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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

#451

Post by jobigoud »

veeti wrote: post #435
jobigoud wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you pay for things that are just one or two euros? In my local boulangerie they don't accept cards for less than 5€, so if I just want a baguette I need to have cash.

You're not going to find a baguette for less than 5 euros anyway

Not sure what you are talking about. A baguette is ~1€, same for a croissant or a chocolatine. Maybe 1.10 or 1.20 depending on the place. I do it all the time. It forces me to have the cash otherwise I need to take another random item I don't really need.

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

#452

Post by freetime2 »

EE84M3i wrote: post #272
freetime2 wrote: post #190

I'm not sure what they have in mind for supporting offline payments, but I think that Japan's FeliCa-based [1] electronic money systems (Suica, iD, etc) are pretty impressive. They are most typically used to pay for transportation, but also widely accepted at stores, vending machines, etc. Balances are stored on the card, and it's very fast to use and seems secure for the most part. Recently it's also available on an…

>although for cards that are backed by a credit card, I think the limit is higher I have a Suica thats integrated into a credit card, and it still has a ¥20,000 limit - the Suica balance is separate from the card balance, it just has a configurable auto top-up setting. Interestingly, if I'm out of the Suica zone, sometimes auto top-up won't trigger. If I recall correctly this happened to me once in Fukuoka, presumabl…

I was actually thinking of other non-transit e-money cards like iD and WAON (my fault that wasn't clear from my comment). For an iD card linked to an SMBC credit card, your iD spending limit is the same as your credit limit [1] - which can be upwards of ¥10M. I don't know how or why anybody would spend that much in iD transactions, but I bring it up because it shows that SMBC seemingly has as much trust in iD security as they do for Visa's online transaction processing.

[1] https://qa.smbc-card.com/mem/detail?site=4H4A00IO&category=1...

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

#453

Post by freetime2 »

jen729w wrote: post #380
freetime2 wrote: post #190

I'm not sure what they have in mind for supporting offline payments, but I think that Japan's FeliCa-based [1] electronic money systems (Suica, iD, etc) are pretty impressive. They are most typically used to pay for transportation, but also widely accepted at stores, vending machines, etc. Balances are stored on the card, and it's very fast to use and seems secure for the most part. Recently it's also available on an…

Tourist in Japan here. Suica is great . I prefer it over my Visa tap 'n pay just for speed. It's instant vs. a few seconds which isn't much, but it's nice. Topping up a Suica every now and then vs. having many international transactions might also work out better for some. My bank (ING) gives me those fees back so it makes no difference to me.

At one point my US credit card categorized Suica top ups as travel expenses, which earned double points. So basically just tried to do all of my spending on my suica card, and racked up a ton of points in the process. Eventually they fixed that - but I had a good run for a couple of years.

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

#454

Post by boerseth »

rglynn wrote: post #372
boerseth wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These past couple of years I've gotten into plenty of trouble on multiple occasions, as a result of what I would describe as a cascade of misfortune initiated by a single unfortunate event (for which I will take some responsibility, but nevertheless...). These "cascades of misfortune" I've run into happen largely because of how we've placed certain institutions at the center of our lives and our society, or perhaps m…

Out of interest, how does one get out of that scenario?

The bank will probably let you order a new card to their offices instead of your home address, so all you need to do is survive for a week or so. In my case, that was very easy thanks to the friends I was visiting.

As for the meantime: I still did have my bank's ID chip with me as a backup, so I could have used online banking to make a transfer to myself with something like Western Union, and crossed my fingers that my bank wouldn't require verification by phone for this suspicious transfer. That would have gotten me some cash at least within the course of the next day, but my friend helped me out, so it didn't come to that.

Without friends around, though, and one or two more unfortunate circumstances piled on, I really don't know. It's unsettling to realize how little it takes to be forced to sleep in the streets.

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

#455

Post by rkomorn »

upcoming-sesame wrote: post #442
rkomorn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat tangential (sorry), but in my part of southern Europe, cash change machines seem to be getting close to ubiquitous. I wonder if that hinders tax evasion at all since there's presumably a pretty reliable paper trail of cash transactions.

