[HN Gopher] Plastic Money
___________________________________________________________________
Plastic Money
Author : bertman
Score : 227 points
Date : 2023-09-04 07:54 UTC (15 hours ago)
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| jasmer wrote:
| [dead]
| xyst wrote:
| just a small reminder of how convoluted the process of buyer and
| merchant payments has become.
|
| It used to be simple:
|
| - buyer hands the money to the merchant.
|
| - merchant verifies monetary value. If monetary value is valid
| then merchant gives buyer the item. Otherwise, tells them to piss
| off/get bent.
|
| - buyer walks away with item
|
| But major credit/debit card processors (visa, mc, amex) had to
| insert their hands into the pockets of every buyer and merchant
| to get their 3-5% cut on each transaction.
|
| Now it's a much more complicated process that happens more
| "seamlessly":
|
| - buyer presents debit or credit card
|
| - merchant checks if debit or credit card is accepted by their
| payment processor --> if not accepted, tell buyer present diff
| card or "get bent"
|
| - merchant swipes/taps/keys-in card information and attempts to
| process the transaction. A decision is typically reached within
| less than <1 second --> if declined, try again. If further
| declined, tell buyer card declined. Buyer insists it's good and
| to run it again. Merchant runs it again, it's successfully
| processed (wtf?). If not, tell buyer to get bent.
|
| - buyer walks away with the item
|
| In the background, in order to accept debit and credit cards the
| merchant had to sign a deal with the devil and pick one of the
| many payment processors. Merchant could have gone with his bank's
| processor but turns out the merchant doesn't have the right
| paperwork or lacks the revenue to qualify for a "premium"
| account. So the merchant looks elsewhere and finds a promising
| payment processor elsewhere but fails to read the fine print. In
| addition to the 3-5% fee charged by the major CC networks, the
| processor will take a 5 cent transaction fee to process, in
| addition to a 1 cent "inter network" processing fee. ALSO, the
| "free" equipment that's provided to your business has a $50 month
| maintenance fee in perpetuity. On the flip side, if you transact
| 100K per month, they will cut the transaction fees by 25%, oh how
| generous!
|
| Oh did I forget to mention that some cards have "premium" fees?
| So if a buyer presents a "black card", the merchant is then
| charged by the bank issuing the card another fee. Sometimes it's
| included in the payment processing terms but this is YMMV. So as
| a consumer, if you ever wonder why the small business takes
| "visa" but not your "chase ultra sapphire pearl max black" card
| with visa logo. That's why.
|
| Unfortunately, it doesn't end there.
|
| (2 days later) buyer that bought that item actually stole/cloned
| the credit card and the actual credit card owner initiated a
| dispute.
|
| Merchant has now been charged a $25 dispute fee and is now in the
| resolution process. If bank and/or credit card processor rules in
| consumers favor, merchant loses $25 in addition to the cost of
| the item(s).
|
| At the end of the day, merchants get fucked. Merchants pass on
| costs to consumers/buyers. Buyers get fucked with increased cost
| of goods.
|
| Only winners are the useless middlemen.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| Card-present fraud is low enough that _I_ can accept payments
| (in the UK) for 1.69%. The reader cost PS39, but in the last
| few months they 've started allowing me to accept NFC payments
| using my phone without a separate reader. No monthly fees.
|
| I'm not running "classic" retail, just stalls at school events.
| The cost of cash is the cost of my time and that of other
| volunteers making sure we know how much cash we brought in, and
| getting to the bank. It's _absolutely_ worth 1.69% to avoid
| having to deal with cash. And that 's even before worrying
| about having a float to make change with.
| folbec wrote:
| "- merchant checks if debit or credit card is accepted by their
| payment processor --> if not accepted, tell buyer present diff
| card or "get bent""
|
| This is america, in France (and more generally in Europe) all
| credit / payments cards are standardized thru governmental
| intervention. Vendors are allowed to say cash only and refuse
| cards in general but this is getting real rare. In some
| countries (Norway), you can have a real hard time paying cash
| in big cities, vendors refuse it.
| karmakaze wrote:
| My first encounter was with VendaCard being used in mid-80s at
| the University libraries for photocopies. Seems they've also been
| used for autolaundrymats.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm with cards like these, if they aren't tied to an identity,
| the general population could print money faster than the
| governments do.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Wow this discussion unlocked a long-lost memory: the Swedish
| "cash card" - a stored value card where you'd use a terminal to
| load money off your bank account onto the stored value card and
| then use it in participating stores. If you lost the card you
| lost the money. The fees to merchants were too high so it never
| gained any adoption, it looks like it only was available from
| 1997-2004. The Wikipedia references a German version, Geldkarte,
| which apparently had a renaissance when it could double as proof
| of age for tobacco vending machines...
|
| https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_(betalsystem)
|
| I'm also reminded of the magstripe stored value cards used by our
| public transit agency. These were trivial to rewrite, but since
| most people who tried this did it to save money on their commute
| rather than random joyriding, it was easy for the agency to
| reconcile the usage logs to find out where they went every day
| and wait for them at their station...
|
| These days I think the main advantage to offline systems is
| performance. When you have a busy subway station in Tokyo with
| massive crowds passing through the gates, nothing beats the
| throughout of offline Felicia Suica cards. Their gates default to
| open and you walk through while swiping without stopping, the
| gates only close if there is a failure. Vs EMV-based systems like
| London where you have to stop and wait for the card reader
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| EMV based systems aren't necessarily authentification based /
| don't always phone home depending on the card issuer.
| dfox wrote:
| It depends on both issuer, acquirer and the particular
| merchant. Second step of the EMV transaction (after the
| terminal verifies that the card was issued by known issuer)
| involves the card and terminal comparing their authentication
| and authorization policies, which might very well result in
| no-op being acceptable to both. The system is not designed to
| be secure against fraud, but to assign liability for the
| fraud to particular party in cryptographically verifiable
| way. So as a merchant (think public transport) you can very
| well accept cards offline without any kind of CHV step, but
| the possible fraud is your problem.
| [deleted]
| alexfoo wrote:
| > Vs EMV-based systems like London where you have to stop and
| wait for the card reader
|
| Throughput depends on the people being ready.
|
| In London the TfL gates (both train/underground) have a delay
| on closing, so it's possible for the next person's pass
| (whatever it is) to be scanned before the gates close. At busy
| times there are enough people already ready with their passes
| that the gates don't shut at all between scans and there is
| steady flow of people passing through. It only fails when
| someone faffs a bit too long with their pass/phone/watch/etc
| and you get a temporary stall.
