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

riksbank.se

71–80 of 581 posts

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

#71
post #18
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…

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

What’s fascinating (apart from the sound those things made is still in my head) is that the very nature of the technology meant who could and could not get credit varied. At first (1950 diners card onwards) only well off could use it at limited establishments (ie restaurants) and they would postal deliver lists of cars - initially white lists of valid card owners and later hot lists of delinquent card owners. Stick your privacy issues in the restaurant food bin there!

Calling a call centre to verify every transaction is too expensive so only purchases over certain limits came in following BofA/Visa - and that stated that way till the late eighties when larger stores started using back office to talk to Visa network etc. but even so the ability to do live updates and verification was too much and there were weird cacheing tricks

So banks could easily approve or be liable for transactions they would prefer not to approve - so they only gave credit to the rich at first, and then to those who paid back regularly. This info was shared and became credit reference agencies - because the credit card companies shared it initially like casinos but the abuse and mistakes brought legislation

I think what i am saying is our consumer credit culture was not designed, it just grew.

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

#72
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…

Possibly related?

"Starbucks does not use two phase commit":

https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/ramblings/18_s...

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

#74
There's a term I saw all over someone's Google calendar schedule, pre-pandemic "DNS without asking". Now I realize it means "Do not schedule without asking" but my mind thought "Domain Name Service without asking" ... how in the hell would you do that?

I guess this is similar: how do you make trustworthy decisions that seem to inherently depend on the network, in the absence of a network? Before the internet, we had phonebooks instead of DNS, and we had cash instead of cards. Did the phonebook have every number? No. Was every piece of cash not counterfeit? No. But it's "good enough". Portable reference sources and tokens. The references are issued periodically and the tokens have evidence of exhaustion, their decay over time. A dog-eared dollar with a bunch of phone numbers on it, half-torn ... the merchant doesn't have to accept it.

How do you do these things digitally? Periodic issue seems pretty straightforward ... if you have a network. Token issuance, similarly, needs at least occasional communication with other nodes in the network.

So there's a local dwell capability.

Is this part of the same reaction we saw with Denmark starting to have emergency stores within 50 km of every Dane? Is this motivated by a need to prepare for war?

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

#75
post #6

1yr timeline is ambitious if it means fully deployed. Clearly the right thing for Sweden and others to do. Also worrying that even 3yrs into the Russian invasion, bordering countries are urgently increasing their preparedness for future conflicts.

This is also partially due to hacking incidents in recent years. In 2021, all 800 Coop grocery stores were closed for a few days due to the Kaseya VSA ransomware attack [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaseya_VSA_ransomware_attack

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

#76
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It's usually not said out loud, but cash is often considered to be dirty and criminal ..." Are you sure this isn't impression you've gotten from isolated reactions involving a small number of individuals, perhaps just a single individual? I can't relate to the sentiment at all, having lived here for just over three decades and experiencing the popularity shift from cash to debit card. I can, in fact, not recall a…

Sweden has introduced civil asset forfeiture where the mere possession of cash can make you a suspect [1]. It's coming from the very top. https://archive.ph/v7TRe

That article does not at all make the assertion you are claiming it does: "The new law allows police to seize expensive goods even from people who are not under investigation for a crime, if they cannot prove they acquired them lawfully."

I don't love the law, but having cash on its own is not grounds for seizure. Having expensive goods that you cannot explain how you managed to pay for is what they are targeting, according to your source.

This is basically a law that takes your expensive shit away if you are too stupid to launder your ill-gotten cash.

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

#77
post #47
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…

The 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 l…

A 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.

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

#78
post #46
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

Very interesting, never heard of these. Thank you.

I imagine there is a clear and distinct line between "I've never seen one of those" and "I can remember exactly how those sound". The sound of sliding that handle over the card is ... distinctive. I can discuss it with someone, slide my hand left and right, and say "shunk, shunk" and lots of people will very clearly remember them.

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

#79
post #74

There's a term I saw all over someone's Google calendar schedule, pre-pandemic "DNS without asking". Now I realize it means "Do not schedule without asking" but my mind thought "Domain Name Service without asking" ... how in the hell would you do that? I guess this is similar: how do you make trustworthy decisions that seem to inherently depend on the network, in the absence of a network? Before the internet, we had…

[dead]

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

#80
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

Wikipedia claims they aren’t being used in the 2020’s, but I’ve still seen stores in the past year pull them out when the internet is down.

I'm trying to think the last time I saw one in use, last year or a couple years ago when there were large scale power outages. Of course the newer cards lack raised digits so I'm not sure how well they worked for keeping business moving. I had cash.
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