You mean ATMs ? It is still harder to prove where the cash you took out of the ATM went to in comparison to card payments, but yeah, if you take a big amount of cash out of the ATM then it would be easy to flag you

No, I mean the machines that now handle cash payments at many businesses, accepting cash and returning change.

They're increasingly common here in Portugal, at least.

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

#456

Post by upcoming-sesame »

rkomorn wrote: post #455
upcoming-sesame wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean ATMs ? It is still harder to prove where the cash you took out of the ATM went to in comparison to card payments, but yeah, if you take a big amount of cash out of the ATM then it would be easy to flag you

No, I mean the machines that now handle cash payments at many businesses, accepting cash and returning change. They're increasingly common here in Portugal, at least.

ah got it. these are mostly mechanical I think and are offline / dumb device as far as I know

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

#457

Post by Symbiote »

quacksilver wrote: post #334
roywiggins wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was charmed to have my US credit card read by an imprinter at a corner shop in the UK, circa 2014.

I last used a carbon imprinter in the UK in 2013. We hired out car roof boxes / cycle carriers at a summer job I had. I am not sure how valid it was, though they would take a deposit and a card imprint until we got the car accessories back.

My employer in the UK had a machine in around 2014, but it was only used for sales of their own products to employees.

It put all the transaction risk onto the employer, and had a high fee per-use, but since they only had these 'stock clearance' sales to employees once a year it was fine.

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

#458

Post by daveoc64 »

bilsbie wrote: post #279

Are they talking about something like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter Or is there some sort of technological breakthrough?

There's no technical breakthrough, but it might seem novel to people in countries like the USA where offline authorisation hasn't been widely allowed on credit and debit cards for some time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_authorisation

In many countries in Europe, offline authorisation is more common. Cards have had a chip as standard for over two decades in European countries, and a PIN is often used for cardholder verification.

Combined, these make the risks of accepting a transaction for a small amount of money offline very low.

The limit of what can be accepted offline is known as a "floor limit" in the UK.

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

#459

Post by necovek »

dhosek wrote: post #176
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

When I got my first account to accept credit cards in the 90s, they sent me a kachunka machine along with a bunch of window stickers, all of which were kind of silly since it was for a magazine and I almost never took payments in person (it was also a challenge to persuade banks that the fraud risk was low since magazine subscriptions required a stable mailing address over the course of a year—as it turned out, the o…

In the 90s through political turmoil in the Balkans (former Yugoslavia, so perhaps Hungary which borders it to the North was similar), it was impossible for young adults to acquire a payment instrument that worked online (even my dad had a tough job getting a Visa card: you had to deposit something like 500 Deutsche Marks for a limit of 200 DMs, which was like 50x monthly salary, and only one or two banks issued them). Thus, lists of stolen credit cards were circulating online after 1995 when we got dial-up internet into homes (it was only in Unis before that).

If you had any interest in any topic you read about on the web or in a book, that was the only way to get things even if you had the money otherwise.

Btw, what typography magazine was it?

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

#460

Post by avianlyric »

ErrantX wrote: post #423
avianlyric wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only meaningful difference is on how and when funds are reconciled. Nope, even this is identical. These days the difference between a debit/credit card is pretty much aesthetic, from a transaction processing perspective there generally isn’t any actual differences. Differences that people see today are most artificial for the purpose of justifying extra fees, or higher interchange based an entirely arbitrary fa…

There are a few differences for sure. All entirely technical in how the money moves or clears. The most obvious point here is debit card moves your money from your account, credit moves the issuers money from their account. But to your wider point; from a transaction fee point of view you are dead right. Of course a credit card has other attractions; for example it's credit :D but also things like section 75 protecti…

> There are a few differences for sure. All entirely technical in how the money moves or clears. The most obvious point here is debit card moves your money from your account, credit moves the issuers money from their account.

From the perspective of the card network and the merchant, there is no difference here. The card network has a contract with the issuer, so all transactions, in all scenarios, are always first paid by the issuer. It’s then the issuers problem to figure out where they get the money from.

It’s entirely possible to perform transactions on debit card that will place the account attached to it in a negative balance, and for the person owning that account to vanish. The card issuer is still on the hook for the money, neither the card network, nor the merchant, care if the issuer recovers the funds or not, they always get paid.

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