|
| Even approaching a closed gate it's possible, with a bit of
| practice and an outstretched arm, to walk through without
| having to break stride.
|
| You do have to be careful of some people intentionally using an
| invalid card, resulting in the gates closing, and the person
| behind them letting them through with their subsequent scan
| whilst being left at the gate themselves (easily solved by then
| going to see one of the gate operatives and explaining the
| situation).
|
| The things that aren't quite there yet, in terms of speed, are
| the QR codes being used for digital rail tickets, they have a
| separate optical reader (obviously) that doesn't work
| quickly/easily enough to walk through without breaking stride
| as you have to faff with a piece of paper or your phone rather
| than a simple NFC.
| [deleted]
| vincent_s wrote:
| Germany: Geldkarte (German: "money card") is a stored-value
| card or electronic cash system used in Germany. It operates as
| an offline smart card for small payment at things like vending
| machines and to pay for public transport or parking tickets.
| The card is pre-paid and funds are loaded onto the card using
| ATMs or dedicated charging machines. The system will be
| abandoned from 2024.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geldkarte
| zwirbl wrote:
| The similar Austrian system was called 'Quick' and has been
| defunct for a few years now. I only ever used it for vending
| machines, mostly cigarettes
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_(Geldkarte)
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| As others have said, EMV doesn't have to phone home, and
| London's TfL system often doesn't straight away because they
| might not even have a connection (my bus this morning
| definitely didn't). It's also not charging the payment
| immediately, because the charge is unknown at that point - you
| might not know until the end of the day or week what the charge
| is, because travel rates are capped and dependent on the zones
| you're traveling in.
|
| As to the gates being default closed, well, gates at train/tube
| stations can accept a range of things being presented to them
| including smartphone/watch payments, bank card contactless,
| Oyster card, Oyster season tickets, paper tickets with magnetic
| stripes, paper/magnetic season tickets, and Freedom passes
| (technically a special sort of Oyster season ticket, I think).
|
| If you're traveling with a paper/magnetic ticket, you're going
| to have to insert it into the mag reader and wait for it to
| spit it out before it opens the gates. Can't be swiped.
|
| That, combined with the fact TfL already have a problem with
| revenue protection (some people jump gates), albeit not quite
| as bad as you'll see in most of Paris or Rome, means they're
| going to keep the gates closed by default.
|
| Fare dodging in Tokyo is almost unthinkable. Social constructs
| mean they can do something at those gates few other cities of
| that size can get away with.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Interesting. So there's no verification of the card validity
| at all? I assumed at least they took an auth hold like gas
| stations do. If I call and get my card blocked I can use that
| now-invalid card and ride for free?
|
| So why then are the EMV card readers so damn slow? Is it just
| a NFC vs FeliCa thing?
|
| The Tokyo metro system also supports paper (mag stripe)
| tickets through the same fare gates. Those are also spit
| through the gate super fast.
|
| On a failed read, the gates close nearly-instantly, I don't
| think they would actually aid in fare avoidance, you do see
| people run into them painfully when their card has too low
| balance.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| From personal experience, if you use an EMV card that has
| been blocked on TfL services, you will sometimes be able to
| travel. I did this by accident once. I could see TfL
| repeatedly trying to debit my account with incorrect
| information for about a week. I doubt all of their readers
| are offline, and I suspect that a card gets blacklisted if
| it declines. I suspect this is also because they only
| charge at the end of the day once they have computed the
| correct fare (with capping etc)
| kalleboo wrote:
| Interesting anecdote! Thanks. I would have definitely
| assumed that at least train gates (but not buses I guess)
| would attempt a hold!
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| > On a failed read, the gates close nearly-instantly, I
| don't think they would actually aid in fare avoidance, you
| do see people run into them painfully when their card has
| too low balance.
|
| I'm talking about the instance where somebody doesn't even
| scan: they just walk through. That is possible in some
| stations in London, and it's perhaps not a coincidence
| that's where the worst fare avoidance occurs.
| nayuki wrote:
| No, the Japanese fare gates have motion detectors. If you
| try to walk through without scanning, the gates close. I
| tested this once.
| justincormack wrote:
| London does not charge online, especially as they don't know
| the fare until later, so the billing still happens as batch
| like Oyster.
| progre wrote:
| The wonderfull Cash-chip was embedded into Visa debit card
| issued by the bank. It also had "Valid in Sweden only" printed
| beside it, on an othervise internationally recognized debit-
| card.
|
| I know of at least one person who had to spend the night in a
| detainment cell at JFK and then had to take a plane back to
| Sweden the next morning because the customs agent concluded
| that they didn't have any money for their stay in New York.
| kalleboo wrote:
| Oh god that sounds like an unfortunate design haha
| rtpg wrote:
| I had this for laundry at school in France! I recently was at a
| US university, and having to use an app and sign up to start my
| laundry was something awful in comparison (though I liked getting
| $5 in free credit for some unknown reason)
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| PSA: The author of this post also runs a niche YouTube channel
| that is notoriously under-subscribed. For everyone interested in
| retro tech & technical infrastructure in the real world, go head
| over here: https://www.youtube.com/@computersarebad
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| "notoriously under-subscribed" is a generous way to put it. I'm
| going to post a cool video soon though, I swear.
| xn wrote:
| The cafeteria at Visa in San Mateo used smart cards in 1998.
|
| There were startups focused on smart cards in the 90s:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/24/business/publicard-busine...
| deadeye wrote:
| Am I the only one here that remembers credit cards before they
| used any sort of online processing?
|
| Back in the day, paying with a credit card was a hassle. There
| was a machine that would take an imprint of your card and you
| would sign the imprint. There was no authorization.
| dghughes wrote:
| The authorization was the clerk picked up the phone and dialed
| the credit card company.
| adamauckland wrote:
| I remember doing the authorisation by phoning up a Streamline
| who would give you an authorisation code to put on the credit
| card form. I worked for Electronics Boutique and we couldn't
| give the games out without the code
| fellowmartian wrote:
| I only know this because of the scene from Home Alone 2.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I worked in a gas station taking credit cards w/ an imprint
| machine. We had a book, updated monthly, of card numbers to
| decline. That was in 1990. By 1994 we were calling a toll free
| number and reading (part of?) the account number for
| authorization.
