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Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

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Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#411

Post by lxgr »

adrianpike wrote: post #67
pjmlp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly 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

We did sailing charters growing up and had one of these on the boat, I was in charge of it and the sound & feel of the CH-CHUNK is seared into my memories like nothing else. We never got any declines, but I always wondered how that reconciliation process actually worked out.

You didn't get any declines because you didn't ask for any approvals :)

If you mean chargebacks: I believe imprinters had card issuer liability for the longest time, at least as long as the transaction was under the (network-defined) "floor limit".

So if these were relatively low value transactions, the bank would simply not have any standing to decline payment.

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#412

Post by lxgr »

devman0 wrote: post #312
pjmlp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly 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

Just because an imprinter was used doesn't mean the transaction was necessarily "offline". Depending on merchant's policy, the cashier would call their processor, give them some transaction details and receive an auth code for the transaction which would be written on the imprinted ticket, thus authorizing the transaction at the POS just the same way it's done today (except with humans and phones, instead of an elect…

Given that GP was the one doing the imprinting, I believe they'd have remembered having done a phone call to a processor or card network on a sailboat :)

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#413

Post by lxgr »

Daniel_sk wrote: post #336
mrtksn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a credit card requires some amount of trustworthiness. Anyone can get a debit card, they even sell it in supermarkets.

This is not the case of debit cards in Europe. Debit cards are tied to bank accounts. Most people only have a debit card or don’t even know what a credit card is (or what the difference is). We just call them “cards”.

You can buy debit (or more accurately prepaid) cards in supermarkets in Europe too (which is a big and relatively diverse place, so just because that is/was not a thing in the countries you're familiar with doesn't mean it didn't exist).

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#414

Post by Kwpolska »

andy99 wrote: post #8

The idea of there being some "government approved" list of things people can buy with this is horrifying and exactly why cash should continue to exist.

I don't think it's going to be a list of things, but rather a list of vendor types (grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations) that have to accept offline payments, and that banks must accept offline payments from. You can live without a new iPhone if the terminal is down, but you can't live without food.

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#415

Post by _flux »

lxgr wrote: post #377
alexey-salmin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 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 provi…

Ironically, 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.)

I 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.

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#416

Post by scbrg »

xyzal wrote: post #320
Etheryte wrote: post #5

Some context might be useful here. I spent some time living Sweden not too long ago and Swedes practically don't use cash. It's usually not said out loud, but cash is often considered to be dirty and criminal, to the point that most don't have any at all. Digital payments are very convenient and deeply integrated, so long as you have a local ID which allows you use the local payment system Swish etc. This worked nice…

How does one give money to the needy on the streets?

For a while it was seen as an excellent excuse not to. Not joking.

These days, the needy on the streets accept our local app based payment system called Swish. Still not joking.

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#417

Post by lxgr »

dheera wrote: post #316
mrtksn wrote: post #9

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 may…

Cryptocurrency 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.

> 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).

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#418

Post by lxgr »

riffraff wrote: post #317
what wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has to pay a transaction fee to accept cash. And you didn’t answer why you shouldn’t pay that fee.

What do you think happens to the cash at the end of the day? Managing cash has costs too, they're just harder to quantify: you have to ferry it to a bank, you have increased risk of theft, fraud, and robberies, you need extra time to actually check the register etc. And then you risk losing business if you don't offer card payments because it's just more convenient for most customers (you may like wise lose some if y…

One big difference is that there's competition between cash handling providers, while there's essentially zero wiggle room for interchange fees.

That's what makes interchange and network fees so much more problematic than acquiring fees. There's very healthy competition between credit card acquirers and payment service providers on both features and price, but in the end, you have to accept whatever card your customer has or there won't be a transaction.

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#419

Post by akmarinov »

jdblair wrote: post #400
koliber wrote: post #391

We've come full circle. Credit cards were offline-only in the beginning. When have we lost this ability? See https://www.google.com/search?num=10&sca_esv=5e043526353aa70...

Offline credit card transactions are still supported, and Square even supports it in the US. Europe use of debit cards instead of credit cards is much higher than the US.

That’s because credit card benefits suck in Europe and there’s no point to using them.

If you need credit, there are credit options with much lower rates than what credit cards offer.

And the reason credit card benefits suck is due to european interchange fee caps and regulation.

Re: Offline card payments should be possible no later than 1 July 2026

#420

Post by andrewshadura »

6yyyyyy wrote: post #352
omk wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think metro trains in countries like The Netherlands and Singapore use this approach where in you tap your cards and entry and exit and you are billed usually somewhere at the end of the day.

It's more complex than that: The card actually has some nonvolatile storage with your current balance, which gets decremented each time you use it.

Not in the Netherlands, no. The card can be a bank card, and you can be billed at the end of the month automatically through direct debit.

It also wouldn't work as you describe, as the terminal at the point of entry doesn't know how much to charge you since it doesn't know where your journey ends.

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