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> I didn't have to sign anything

Hmm, I guess you are american (with a magstripe card?) traveling in the EU? I never had to sign anything when paying with card here.

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Having to put in a PIN is even worse than signing.

You don't even have to use the PIN if you are using NFC and paying under 500 CZK.

Yeah, true. Apple pay should get rid of this limit too, but some countries have fucked PoS configs.

I believe it’s set by law and not by Apple. IIRC when I was in Iceland it was 5000 ISK (roughly 50 dollars) for every single machine in the country. Over that you have to use the physical card or enter PIN/signature if the machine supports it (none of the ones I used in Iceland supported entering after NFC so I ended up having to use the card). Since everything is expensive as hell in Iceland it kind of diminishes the utility of the NFC a bit.

Edit: Actually after I typed above out I found a chart that has the limits: https://merchantmachine.co.uk/contactless-limits/

Apple Pay is authenticated and completely different from normal contactless payments which are unauthenticated.

Misconfigured terminals just happen to be really common, so sometimes it’ll work and sometimes it wont.

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