| lowercased wrote:
| I worked a retail mall job in the early 90s. We had a
| computer/POS system that had a built-in swiper for credit
| cards. You'd swipe, hit a key, then listen to it dial out,
| connect, beep, etc. A CC payment took minimum 30 seconds,
| usually closer to a minute. December was always a huge slowdown
| for cc payments. _Occasionally_ we 'd pull out the imprint
| machine and do a few of those, and... for some reason, I seem
| to remember we had to use it for amex or diners club or
| discover or some other 'non-traditional' card, but those were a
| rarity - I think I may have done 2 or 3 of those a year.
|
| Most places seemed to have 'swipe in the terminal' only by late
| 90s.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| I'm curious to know when exactly that practice ended in Western
| Europe and North America. As a millennial, the only time I ever
| encountered it was in 2008 in an outdoor shop in Thamel,
| Kathmandu's backpacker ghetto. The owners said that they could
| not accept my Visa Electron card (standard European debit card)
| because it was not a real credit card, and they showed me the
| machine they used to take imprints of real credit cards. Of
| course, this was all gone by my next visit to Nepal a couple of
| years later.
| elygre wrote:
| If the amount was big enough, there would be a phone call from
| the merchant to some call center.
| teh_klev wrote:
| I'm of that vintage of credit card user that remembers this. I
| used to keep my counterfoils (I think that's what they were
| called) to reconcile what was remaining on my available credit.
| I seem to remember there was a printed list of that some
| merchants used to look up invalidated cards before electronic
| terminals replaced mechanical card swipe machines.
| EricE wrote:
| I remember my parents credit card bill coming in on punched
| cards - would have been the mid 70's. Ha!
| andreareina wrote:
| I used to be the one running those cards through the machine!
| We actually would call someone (credit card processor?) to give
| them the details and we'd get an auth code back that we wrote
| down.
| pluijzer wrote:
| Starting from 1996 we had ChipKnip in the Netherlands. When it
| came out you could already pay with debitcards in most shops. The
| added benefit was that it was suited for small purchases and
| worked in places without a phoneline, like the bus. One problem
| is that if you break or lose the card your money will be gone. I
| remeber that when I was a child more then once I broke my card
| and had to tape it togheter in aome wild fashion in order to use
| my money.
| miki123211 wrote:
| I kind of like the solution adopted by the Polish city of Wroclaw
| (and many others, but Wroclaw is the one I'm personally familiar
| with.)
|
| Their transit system relies on bog-standard bank-issued Visa /
| Mastercard payment cards, the kind most Polish people already
| have in their wallets. When you buy a ticket (usually at a ticket
| machine at the stop or in the vehicle itself), the machine
| temporarily remembers some of your card information. If a ticket
| inspector comes, you just tap your normal credit / debit card to
| their terminal, which queries the vehicle's systems somehow. It's
| basically the reverse of a storage-value system, they use a
| payment card for a kind of identification.
|
| All transactions are performed offline, usually the next day.
| Tickets are cheap enough that fraud is not a big concern, and
| there's a system in place to blacklist cards that can't be
| credited. If you end up on that blacklist, you have to go to
| their website or office, enter your card number / tap your card
| and pay the missing amount.
|
| If you're a resident and not a tourist, there's also a system of
| transit cards I believe.
| nayuki wrote:
| > SIM cards are just smart cards. [...] SIM cards no longer
| conform is ISO 7810 in most cases (having migrated to the smaller
| micro and nano formats), but continue to be compliant with ISO
| 7816 for electrical and protocol compatibility.
|
| Over the past 20 years, I've used mobile cellular telephones that
| take mini-SIM, micro-SIM, and nano-SIM. I didn't get to
| experience the full-size SIM card, but learned about this obscure
| fact from online photos and museums. Example:
| https://twitter.com/phone_museum/status/1287310071907713024
|
| > Why is it that SVCs gained so little traction for payments in
| the US?
|
| Another obscure point is that during the Bitcoin craze of the
| mid-2010s, the Canadian government tried to pitch MintChip as a
| competitor. It fizzled out and went nowhere.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintChip
|
| > Offline systems simplify payment networks in some ways, but
| also add complexity, which is often apparent in transit systems
| that combine offline terminals (for example in buses) and online
| terminals (for example at train platforms). [...] If you add
| value to a card with a zero (or near zero) value and then try to
| board a bus, it is likely that you will be rejected: the value-
| add hasn't been written to the card yet, and the bus terminal
| hasn't been told about it. The transit operator often sets an
| expectation of one business day for online value adds to be
| available if your first trip is an offline terminal If you add
| value to a card with a zero (or near zero) value and then try to
| board a bus, it is likely that you will be rejected: the value-
| add hasn't been written to the card yet, and the bus terminal
| hasn't been told about it.
|
| This perfectly describes the situation in Toronto/Ontario with
| PRESTO, adding value, and tapping on buses.
| seszett wrote:
| Nice and very interesting write-up.
|
| I'd like to comment on this part, about actually writing on
| cards:
|
| > you can create an account online and associate the card with
| your account, and then you can add value online. This is
| convenient, but confronts the offline nature of the system. You
| add value to the card, but there's no way to write the new value
| to it.
|
| > The solution, or at least partial solution, to this problem
| looks something like this: fare payment terminals have to receive
| a streaming log of value-add operations so that they can apply
| them next they are presented with the relevant card.
|
| I think that's why new systems often use NFC, since smartphones
| can do NFC this has the potential (because many NFC transit cards
| don't allow it yet) to actually charge cards from smartphones. In
| practice, none of the transit systems I regularly use allow it,
| and although it's in beta in Paris they only whitelist a handful
| of specific smartphone models so I can't do it either. But it's a
| possibility.
|
| It could work the same with ISO 7816 smartcards if people just
| had card readers at home, but in practice here in Belgium where
| most people have such card readers (used to authenticate online
| with one's national ID card, although this is becoming less
| common now that there's a smartphone app for that), this has
| never been used for anything else basically.
|
| And for some reason, smartcard companies seem to be totally
| unable to devise user-friendly interfaces. It's been more than 30
| years now so you might think they have had the time to think
| about it, but... no. I wish there was just a web standard for
| that with a standard browser-provided UI.
| dolmen wrote:
| Charging the Paris transit card (Ile-de-France Mobilites) via
| NFC is out of beta for at least one year now. Much convenient
| to bypass queues at the start of each month.
