant to do that.
- kosinus 1y agoDebit cards are most definitely accepted on planes.
- mrtksn 1y agoEven without internet connection? Edit: OK maybe there's different level of trust and some take a leap of faith :) In my experience debit didn't work but it appears that its not the same everywhere.
- whatevaa 1y agoYeah. They just accept some loss on bounced payments. Got a free meal (well it was a sandwich, nothing fancy) like that.
- ruszki 1y agoCan’t debit account go negative where you live? It’s definitely possible. Even when you don’t have an account credit, or what it’s called. Of course, this is possible only in strange circumstances, but still, I had a debit account with negative statement once. If I remember well, it was because similarly delayed offline transactions. It probably depends on country and/or bank.
- kosinus 1y agoI have no idea how the terminals operate, but I was on a flight two days ago and paid with a debit card. The flight otherwise required devices to be in airplane mode. Though there are flights that offer wifi, so there's a good chance the terminal can communicate with the ground, but they just don't allow anything else.
- tecleandor 1y agoYep, but IIRC only if they are credit, not debit. I guess they also have certain special conditions with the processor... Edit: I've also seen it when paying on the cafe car while on train trips in Spain. Even without any cellphone/internet coverage they'll let you pay, but only with credit.
- pjmlp 1y agoExactly like that most likely, I am old enough to remember those machines where credit cards left their mark on the receipt, that is why their numbers are higher than the card. Here, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter
- mrtksn 1y agoVery interesting, never heard of these. Thank you.
- wat10000 1y agoI suddenly feel very old.
- thrill 1y agoThat’s how it happens.
- mikestew 1y ago“Never heard of these”, meanwhile I was remembering a credit card that I used so often that I wore the coloring off the raised numbers. And I guess if one has never seen these, I need to explain. In order to leave an impression on the carbon paper (I should probably explain that, too, huh?), a fair amount of pressure was needed (those old card imprinters didn’t require a gym membership, but a child could not operate one). That rolling pressure would eventually wear on the surface of the card, and turn the numbers white when the outer layer wore through.
- jdshaffer 1y agoIf I remember correctly, this sound is part of Pink Floyd's song "Money"... part of the background rhythm. I wonder how many of the "Never heard of these" crowd would recognize it if they hard it in person... smile
- RHSeeger 1y ago
- cyanydeez 1y agoAirlines typically are already in possession of your credit card, so most likely it's just "if he stiffs us, we can always find the carrier they registered with" So it's not _just_ blind trust.
- huhtenberg 1y agoUsing a card-to-card transfer of some sort of credits/units, with eventual online settlement. Using chip cards, obviously. The tech for this existed since at least mid '00s.
- blibble 1y agothe original credit cards were entirely offline via paperslips phone auth was added later for "online" auth, then machines that automated it
- Multicomp 1y agoI mean that is what mondex was and oystercard is today. Closest we can get on the us is a prepaid refillable gift card. I Keep hoping for digital cash, no dice so far
- formerly_proven 1y agoThere used to be a few relatively large scale stored-value card systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored-value_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored-value_card) for general-purpose payments in the past.
- g-mork 1y agoThe EMV standard has long supported an offline transaction flow. AFAIK it was the default almost everywhere in Finland circa 2011, contactless there was almost always instantaneous. Digging into why that was compared to the invariable wait when using contactless in the UK revealed this flow. The card has a variety of risk counters on it that allow it to securely decide whether an offline transaction can proceed, at least some of which are also exposed to the terminal which can have its own separate policy. I imagine internally the banks and payment gateways have a huge variety of internal related tuneables.
- devmor 1y agoA lot of internet payments work this way already anyways, not many gateways require auth before capture, processors/payfacs just do it because it gives lower interchange and reduces risk.
