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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

I like this idea, the downside is it would require an overhaul of the entire fintech system, every page that accepts credit cards, etc, because we'd just run out of card number space. So in essence it would amount to starting a financial network from scratch.

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There are 16 numbers in a creditcard. That is a lot of potential cards. It will be a while before we run out of cards. And when we do they could just add more numbers. It isnt such a big deal.

Probably you’d get 8 or 12 to play with ad a bank and I think 1 is error correcting. But that is still a lot!

Problem I have with gift cards is a lot of merchants and machines refuse them. I wonder if neobanks have this issue?

Quite a few websites don't accept my Revolut or Monzo cards at all, despite being VISA/Mastercard. So there is clearly some way for them to detect these neobank cards.

It's called the BIN (card number prefix) try e.g. https://binlist.net/

You lose some digits as the bank identifier etc, so really you get 12 digits or so. The population of the world right now is a 10 digit number. It sounds like a lot of space at first glance, but it really isn't. "Just add more numbers" is what people thought when IPv4 started to run out and we all know how that is going.

> And when we do they could just add more numbers

That's an exceedingly optimistic use of "just," I suspect.

Well if BTC got adopted properly it would have been the answer. We are stuck with the system designed ages ago. No doubt it's good for government. Current Fintech can go any peasant go bust. However, normal folks have zero control over their financial security. Your always under radar especially under cashless society umbrella.

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