| dolmen wrote:
| > And for some reason, smartcard companies seem to be totally
| unable to devise user-friendly interfaces. It's been more than
| 30 years now so you might think they have had the time to think
| about it, but... no. I wish there was just a web standard for
| that with a standard browser-provided UI.
|
| Browser development is driven from the US. Smartcards
| development is driven from Europe. I expect that the same
| frictions that happens in deployment of smartcards for banking
| also happens in the browsers world.
| 1023bytes wrote:
| I've just used this in Malaysia, they have a card called Touch
| n Go that is very widely accepted. You can load up the card
| using cash terminals or via a smartphone app with NFC, you can
| use that to check the balance as well
| tuetuopay wrote:
| My grandfather was at the head of a French company that pioneered
| the smart card for banking use. They started with the payphone,
| continued with the Vitale card (public health system card), then
| did the credit card. He told me stories of him going in many
| countries to sell the tech and concept, and this article nails
| it: this is a French thing, so the US did _not_ want it. They did
| not want it so badly that magstripe is still commonplace. Its
| quite nice to listen to him about the beginnings of computing,
| the notion of "datacenter", etc.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > this is a French thing, so the US did not want it
|
| Given how common US things are in Europe, I'm surprised there
| isn't more of a trading war over things like this. Personally,
| I think the EU should penalise foreign all social media
| companies, and fund local start-ups to replaces them.
| oaiey wrote:
| The US is a huge market within, has very revenue focused
| companies and an active "Homeland security"/national interest
| management ongoing.
|
| I totally believe that the first two points reject 90% of
| international influence and standardization.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Well, one of the reasons I kind of play up the French
| origin of this technology is because I think it turns into
| an interesting twist when it comes to US government
| adoption. Articles from the time period seem to agree that
| the technology was having a really hard time crossing the
| ocean from Europe, and while there were several factors I
| think a good chunk of it was just the payment networks in
| the US not being interested in adopting something new.
|
| But there's a bit of irony where, post 9/11, the US federal
| government decided they needed to really pick things up
| when it came to secure identity for federal employees and
| military personnel. So they developed and adopted the PIV
| standard now used for all federal credentials, which is a
| very soup-to-nuts smart-card based identity solution
| complete with PKI certificates and offline biometric
| authentication. The problem is that smart card technology,
| clearly the way to achieve this, hadn't taken off in the
| US, so they ended up having to buy pretty much the whole
| solution from France. Not that big of a deal in practice as
| Thales is a major defense contractor to the US anyway, but
| sort of a disappointment considering all the interest in
| keeping a strong domestic military technology capability.
|
| One wonders where the NSA was during this process, but the
| NSA has a tendency to both overengineer things to a degree
| that widespread use is infeasible, and keep things secret
| to a degree that widespread use is undesirable. So the more
| homegrown solutions to similar problems, things like the
| Fortezza cards, were complete nonstarters as a widespread
| solution to identifying federal personnel. So we have one
| of the factors here in the United States general lag in
| adoption of identity technology compared to other,
| especially European, countries.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand what the first two points are.
|
| That US corporations are so focused on revenue / a large
| market that they are not influenced by government?
|
| Or that the US market is so big international corps cannot
| complete (which is irrelevant in the context of my own
| comment).
| EricE wrote:
| Simpler than that - look up the phenomenon known as Not
| Invented Here
| sugarkjube wrote:
| I doubt offline cash-like electronic money will ever happen.
|
| Like others also already mentioned, we also had a system like
| this 30 years ago for vending machines and cafeteria in a large
| corp.
|
| Banks want tracking (for customer profiling). Governments wants
| tracking (for anti-terrorism and anti-money-laundering). So it
| won't happen.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| It happened in 1995 with Mondex,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex
|
| But I suspect that your reasoning is correct nonetheless.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I believe this is the case too, at least for the US. Why, no
| profit to be made from people using these. We have Credit Cards
| and the Banks get a cut from the store and from people who do
| not pay their full balances off, and the stores hide these fees
| from their customers.
|
| Now some stores are starting to add special fees for Credit
| Card use, which the Banks are trying to eliminate these fees
| via the US Congress. They know as well as I do, if stores start
| charging fees for Credit Card use, many people would jump right
| back to cash. This would decrease their profits.
| esprehn wrote:
| Consumers also want protection against lost cards, fraud and
| refunds when the merchant or product is bad.
| mindslight wrote:
| The general trend that I see is that institutions [0] will
| always favor centralization of telemetry and control (eg the
| concept of _legibility_ ). You don't even need to phrase it in
| the terms of profiling/tracking per se, although those are
| instances of the general.
|
| I think I even feel the same dynamic with something as banal
| and informal as home automation. With some kind of computer (eg
| microcontroller) at every node I certainly could keep the local
| control local. Or I could just focus on publishing data to the
| "network" [1] and getting commands back, and making the
| interface a given device exports as simple as possible.
|
| We see the results of this harsh dynamic for platforms that
| allow for hub-less control (eg Zwave I think). Nifty and more
| robust, but it adds to the bespokeness and siloing/lock-in.
| It's just so much more complexity that then has to be
| configured, and then grokked to know what the system will
| actually do. Whereas backhaul state and control to a general
| purpose Linux machine running python and you can do "whatever
| you want" (modulo that singular machine having a problem).
|
| Not a great dynamic for those of us that like freedom.
|
| [0] or really any entity, corporations and governments can just
| fulfill the imperative at scale
|
| [1] full extrapolation in the corporate context - "cloud"
| paulgerhardt wrote:
| https://offline.cash/
|
| I mean. It's already happened. Thanks to some clever non-
| intuitive use of escrow contracts one can create fungible cash-
| like electronic money for offline transactions.
| medler wrote:
| NYC metro cards are reportedly a form of stored-value card. When
| you swipe, it reads the value, writes the new value, and checks
| that the correct value was written. Transactions are later synced
| to a database to catch fraud and so forth.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNYC/comments/nsicuj/technologica...
| ElongatedMusket wrote:
| Talking up the tech of having physical plastic cards hold value,
| but ignoring the real-world implications, is kind of silly right?