- avianlyric 1y agoThat depends on where you are. But all the major networks expect auths before capture, even if it isn’t technically enforced, and will punish gateways and merchants who have low auth rates. Auth before capture doesn’t generally reduce interchange. What it primarily does is shift liability in the event of a dispute. If a chargeback is raised, and no auth happened, then the merchant simply looses immediately. They have no mechanism for fighting the chargeback. If they auth first, and got an approval, then it’s the banks problem in the event of a customer dispute. The merchant can reply to the chargeback by pointing out the valid auth they received from the bank, and the bank has to go pound sand. You may see this as different “interchange” rates from a specific gateway. But that’s simply not true at the network level. The difference in pricing just exists so the gateways themselves can price in the additional risk associated with auth less captures, given the gateways are always on the hook, even if a merchant goes bust. The major networks force gateways to have funds kept in escrow that are guaranteed to cover any shortfall that might occur due to individual merchant failure, or failure of the gateway itself. That how networks make sure that zero real risk every accrues with them, they make everyone else put up huge stacks of cash to ensure that every virtual cent that’s in flight at any moment, is backed by a real cent in escrow somewhere.
- john01dav 1y agoOn every flight I've been on recently, Internet was available to passengers. Surely a few KiB (I assume that this is what a credit or debit transaction requires) could go over this system?
- messe 1y agoUS domestic? I've found it's somewhat rare to see here in the EU, but there are a few airlines that offer it.
- john01dav 1y agoYes, most of my flying experience is US domestic. While I expected differences, I didn't expect this one
- serial_dev 1y agoMost EU flights I’ve been on offer Internet to travelers for a fee. Even if they don’t offer it to travelers, it doesn’t mean they themselves do not have Internet connection… I’m sure most of the time, they have access to the internet and paying by card is not more complicated than paying in any other store.
- WmWsjA6B29B4nfk 1y ago> Even if they don’t offer it to travelers, it doesn’t mean they themselves do not have Internet connection It usually does, it requires quite a bit of equipment and it doesn’t make economical sense to install it and not sell it to passengers. Airplanes have other means communicating with the ground and airline offices though.
- Kwpolska 1y agoOn one of my recent Ryanair flights, the transaction reached my bank about 30 minutes after landing. On another, it took two days.
- eep_social 1y ago
- alexey-salmin 1y agoA brief history goes like this: In the past embossed credit and debit cards were both accepted on planes. That's why they were embossed in the first place: for offline processing which in even more distant path was the only option. Later CC machines and offline chip/stripe transactions co-existed with online transactions. Normally (at least in Europe) you couldn't get an embossed card, even a debit one, without proving your credit worthiness. The possibility of offline transactions assumes overdraft — the same as with check books. When online transactions appeared, banks started to issue Visa Electron and Maestro cards which didn't work offline, could explicitly prohibit overdraft and were easier to get. But nowadays all boundaries gradually disappeared. Nothing is embossed, Visa Electron doesn't exist, bank issue debit cards with credit codes. It's all much simpler and more confusing at the same time.
- lxgr 1y agoIronically, the few embossed cards I still have are from debit or prepaid issuers, presumably in a plot to make them look more "official", so at this point we've looped around completely and I've started associating it with a dated/tacky look. (They also take up twice the space in my card wallet and often lose their cheap metallic paint over time, annoyingly spreading glitter across my pockets.)
- _flux 1y agoI experimented a bit, and with a hot air station it's possible to de-emboss them, exactly for the purpose of fitting more cards in my card wallet.. I didn't try it on an active card, though, and I suppose the problem solves itself by time.
- scotty79 1y agoPossibly related? "Starbucks does not use two phase commit": https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/ramblings/18_starbucks.html https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/ramblings/18_s...
- Steve0 1y agoI have grown up seeing my parents write physical paper cheques. It's basic life goods and everything is still signed for, tracked and registered. Besides, banks love to collect interest.
- StanislavPetrov 1y agoTo this very day I have several (older) relatives that use paper checks sent via snail mail to pay all their bills.
- CorrectHorseBat 1y agoWe used to have something like this in Belgium where you could load money on your debit card: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(debit_card) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(debit_card)
- pests 1y agoI took a Spirit about a year or two and accidentally gave them an old card for payment. They didn’t bill til a day after landing and it got denied. I settled it on a later flight but they definitely lose some money from this.
- riffraff 1y agoOn European airlines I'm pretty sure you can buy with debit cards too.
- dheera 1y agoCryptocurrency could also solve this problem. A "debit" card could have 1000 crypto wallets, each with $10 in them. If you want to pay $90, it forks over keys to 9 of the wallets, and they get drained by the merchant as soon as they have a connection.
