What if they switched CC numbers TO IPV6 addresses? Insane or genius?
All in all not a bad direction to go in. I wouldn't really miss phone payments.
After doing that for a week or two (I was bike commuting at the time), I had it pretty much memorized.
But it'd take at least 3 generation to use in non-english speaking country since in different languages same letters might be pronounced vastly different. Then you have immigrants and foreigners who might now know this alphabet so clerks would still be able to recognize ad-hoc and NATO alphabet. In the end, it would extend requirements while not providing universal benefit.
Phone service is always in a specific language, I don't see why the use of such alphabets would be harder in non-English-speaking countries than in English-speaking ones.
If we allow for the representation to be 0-9 and then another ten letters selected for uniqueness and clarity, overlapped with appropriate non-roman pictographs, etc, the same 16 characters jumps to 600 quintillion range, or about 60 bits by napkin math.
That's more than realistically enough for hundred billion people to each have millions of real payment IDs with millions more one-time use ones that contained some sort of transaction hash for authorization.
Which conveniently fits in a 64 bit word with some left over. I suspect someone involved in the payment space already figured that out a long time ago, but no cataclysmic event has yet happened to de-rail the existing money train.
If you wanted to do that in IPv6 you'd still have the upper 64 bits left over :)
Depends upon how it is implemented as could go full on 1984 very fast without that ever being intended.
The whole aspect of a static fixed CC number you share with people is what really needs to change. A One Time CC per transaction would be more useful and negates many potential issues in a way that protects the customer and in turn the bank itself.
That's what Google pay does. It generates a new credit card number for each transaction that charges the CC you have on your account. It's kind of like a password manager for credit cards.
Also, I'm not enthusiastic about trying to communicate an IPv6 address over the phone to the wage slave working at the pizza joint. You'd have to implement one of those address-to-word setups, which would make for some amusing card "numbers". How would you like getting a card with "chinky challis uta ablow wiry rehaul a carotin" on the front?
Something like: http://jubei.ceyah.org/cgi-bin/ipv6toenglish