| Maybe it would have been better for the author to get that out of
| the way first... something like "if plastic cards held a value,
| public figures such as celebrities and CEOs would be robbed,
| kidnapped, held ransom, etc due to the values of the cards, so
| they are not practically safe in our non-utopian world. But let's
| explore the tech behind it anyway"
| lxgr wrote:
| You're missing an important point: It's possible to carry
| _some_ of your money with you, and leave most of it somewhere
| more safe, in whatever form, just like with cash.
| jaclaz wrote:
| And another important point, public figures tend to have
| assistants with them that carry the money or the cards or
| just pay later.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| That's just about the silliest idea I have read this month.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The cards are kind of a cash-substitute.
| benoliver999 wrote:
| This guy writes faster than I can read. I love the site!
| virtualritz wrote:
| I remember getting my first debit card from my local bank in
| Germany as a teenager. It was in the early 90s, I believe.
|
| It had a chip with the ubiquitous brass contacts almost any card
| has today.
|
| My uncle had participated in the patent filings for some of the
| tech, years earlier, for his employer. He had explained to me,
| already in the 80s, how this would be the future of carrying
| money around.
|
| It never took off. My personal take is that it was simply an
| oversight in UX.
|
| There was no way to check the balance on the chip without going
| to an ATM.
|
| Furthermore only some ATMs of some banks carried the
| hardware/software to do so. I also don't recall if you could even
| check your balance if the ATM belonged to another bank.
|
| Also paying by card was far from common in Germany then so few
| shops carried the readers. It was mostly only big supermarkets
| and department stores.
|
| I.e. it was double inconvenient compared to cash.
|
| And Germany being a safe country, the added security in case of
| theft didn't help. It was also a minor factor since a thieve that
| would steel your purse would simply throw the card away. The
| money would be gone either way.
| jimmcslim wrote:
| Oh wow, a lot of technology in there from my past... in the late
| 90's I worked at a startup, Cards Etc, in Sydney, Australia with
| the mission to build a back-end system, Arterium, for dealing
| with multi-application smart card issuance.
|
| The product is still mentioned in a couple of articles...
|
| https://www.afr.com/companies/smartcards-offer-a-world-of-op...
| https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/3534/first-data-selects...
| robin_reala wrote:
| I spent a few years with a Mondex card[1] (I assume Exeter
| university was one of the test locations?) and it was vaguely
| useful: most places on campus accepted it so you could use it to
| pay for a pint, print or photocopy, or buy course books. Looking
| through the list of what it could do though it seems it was
| pretty underutilized. In the test location I was in you couldn't
| transfer funds to another person or use multiple currencies, and
| I don't remember any personal readers.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex
| vinay_ys wrote:
| In more recent times, we had to think about this problem in
| Indian market context. I saw this problem as online vs offline
| payments problem.
|
| If both parties are offline, can you still make a secure transfer
| of stored value? Yes, with a trusted execution environment and
| cryptography, you can do it. So, yeah, smart card works; a
| smartphone works, a feature phone with NFC smart card works etc.
| For each, the risk profile is different which affects the answer
| to the next question.
|
| Then, when does reconciliation happen? When either party goes
| online? What if it is not a closed loop system? Then,
| reconciliation needs to happen for both parties independently.
| How long can either party stay offline and continue to make
| transactions? Is it both send and receive or only send on one
| side and only receive on another side? What if one party
| (merchant/receiver) is more likely to be online (almost always).
| Does it just become online payments problem then? NFC tap and pay
| is exactly this scenario.
|
| In India, right now, we have NETC stored value cards for closed
| loop systems like metro. For open systems like UPI we have
| recently introduced offline payments capability with very small
| stored value stored as tokens on the mobile phone and used for
| very small transactions. As the banks learn the real-world
| operational risks, the wallet limits and transaction limits will
| be increased.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The real solution is to let the receiver of the money have a
| "verify" button which will, if connected to the internet,
| contact a central server and check that no double-spends etc.
| have happened. Up until verification is done, the money shows
| as "provisional" in your account - but you can still spend it.
| Only one person in the chain needs to verify for the whole
| chain to become permanent.
|
| Then the users and merchants can decide if they wait to click
| the verify button. And the default for anyone with data
| connectivity should probably be auto-verification. There is an
| incentive to verify, because if any double-spending has
| happened, the first to verify is the one who gets the money.
|
| Double-spends _will_ happen in any system that allows offline
| transactions, because a user has to be allowed to log into a
| new device (if they lose their old one), and there is no way to
| know if the money spent from their old device was synced to the
| server yet.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Up until verification is done, the money shows as
| "provisional" in your account - but you can still spend it.
|
| Who would accept "provisional money" though, if there is a
| realistic risk of it being double spent and therefore
| effectively worthless?
|
| > Double-spends will happen in any system that allows offline
| transactions
|
| Only if you assume untrusted devices. That's why in most past
| and existing stored-value systems, smartcards are being used
| - these have different security properties.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > Who would accept "provisional money" though, if there is
| a realistic risk of it being double spent and therefore
| effectively worthless?
|
| It's up to the receiver whether they want to walk to the
| internet cafe and connect to verify it, or if they just
| trust the person they got it from.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > Only if you assume untrusted devices.
|
| If all the devices are trusted, but can be lost/destroyed
| and re-issued, you have the same problem.
| lxgr wrote:
| There are ways to do reissuance for lost or damaged
| stored-value cards, but they require shadow accounts and
| periodic reconciliation:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37380539
|
| But these aren't mandatory: Physical cash also can't be
| replaced when lost, and only rarely when physically
| destroyed. That model might be preferred in some
| scenarios.
| woah wrote:
| I get the idea, but I think this is a terrible UX. People
| shouldn't have to worry about whether they have real money or
| not. Either the system is secure or it isn't.
| Spivak wrote:
| Eh, checks and chargebacks are a thing. People are already
| used to the idea that money has to clear to be real.
