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Comment by sitharus | Hacker News Reader

We hardly use cash in New Zealand, over 85% of transactions are electronic. There’s a lot of places that don’t accept cash anymore because cash handling is annoying and risky.

That said, nobody thinks of cash as dirty, just annoying. Also our payment system has always been able to work offline, because it started rolling out in the 80s.

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Since when does EFTPOS work offline? It works off the internet, but not "offline", if the phones are down, EFTPOS is down. It happens with relative frequency, given the weather. Or trucks hitting boxes, or diggers cutting cables. Shit happens.

Regarding places not accepting cash: NZ First (political party) is proposing to protect the right to use cash and make all businesses accept cash for up to $500 items.

> The Cash Transactions Protection Bill would mandate businesses in trade accept cash payment for goods valued up to $500.

Since always. EFTPOS was designed with offline support (signed receipts) as an emergency fallback when the network is down. It’s been like that since the 90s, I know because I’ve been using EFTPOS since then and experienced many outages.

It is capped at $300 per card used and 200 transactions stored (I believe some large merchants can vary this, but not by much), it’s only for temporary failures not multi-hour outages.

You can quickly find information with your favourite search engine.

I've visited New Zealand a few times en route to Antarctica. The only time I've ever needed to take out cash was for the Christchurch bus service. I was in MIQ on the way in, but they gave us free reign on the way out because Antarctica was considered virus-free (and according to immigration NZ, it counts as the Ross Dependency). There was obviously a lot of push for contactless payments in 2021. I get the impression that the pandemic helped really cement it, although it sounds like the UK where we've had widespread contactless for almost 20 years.

The pandemic helped the banks push contactless which they love, because it’s not EFTPOS.

EFTPOS is our national post of sale system, it has very low or no fees for any party involved. Merchants pay a fixed machine rental per month which can include unlimited transactions, or may have a per transaction fee of up to $0.20. Most individuals do not pay a fee for using EFTPOS and there’s normally no card fee, though some banks have accounts with fees that have other benefits (eg higher deposit interest rates to encourage saving).

Contactless goes via the standard card network extortion. Since 2022 the interchange rate has been capped by legislation which has helped merchants a lot, but the per transaction fee over the card network is still far higher than EFTPOS.

Contactless EFTPOS does exist in Australia - we share a lot of the underlying tech - but the banks won’t activate it here because they’d lose the interchange fees.

Online EFTPOS is starting to gain market share though, which is nice.

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