- phil21 1y agoThis would be vulnerable to a double spending attack. Pretty trivially too unless I’m missing something. If it became common I imagine it would stop being so quickly as fraud would rapidly catch up.
- lxgr 1y ago> Cryptocurrency could also solve this problem. Offline, without double spending risk? Absolutely not, or at least not without a lot of extra headaches. For that, you'll need at least some trusted hardware (generally an antithesis to trustless crypto schemes) and/or a clever incentive system (e.g. with senders staking a multiple of their balance as collateral, and never being quite sure if receivers are really offline, or only pretending to be, ready to claim their stake once they get publicly verifiable proof of double spending).
- raffraffraff 1y agoMy Garmin watch has Garmin Pay, which works even if I don't have my phone with me. I think I just presumed that there is a bank balance cached somewhere in the app so that an attempt to spend up to a hard limit or that amount will work.
- lxgr 1y agoMobile/wearable wallets are usually online-only, since you can add one card to many devices, so offline limits would be really painful to synchronize (or alternatively banks would be taking a big risk by allowing more than one or two devices and duplicating limits).
- raffraffraff 1y agoIndeed. But still, there must be some sort of "credit score" behind these devices. It can't just give money to a vendor. It must be based on some prior amount agreed between Garmin Pay and the bank or card provider. Take a debit card for example. It's connected to a bank account, and cannot give credit. Garmin must be taking some of the risk on board, since the bank or card provider do not. There's also the fact that anecdotally people are reporting different spend limits. On a thread I saw one person claim that £30 was their limit and another saying "My largest payment so far on the watch has been £275"
- lxgr 1y agoOnline only means just that: There’s no pre-agreed amount; the merchant POS terminal has to ask the issuer for authorization of any transaction amount, however small. There can be other limits in place (like those controlling whether or not a PIN has to be entered), but those are on top of the requirement to obtain online approval from the issuing bank.
- Brajeshwar 1y agoI got my first Credit Card in 2000 (I think that was 2000 or may be 2001). Credit Card swiping devices were rare and many a store just use that Imprinter thingy, and I sign on the carbon papers. That was an offline process. This was in Bombay (INDIA). I think something similar to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter
- immibis 1y agoIt's a trust thing yes. Essentially, you (the merchant) just write down their card number, and how much they paid you, and then later you send that list to your bank who sends it to the credit card network. There is no big technical hurdle. There is a big social hurdle in convincing your bank and the network that you should be allowed to do this. Also the card number gets copied by a little pressing machine onto carbon paper or something like that, not just written down. Being able to spend money you don't have is not a new thing, and poses no technical problems. American readers will know you can easily do that with a cheque. It's your responsibility not to do that, and that's one reason why the bank wants so much personal information to open an account, so they can send the police over to break your kneecaps.
- d--b 1y agoon planes they link your purchase to your seat, so they have your ID info in case you’re not solvent
- Jarmsy 1y agoI don't think they do, people move around and swap seats. I expect they just find the losses small enough to write off. I was once travelling shortly after being issued a new debit card, but still had the old one in my wallet and used it by mistake and I wasn't charged. They never tracked me down for the cost of that packet of crisps!
- lxgr 1y agoOften this is indeed trust-based, but the trust isn't due to you having a card issued by a trusted bank (most airlines accept debit cards too), but rather due to passengers being extremely visible and well-identified: In-flight credit card fraud is an incredibly bad idea, given that most countries check your ID at least at some point during getting on the plane, and seats are usually assigned as well. (Doesn't mean that nobody tries, of course [1]). Sometimes airlines also use ACARS (basically airline-specific telex over VHF, HF, or satellite) to send the card number to their backoffice for authorizations of large amounts, such as business class upgrades. These days, of course, Internet connectivity is getting more common, and with that the problem will likely go away. [1] https://www.sunderlandecho.com/news/pair-spared-jail-after-admitting-conning-airlines-in-mid-air-duty-free-scam-360695 https://www.sunderlandecho.com/news/pair-spared-jail-after-a...