| lmm wrote:
| Not nowadays. Most people never deal with cheques and
| never accept payment by credit card.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| > because a user has to be allowed to log into a new device
| (if they lose their old one)
|
| You can solve for that by having short validity of the
| offline tokens on device and having that equal the cool-off
| period for reclaiming those funds when new device is
| provisioned. If I had [?]100 unspent tokens in my offline
| capable device that I lost, and got a new device provisioned
| the same day, then that [?]100 will show up in my account and
| be available to load on my device only after, say 7 days, of
| cooling-off period. In those 7 days, if someone who found
| your device could spend it and if so you lose it. If you know
| you are likely to be offline only sporadically for few hours
| and not for days, you can reduce the validity (and hence
| cooling-off period) significantly to just 12 or 24 hours.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I think this system has to be designed for some users who
| will _never_ be online. Think of villages where there is no
| internet access yet (only 8% of Eritrea has access to the
| internet for example!). Hence there can 't be a 'if you
| don't log in for 7 days you lose your money' mode.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| Let me clarify: if you have you device with you (didn't
| lose the device) and you didn't make contact with another
| online device for more than cool-off period, your device
| tokens won't be refreshed and they will expire and become
| unspendable. You don't lose that money - it is still in
| your account and will be available for you spend as soon
| as you go online. The "lose your money" scenario is only
| if you lose your device and someone finds your device and
| spends the money on the device within the cool-off
| period. It is equivalent to losing your cash wallet and
| someone else spending your cash. Except in case of cash,
| that stolen/found cash is lost forever and is valid to be
| spent by the thief/finder forever whereas in this case
| there is a small time-window after which you
| automatically don't actually lose your money!
| endgame wrote:
| If both parties are offline, exchanging cash trivially solves
| this problem.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| :-) that assumes cash is trivial. It is not for so many
| reasons. Cash is bulky and discrete. Cash is visible and
| easily snatched/coerced from you.
|
| Apart from classical robbery held at knifepoint or gunpoint
| and taken to an atm and being robbed or being blackmailed to
| actually do instant money transfer online which do happen,
| there are other lower threshold but more frequently occurring
| and more painful cash "thefts".
|
| One eye-opening story I learnt a while ago was this: the
| women daily wage workers (or the household help that comes to
| my home) who are typically the breadwinners for the family
| are coerced by their drunk husbands to give their hard earned
| cash which they will waste on more alcohol or gambling. This
| was the situation for decades. Now, with zero-balance, zero-
| cost bank accounts being made available at scale in India,
| these women can now keep their money safe and provide care
| for their children by refusing to give money to their
| husbands (usually it involves telling them they don't have
| the money to give when in fact they do in their banks). Such
| is the social reality for so many.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| cash also has a fantastic advantage that no piece of
| technology will ever have - its ability to level the
| playing field in terms of access. No government can
| invalidate your cash without simultaneously invalidating
| all cash. This is not the case with any digital system.
|
| See here for one example where the indian state denied
| citizens access to their money by freezing their UPI
| accounts after unproven allegations.
| https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/bank-acs-can-be-
| frozen...
| jameson71 wrote:
| That doesn't sound a lot different than "hiding" the cash.
| If she is working, the husband knows she is getting money.
|
| I do not think the loss of privacy is worth the convenience
| when talking about replacing cash in a society.
| lxgr wrote:
| I fully agree, but in fact stored-value cards offer a
| plausible path forward for private electronic money:
|
| Most existing stored-value systems use "shadow accounts"
| for reconciliation (in case one of the card-level private
| keys gets compromised and makes it possible to "double-
| spend" electronic cash), but that's not really a required
| part of the system. If it's secure enough, it's possible
| to just leave these out!
|
| It's probably also possible to create some kind of hybrid
| system which does create pseudonymous traceable logs
| which offer some trade-off between privacy and security,
| similar to how banknotes have serial numbers which can
| theoretically be traced, but practically mostly aren't.
|
| And the enormous advantage of a privacy-preserving
| e-cash/stored-value system over cash is that it works on
| the internet too.
| wtmt wrote:
| The story and the connection to bank accounts don't sound
| logical at all. It's not like the husbands wouldn't know
| that the money _is there somewhere_. If a random person can
| do to another person a "classical robbery held at
| knifepoint or gunpoint and taken to an atm and being robbed
| or being blackmailed to actually do instant money transfer
| online", why wouldn't husbands catch on to this? The women
| could, in theory, have more than one bank account and hide
| how much they earn and save by keeping a lower balance in
| the account known to the husband. But the same could also
| be done with physical cash by handing a chunk of it to a
| trusted person (for expenses and savings) and keeping a
| smaller amount at home to be snatched.
|
| With one or more bank accounts, the woman must now keep her
| phone safe and inaccessible from the husband too. Or she
| must be very quick and diligent in deleting all the SMSes
| sent by banks for all kinds of transactions. This adds more
| hassles than saving cash with someone else.
|
| In all the cases of alcoholism and men snatching money from
| the women/household without any other care, it's violence
| that keeps that relationship and "contract" alive. That
| violence isn't going to disappear just because physical
| cash is replaced by a bank account.
|
| In summary, I don't buy the conclusion you've quickly
| jumped to.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I don't quite get the example, like the other user said in
| this case the husband would clearly understand his wife is
| still working, so of course he won't believe it? So if he
| has a alcohol and gambling problem then he will still try
| some method?
| bertman wrote:
| >For open systems like UPI we have recently introduced offline
| payments capability with very small stored value stored as
| tokens on the mobile phone and used for very small
| transactions.
|
| Sounds interesting! I read about India's UPI for the first time
| a couple of months ago in an Economist article:
| https://archive.ph/WoqQp
| predictabl3 wrote:
| Please don't scorch me HN, this isn't an endorsement, just a
| question for thought -- but isn't this one of the things
| Lightning is sort of meant to solve?
|
| lol, literally less than 20 seconds.
|
| > Then, when does reconciliation happen? When either party goes
| online? What if it is not a closed loop system? Then,
| reconciliation needs to happen for both parties independently.
| How long can either party stay offline and continue to make
| transactions? Is it both send and receive or only send on one
| side and only receive on another side? What if one party
| (merchant/receiver) is more likely to be online (almost
| always). Does it just become online payments problem then? NFC
| tap and pay is exactly this scenario.
|
| Again, literally the exact problem statement and value
| proposition of Lightning, but _stupid, stupid_ me for daring to
| mention it here, I guess. Feel free to ignore that the idea
| behind Lightning could be useful without being tied to crypto,
| but can 't possibly have a conversation about that. Nope.
| callalex wrote:
| >but can't possibly have a conversation about that. Nope.
|
| What conversation? You just dropped in here with flamewar
| bait and complaining about some self-imagined persecution
| without contributing any substance. Hence your comment is now
| gray.
| intotheabyss wrote:
| No, not lightning. If anything, it would be something like
| this: https://blog.gridplus.io/the-phonon-
| network-59835328b799
| lxgr wrote:
| > Then, when does reconciliation happen? When either party goes
| online?
