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Comment by lordlarm | Hacker News Reader

The next step for Square, in my opinion, is developing a reader for the EMV cards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV), which is hugely dominant in Europe - and also more secure. See a this useful Quora post, from 12 months ago: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Square-intend-to-translate-the...

Going international, or making such a reader, opens up an enormous market and the potential is huge.

I'm waiting, excited, as I see Square disrupting this business. As tibbon asked earlier in the comments: "why has no one disrupted this market before". I'll think it is a good question, I have no answer, but find it is about time. Ref. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4392763

Also, an interesting firm from Sweden, which is worth following now is iZettle (https://www.izettle.com/) which has developed an EMV reader. Noticably their, "how much do I pay to use iZettle" page is intresting. http://help.izettle.com/customer/en_us/portal/articles/53095...

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iZettle would not get a lot of adoption in it's current form.

For merchants the biggest issue around chip and pin cards is this:

If the merchant takes a signature, then they are liable for loss incurred by bad transactions.

Which simply means, very few merchant accept signatures and only in exceptional circumstances.

So any EMV reader in Europe, to achieve adoption by merchants, will need to offer a PIN entry method.

However here is the other part of the deal.

A PIN entry keypad must be secure. In fact, the keys themselves cannot be implemented in software that exposes the key presses to any other software.

Usually this means that the hardware keyboard itself doesn't send keypresses to the OS, it is a dedicated piece of hardware (with screen) that only transmits the hash of the PIN to any external system.

In effect, Square would need to re-design their device to include a PIN entry keypad and screen.

Thanks, that's a very important gotcha in current payment systems. Most interesting thinking of ways to work within that seemingly draconian framework!

Would it be possible for them to just rely on the commodity chip and PIN readers that most banks (in Europe, or at least the UK where I am) use for 2 factor auth for online banking?

Of course, all of this is absurd security theater, given that chip-and-PIN is already broken: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland10chipbroken.p...

I'm not disagreeing at all.

But then the security theatre results in a change of liability that merchants are unwilling to accept, then you are in a position where to get adoption you have to prevent that shift in liability.

There are dozens of chip readers on the market all around the world already, they just don't have the software, good design and price structure to match.

You are right, here is an interesting Quora post summing up the competitors: http://www.quora.com/Square-product/Who-are-some-competitors...

Answer-wiki pasted in for convenience:

«US only:

- Paypal Here ( https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/credit-card-reader , US)

- Intuit Go Payment (http://gopayment.com/, US)

- Payware Mobile by Verifone ( http://www.paywaremobile.com/en , US)

- Phone Swipe (http://www.phoneswipe.com/, US)

Europe only:

- iZettle (http://izettle.com/ , Sweden, chipcard reader)

- Cellphony (http://www.cellfony.com/, FR, still in beta)

- iPay by PrivatBank (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ipay/id307368715?mt=8 , Ukrainia)»

I'd bet more on NFC being the next big thing. Who wants fancier cards?

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