- giancarlostoro 1y agoNot that I disagree, but it does make me wonder if this would be one rare instance where American Express which I know is notorious for siding with their customers (at least for a time? - my father worked as an accounts payable accountant at a big hotel in Orlando near Disney World and he said American Express was notorious at not paying even with signature if their customer claimed it was fraud) would still side with their customers. Leaves one to wonder if they even take Amex on flights. I still remember them taking my card which I think was a debit card on a flight and shoving it into carbon copy paper and basically billing me whenever we landed. This was late 2000s. From Puerto Rico to Florida.
- lxgr 1y agoI doubt you'll see any bank not siding with the cardholder in an offline or deferred-online scenario, since they're usually not liable for any ensuing fraud and accordingly can just charge the transaction back from the merchant.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rsynnott 1y agoEh? I’ve always used a debit card with those without issue. Transaction usually posts the next day.
- acchow 1y agoCredit card transactions were only done offline in the 80s. So it’s very doable. They physically imprinted your card numbers on some special paper with a mechanical device. Wild.
- wodenokoto 1y agoI’m a millennial and even I remember when all card payments were offline. I remember a bar I worked at had trouble because some customers had begun writing wrong signatures and the receipt had been rejected by the bank the following week.
- vidarh 1y agoThis is funny to me, because I'm old enough to remember when card payments all used to be offline... And even paper based.
- FabHK 1y ago> paying by card offline. How is this going to be implemented I wonder. Paying offline used to be the norm for credit cards, from their introduction in the 1960s until some two decades ago. Wikipedia: [...] until always-connected payment terminals became ubiquitous at the beginning of the 21st century, many merchants accepted all charges, especially those below a threshold value or from known and trusted customers, without verifying them by phone. Books with lists of stolen card numbers were distributed to merchants who were expected in any case to check cards against the list before accepting them, as well as verifying the signature on the charge slip against that on the card.
- bradleyjg 1y agoThese things used to be ubiquitous: https://fragrant.mobiletransaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/credit-card-imprinter-payment.jpg.webp https://fragrant.mobiletransaction.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
- fmbb 1y agoI would not assume the central bank of Sweden would mean credit cards only. Debit cards are extremely common for card payments.
- jordanb 1y agoCredit cards were originally an offline payment method. The merchant would create a receipt that included a contact paper imprint of the card (which is why the card has raised lettering) and would present it to the bank for reimbursement.
- eirikbakke 1y agoIn Norway, the card terminals usually go into an "accept with signature" mode if they are temporarily offline. So they print a receipt that the customer has to sign. (This is for BankAxept debit cards, which are standard in Norway.) In a grocery store line once, I remember a distraught customer whose card was declined due to insufficient funds. The store manager came over, yanked the ethernet cable from the payment terminal, and told the customer to try again. "Accepted with signature."
- iwontberude 1y agoThis is why I don’t snitch on anyone stealing food. Skip the line.
- ExoticPearTree 1y ago> It's not about paying by cash but paying by card offline. How is this going to be implemented I wonder. Considering that the card has memory on it, you can store there how much balance you have when you do an online payment. The bank can send back your available balance, so you cannot spend offline more than you have. I can't think about anything simpler than this.
- cambaceres 1y agoUnless money has been withdrawn from the account connected to the card after the card was last online.
- ExoticPearTree 1y agoTrue. But you can have a rule that says something like “after X offline transactions you must insert the card into an ATM for update”. My thinking is that in this day and and age, unless something bad really happens (war, volcanic erruption), the chances of using a card for offline transactions for an extended period of time are very close to zero.
- boricj 1y agoYou could store money digitally on a card. Moneo did that until 2015 and it was used in France as a wallet for paying meals in school canteens for tertiary education. That system was phased out just as I left university. I remember writing an app in Java to read the balance on a card with my laptop which had a built-in smartcard reader, because I was too lazy to go to a station. Everyone in the classroom then promptly asked me to check their balance... and a few asked if I could top it up somehow.
- jagged-chisel 1y agoThink about credit cards before online processing - the old paper machines that imprinted your card onto carbon paper. The merchant was guaranteed payment. You, on the other hand, were indebted to the bank. The concept of a “credit limit” was the line over which the bank insisted you not step, lest you incur fees galore.