|
| In many existing systems, there's a split between "merchant"
| and "customer" cards, of which only merchant cards are allowed
| to accept payments. Merchants often have to go online once per
| day and batch-submit all of the day's payments in order to be
| guaranteed settlement.
|
| Among other advantages, this allows for a "lost/stolen" card
| feature: If a user loses a card, that card can be denylisted on
| a global list synchronized to all merchant terminals daily.
| After another day of waiting for straggler transactions, it's
| possible to determine the remaining balance of the lost card
| from the backend, and reimburse its owner, since further funds
| on the card can no longer be spent anywhere in the system.
|
| One day is essentially just an arbitrary timespan here - you
| could make it 14 days, or an hour. In the systems I've looked
| at closely, one day makes sense because these are historically
| transit-focused, and e.g. buses don't have continuous network
| connectivity, but do go to a depot in the evening, which is a
| good opportunity to clear and settle all of the day's payments.
|
| Customer cards never need to be online in such a scheme.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Then, when does reconciliation happen? When either party goes
| online? What if it is not a closed loop system? Then,
| reconciliation needs to happen for both parties independently.
| How long can either
|
| You can solve that by actually having the money in the device
| so that reconciliation is not required, digital cash like the
| abandoned Mondex stored value system.
| lisper wrote:
| The important point here IMHO is that the vast majority of fraud
| is not an inevitable cost of doing business, it's the result of
| _deliberate policy decisions_ , and the fact that the cost of
| fraud can be fobbed off by financial institutions onto merchants
| and thence onto consumers without the latter even being aware
| that they are bearing this cost. It is quite literally a
| conspiracy.
| [deleted]
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| hippich wrote:
| Sometimes back in 90ties, in Belarus, we had payphones that
| accepted prepaid payphone cards. I don't remember if you could
| reload them or you just bought one with credits already on them,
| but you certainly could change a few bytes on the card's chip
| memory to set credits about to any value you wanted. And the
| hardest part was actually finding contact board that matched
| chip's contacts layout, to wire it up to LPT port. But otherwise
| it was "plaintext" value you change in the hex editor.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The UK had non-chip phonecards for a while:
| http://www.telephonecardcollector.com/phonecard-collecting-h...
|
| I think they were magnetic or magneto-optical?
| rwmj wrote:
| Yeah they used a laser to read and burn along a strip in the
| card. (It was a bit more subtle than I've described it, and
| you couldn't see the burn mark.)
| throwmeaw wrote:
| One of the first stored-value bank cards was called Proton and
| trialled in Belgium as early as Feb 1995 [0].
|
| I have fond memories as a young teenager topping up the card at
| my bank ATM (just transferring money from my current account to
| the proton bit of my debit card) and buying my weekly & monthly
| computer magazines at the local newsagent. I'm surprised it
| survived until late 2014, a nearly 20 year long run.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(debit_card)
| jeffchien wrote:
| Coincidentally Japan just indefinitely suspended sales of their
| famous SVCs due to the semiconductor shortage, and BART had
| issued a similar warning about shortages last year.
| reisse wrote:
| We had stored value card payment system in Uzbekistan somewhere
| from 2003-2005 to 2010-2012. But no-one ever called it "stored
| value card", basically, I learnt the word today :) Everyone just
| called it "offline cards", in contrast with "online cards" which
| required Internet to do transactions.
|
| The system was called UzKart (do not confuse with UzCard, which
| is modern online successor of that system). On the day when
| salary was paid, you had to find an online ATM or internet-
| connected terminal in the shop, and "load" money to the card.
| Then, you could use the money on the card to pay in offline
| terminals. Balance could be checked directly in offline
| terminals, you had to ask the seller to print it.
|
| Sellers had a special offline card, called "merchant's card". In
| the end of the day they loaded all the transactions from an
| offline terminal to a merchant's card, and then brought the card
| to an ATM or a connected terminal, to synchronize payments with
| the bank account.
|
| If, for some reason, at the time of synchronization some payments
| failed to clear, payer's card was banned and they had an angry
| call from the bank.
|
| When the system was introduced, internet connection was expensive
| and unreliable. It co-existed with online cards, but merchants
| strongly preferred to deal with offline cards. As soon as mobile
| internet become cheaper and more widespread, offline cards died
| because of the hassle with "loading" and "unloading" them.
|
| More info on UzKart and UzCard can be found (in Russian) here
| https://gazeta.norma.uz/publish/doc/text97703_uzkart_ot_duet...
| and here https://uzcard.uz/ru/news/post/uzcard-bankovskaya-
| tranzaktsi...
| ksec wrote:
| Which is similar to T-Money in South Korea, Octopus in Hong
| Kong, and later Suica in Japan. All of which if I remember
| correctly came before 2000.
|
| They are still extremely popular in those region. One of the
| thing I dont understand is why these type of payment never took
| off in the West. Even things like Oyster card in the UK is only
| for transport but not for any other sort of payment.
|
| Another point worth pointing out, Offline payment are much
| faster, with Sucia based on FeliCa capable of doing the
| transaction in less than 100ms. This is important in a
| transport system as heavily used as the Japanese transport. For
| people who are used to these type of payment, everything else
| just felt so slow.
|
| With every iPhone now getting a Felica Chip built in, I was
| hoping this type of payment could take off. And yet nothing
| happened.
| toast0 wrote:
| I don't know about Europe, but in the US, offline payments
| with regular credit cards are/were a thing.
|
| In the old days, you could use an imprint machine to run the
| card, and mail in the charge slip. Raised numbers and imprint
| machines are uncool now, but they lasted a long time as
| backup in case the terminal wasn't working or the power was
| out.
|
| As far as I know, most US cards include the metadata for
| offline charges, where the terminal processes transactions in
| bulk, but there's more risk for merchants than doing an
| online transaction.
|
| Stored value cards are popular in transportation, where speed
| is important, fault tolerance is required, and connectivity
| is intermittent. But even for gift cards, it's more common to
| use the card as an identity token, and get the value from an
| online ledger; it makes alternate uses much simpler.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I'm always extremely leery any time those come out because
| the network is down. A furniture / appliance store in my
| hometown had an employee use the imprint machine to steal a
| bunch of credit card numbers, including my parents' card.
| They only found out because the police had been tipped off
| and found a bunch of carbon copy slips in the employee's
| apartment.
