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Comment by vaughanb | Hacker News Reader

> ... chip in

Unintentional pun. The US public seems to have a huge reluctance to use the chips in the cards too. It's swipe and sign.

(I'm also from Australia and signing for a credit card purchase went away decades ago. PayWave is really popular, my 89 yo mother loves it.)

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US here, got issued a chipped card about a year ago and noticed quickly that any attempt to swipe with my card would be greeted with an error message and instructions to insert the chip. For all systems I've seen, it seems that if the merchant accepts chips and if the card has a chip, the chip must be used, regardless of any user reluctance.

If it’s a chip card and the vendor doesn’t use the chip, then they are responsible for all fraudulent transactions.

If they do use the chip, then the card issuing bank is responsible for all fraudulent transactions.

This rule was supposed to go into place over a year ago. But most places couldn’t be bothered to update their equipment, so it had to be postponed.

Even now, many places still can’t be bothered. Makes me care about them just that much less.

Most readers I have experimented with in the US will allow a swipe after 3 unsuccesful chip reads (inserting card in opposite direction w/ chip exposed).

Also Australian used to using Paywave. I traveled through Europe in January. My card was accepted without issue in most countries. There were a few countries like Greece where I need to use Pin. Outlier was in the UK where I had to sign and show photo id, which I found strange.

> Outlier was in the UK where I had to sign and show photo id

How long ago was this? Signatures haven't been a thing here for well over a decade. Also is Paywave just contactless? Because we've also had contactless for a fair while.

January this year, had to sign twice once at a Restaurant near Earl's Court and once buying tickets for Tower of London.

Most chip readers in the US are incredibly slow. Like 10+ seconds just top read the card. There are faster authentication schemes that some of the readers use, but it's rare that using the chip is very fast, while swiping is always instant.

When I visited the US in late 2014, most places didn’t support contactless payments; a few did, but the operators didn’t necessarily know it, because basically no US cards supported it. I really confused a Subway employee near San Francisco by using it, and stopped to explain how it was that the transaction had gone through without him noticing.

Haha you got me!

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