121–130 of 158 posts
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You're 100% correct. Hardware is cool, but the merchant services side is what makes Square awesome
How is that different from PayPal? To me the hardware is what Square is about.
Note that PayPal was revolutionary and is worth many billions of dollars - largely because they could handle the fraud this kind of configuration causes.
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There are regulatory barriers and I'm sure the audio coupler technology they're using is patent-pending.
why would someone involved in credit card fraud care about regulatory barriers and patents? These will be the same people who sneak into ATMs, and modify the readers. This will basically just eliminate all the risk.
This sounds like a money grab business to me. They'll launch, make a couple hundred mil, then they'll get hit with fraud, a ton of people will lose money, and they'll be forced to shut down, since noone will want to use the service, in fear of getting defrauded. Since there is no barrier to entry, it'll be like 2 weeks before someone comes out with a black market version, that will look exactly the same, but instead…
there are a huge number of legit businesses that would benefit from this. i showed it to a few friends already. why are we naysaying this specific business and not other point of sale things that operate the exact same way? what prevents someone from running a fake newspaper stand with a laptop and CC swiper? why is this product vastly different?
If the device doesn't look 100% 'official' I wouldn't touch it with my card.
Actually, there are two things about this system that I really like:
1. I can see a future where paper receipts are a thing of the past.
2. If someone uses my card fraudulently, I'll receive an e-mail a minute after it happens alerting me that something is amiss.
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AFAIK reading the chip is non trivial, and involves heavy encryption and proprietary hardware/software. Maybe though :/
Chip and PIN is a standard. They wouldn't have to reverse engineer it or implement from scratch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_and_PIN
Furthermore, the demands of providing an EMV solution do not even stop once all the necessary processing has been implemented, thanks to the extensive type approval process enforced by the governing body, EMVCo. Before any EMV-capable solution can be deployed, there are thousands of tests that need to be passed to validate that the implementation conforms to the EMV industry standard, and as the EMV specifications are regularly updated this becomes a major task in itself! This is why many businesses requiring an EMV "Chip & PIN" solution choose to license a purpose-built EMV software kernel rather than developing their own."
http://www.emvx.co.uk/emv_guide.aspx
idk, maybe they could license it from someone, but I wouldn't say it's a trivial thing to add.
This may come as a shock to some, but: Magnetic cards (and all existing RFID equivalents) are bad. Instead of encouraging their use, we should be creating the mostly fraud-proof obvious alternative: one in which a single transaction does not give the other party permanent access to your wallet. Picture a card with a key pad on it, for entering a dollar amount. The transaction (through RFID?) would be valid for only t…
http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2009/October/oct15_dynamics....
CEO is Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame.
This may come as a shock to some, but: Magnetic cards (and all existing RFID equivalents) are bad. Instead of encouraging their use, we should be creating the mostly fraud-proof obvious alternative: one in which a single transaction does not give the other party permanent access to your wallet. Picture a card with a key pad on it, for entering a dollar amount. The transaction (through RFID?) would be valid for only t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
there are a huge number of legit businesses that would benefit from this. i showed it to a few friends already. why are we naysaying this specific business and not other point of sale things that operate the exact same way? what prevents someone from running a fake newspaper stand with a laptop and CC swiper? why is this product vastly different?
This is really weird for me. In the UK we've been trained to not just allow people to swipe our cards into just any hacked together device. If the device doesn't look 100% 'official' I wouldn't touch it with my card.
do they do restaurant payments different in the UK? would you simply hand your card over to a waiter to pay a bill? what prevents the waiter from just writing down your info? you wouldn't even see a device there.
i think that its just an issue of trust. you won't necessarily trust someone with a hacked together device on a street corner, but if its your cousin jim's glass blowing sculpture store, you'll probably trust anything they run your card through.
plus, in the US at least, we have a fairly robust consumer protection on cards. if you suspect your card to be compromised or see a charge on it you know isn't yours, dispute it and you'll probably have your issues resolved satisfactorily.