| [deleted]
| lmm wrote:
| > They are still extremely popular in those region. One of
| the thing I dont understand is why these type of payment
| never took off in the West. Even things like Oyster card in
| the UK is only for transport but not for any other sort of
| payment.
|
| From my memory, some newsagents etc. did allow payment by
| Oyster. But there just wasn't demand for it.
|
| In Japan at least, many people don't have credit cards and
| are scared of any kind of debt (perhaps because debts are
| more enforceable here). So that might be a factor.
| loyukfai wrote:
| The Octopus is the de facto transport pass in Hong Kong
| (well, it's started by the major transport companies) and
| commonly used in many shops, it's also used by some for
| building access.
|
| Octopus takes an 1.5% cut, I'm not sure if it applies to the
| founding transport companies but I assume the money will flow
| back to them anyway.
|
| Recently, some transport services started incorporating
| Chinese e-wallets like Alipay and WeChat Pay which utilizes
| QR codes, and the agony of seeing people (mainly Chinese
| tourists) repeatedly scan and fail at the gates blocking the
| whole queue during rush hours is quite depressing after years
| of smooth access.
|
| Cheers.
| hakfoo wrote:
| We sort of have two forces pushing in opposite directions:
|
| * Many transport cards were NFC or RFID or otherwise "you
| don't have to take the card out of your wallet" years before
| general-purpose cards were. Now, many transit systems just
| promote "tap-on and off with your Visa and don't bother
| loading money into our closed-loop network." (Interestingly,
| I will note that Toronto's system at least is cheaper to ride
| if you do use the closed-loop card)
|
| * Conversely, merchants-- especially large merchants-- have
| desperate desire to get away from the general purpose card
| networks due to high fees and sometimes clunky chargeback
| rules. Notice the handful of "Walmart Pay"/"Kroger Pay" apps
| that they'll support rather than enabling Apple or Google Pay
| at the till, or even things like Target and some petrol
| stations offering propriatery cards that connect to debit for
| settlement.
|
| Transport cards could be appealing for the merchant
| audience-- they're likely cheaper to process and represent
| funds already confirmed by the transport operator. But
| they're not federated, so it would turn into a nightmare of a
| thousand individual integrations and a UX like the early days
| of (pre-Visa/MC branded) debit where you'd have to check if
| the merchant supported the specific network your card was on.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| I'm surprised we don't have something like this in the U.S.
| Just last week I was withdrawing cash from an ATM because I was
| worried the power would be out for a few days and my debit card
| wouldn't work.
| lxgr wrote:
| Almost-ubiquitous, almost-free network connectivity can be a
| curse when it comes to the development of resilient systems.
|
| The US has had free local calling for many decades now, so
| online card authorizations were always much cheaper than in
| many other countries, even long before the internet.
|
| Still, there were some applications: The article mentions
| laundromats, but as far as I know, US military ships have
| also had a similar system.
|
| There's an interesting recent legislation proposal today that
| argues for a very similar system, but primarily for the sake
| of privacy (although network/power failure resiliency would
| be nice secondary benefits): https://ecashact.us/
| mrsalamander wrote:
| In the early 90s I lived in Guelph, Canada. We were one of a
| couple of pilot cities for Mondex, a stored value card system
| that I think was owned by MasterCard. The city got a bunch of
| funding to get Mondex working everywhere from parking meters to
| buses, payphones, and of course private businesses. Everyone
| who wanted one was sent a Mondex card and a portable card
| reader which looked like a small calculator. You could put your
| card in it and press your thumb on a button to make the display
| show your balance. That little device allowed you to transfer
| money between cards if I recall, but I never figured out how.
| You could also see your past transactions and set a card PIN.
|
| One of the cooler things Mondex could do was an early form of
| online banking. Some households were issued special phones from
| Bell Canada that looked like regular Nortel phones with a
| yellow card reader attached to the side and a much larger
| screen. You could log in to your bank directly from the phone
| and transfer money out of your account into the card. You could
| also use an ATM if you didn't have the phone.
|
| It was a pretty neat technology but at just around the same
| time Interac debit payments really started to take off and
| people were much happier to have a card linked to their
| accounts rather than a card with a balance you could lose. The
| payments were also pretty slow, so anyone paying for the bus
| slowed the line down.
|
| I still have my card and reader somewhere and I think it has a
| few dollars left on it. The last time I looked, many years ago,
| the only transactions that showed up on the reader were coffee
| purchases at Tim Hortons.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| In the mid 90's in Canada we had similar cards, but they were
| only for pay phones. Before cell phones became cheap, parents
| would buy these pre-loaded cards for their tweens and teens so
| they could call for a ride when they were done at the mall or
| whatever.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/aD6ihh8.jpg
| mig39 wrote:
| Personally, I did the collect call thing to my parents,
| especially after the system was automated.
|
| Robot Voice: Hello, you have a local collect call from "mig39
| is ready to be picked up" -- do you accept the charges? Then
| my parents would just hang up and come get me.
| techsupporter wrote:
| People of a certain age will remember the GEICO ad,
| "Collect call from Bob...Wehadababyitsaboy" -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs
| thriftwy wrote:
| That's interesting. In Russia, cards didn't really catch up for
| a long time, but once they did, they were online cards with
| GSM-enabled card terminals.
|
| Until 2010, most people will get their salary on a card, go to
| ATM, withdraw paper money and pay with that. Actually, cards
| only became relevant with the advent of contactless/NFC cards,
| which started around 2012. Then they spread like wildfire.
|
| I wonder what caused the adoption of UzKart compared with plain
| old cash. I also wonder if any neighbouring countries had
| similar systems and what their adoption levels were.
| samstave wrote:
| Reminds me of minutes loading of SIMs in Philippines in the
| early 2000s... Loading was available every single tiny soda
| stand to bodega to major shopping - they were Uzbek-quitous :-)
|
| I have some friend who have made millions over the years in
| selling international calling cards and routing them through
| their SIP networks...
|
| There is the ability to make a completely separate
| transactional system outside of of Central Bank Control, using
| these stacks for card loading and calling (network access)
| etc... but generally fighting against Money Monopolies is
| suicide for your business.
|
| And on the one hand, rightfully so - EXCEPT in cases like
| SBF... that guy is such a criminal, the central banks like him,
| and his parents, and his donations, and his fraud...
|
| The whole system has holes in every facet.
| jackdaniel wrote:
| That's super-interesting, thank you for sharing :)
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