Hacker News Reader

Comment by pitchlatte | Hacker News Reader

blows my mind that there’s not a single open solution for mobile wallets and nobody is saying anything.

You have to negotiate directly with Visa to convince them why they should accept your system. How will you convince them?

We desperately need to break Visa's stranglehold on access to the consumer side of commerce. As long as everyone's only innovating and competing on the merchant side of things, we're not really going to get anywhere.

You're free to make your own card network. How will you convince banks to issue your cards and merchants to accept them?

You mean like the EU digital wallet

You're free to try and make something like that.

They are making something like that as we speak. I’m not sure why though, they’ve had free SEPA Instant transfers for ages now.

Many EU online shops accept SEPA payment. It isn't convenient, because it's a push payment (giro) which means the site can't stick it in the middle of the order flow and expect it to take a few seconds. Some users might have to visit a bank branch to send payment.

Not all banks do SEPA Instant, yeah. I suppose the answer to that is connecting using PSD2 and sending the payment request then checking payment actually went out (using something like https://gocardless.com/). Many countries also have local bank link systems (e.g. in the Baltics it’s common to have dedicated buttons in the payment form for the big 3 or 4 banks everyone uses).

I’m talking about in-person payments though. It would be so easy to implement QR payments backed by the existing SEPA Instant rails. Many bank apps already understand EPC QR codes (usually found on invoices), so shops could just show these to accept payment. In case your bank doesn’t support SEPA Instant, you could show the cashier the receipt in your bank app, which, well, horribly insecure, but probably fine for low-stakes cases like grocery shopping (you don’t want to be banned from your grocery store chain for forging a 35 € payment).

One problem with SEPA Instant is that it can sometimes fall back to regular SEPA which takes a few business days.

Are you prepared to protect customers by refunding them if they are victims of fraud when using your payment system? Visa and MasterCard are prepared to do that. That's how they could convince consumers to use their cards without worrying.

Clearly consumers do worry, since the ones found in this comment section are saying they refuse to use a card as it could be stolen.

Millions of card transactions are made every day. If consumers worried, they wouldn't have credit or debit cards and they wouldn't use credit or debit cards.

What a single hacker writes is on the other hand just what he wrote.

Millions of people type their banking username and password into services like POLi, too.

so what you're saying is we should be looking at competitors of Visa

MasterCard has the exact same issue.

Yep, the duopoly is pretty strong. There are national card networks (which sometimes make their own tap-to-pay apps!), but if you want universal acceptance you’ve got to deal with the big two.

You can sidestep this however by not dealing with cards. I’d look into various QR payment schemes.

Because a normal card is superior in most practical cases?

It is? I haven’t carried my wallet around in years, because Apple Wallet does everything I need. Concert tickets, boarding passes, bank cards, public transport cards, etc. A physical wallet and cards in comparison feels like stone age technology.

Banks and card networks will only accept proprietary shitware as payment. Would you rather keep the malware confined to a separate processor chip or would you let it run on your phone?

In other words, would you like to have your physical card to be lost or stolen and someone paying with it? As small amounts don’t ask for a pin confirmation. Having my phone stolen is pretty much another level of attack.

Yes... that $25 if they manage to get even that before it is blocked I can live with. Loosing my phone, even if they can't do anything with it is a whole other scenario. Now I can't even get home.

Your bank will refund any stolen money if your card is stolen.

> would you like to have your physical card to be lost or stolen and someone paying with it?

I don't really care, as I'm protected from fraud by the card issuer and regulations in my country.

> Having my phone stolen is pretty much another level of attack.

Stealing a wallet or a phone seems just about the same level of difficulty.

And you can trick an iPhone into believing you're a transit terminal and charge arbitrary amounts to real credit cards, without unlocking the phone. (And Apple thinks this is a feature.) The attack requires specialized hardware and physical access, but if you've stolen the phone, that's fine.

(Yes, I know, this article is about Android. But most people where I live have iPhones, even if I don't.)

Yes it is. Doesn't break if drop it for one. Much smaller than a phone. Isn't tied to apples ecosystem. etc.

I get that you might want one if you are a tech maximalist with a single focus. But that doesn't mean you should stop carrying your card.

Don't you still have to carry cards for things that aren't digitally excepted, such as a drivers license in most states?

I'm not an American. In Estonia your ID is entirely digital, and I just show my e-Estonia government provided app to a scanner, which can scan my ID from there and verify it. Same with a drivers license. As long as I travel within EU I also don't need to carry a passport with me as a EU citizen.

And your battery goes empty, and you just lost everything. Or your phone falls to the ground and breaks.

And to add to payments, the store loyalty apps are the worst... Lidl over here has an app only (no physical loyalty card), and they should be hanged for developing that... first of all, you're waiting in line while a grandma takes her phone out of her purse, then unlock it, and of course android is not satisfied with her fingerprint right then but also wants a pin... then all apps, then scroll down to L, find LidlPlus app, tap on it... QR code? Nope, not yet! First you get a daily coupon wheel of fortune, tap, wait for it to spin, see what your award is... and if it's something that she just bought, she has to manually activate that coupon in the menu (again, tap, find, tap, tap back), and then click the card button to get the qr code to scan... it's literally minutes sometimes of just waiting, instead of scanning a simple qr code on a plastic card pulled from the wallet.

We even had one of our telcos break down (full internet loss, country wide), POS terminals not working at all, and there are actually people with zero cash with them, not even like 50 euros (for just-in-case (like this))... and then you have to wait for them to turn around, take their stuff back and go home hungry.

I also have Apple Wallet on my Apple Watch. I can use the Apple Watch to also pay for things.

No it’s not, all of my and my extended family cards (for… like a decade!) are never even leave the envelope they come in. I’m not sure I personally know people who use physical cards over Google or Apple Pay. I have seen the cards being used in the wild, of course. But I’m having hard time remembering anyone I personally know who does that.

How strange that culture is so different in different places. You can just start using them, though. Literally just swipe your card whenever you would swipe your phone.

Do you guys not have wallets with card slots?

I've never had a physical wallet period. I'm not some Gen alpha baby either, I'm almost 30. I have like 4 bank accounts too.

Go buy one and put your cards in it

So, the argument is that it is popular? I'm not arguing against that...

That people trade anything for even just perceived convenience? That isn't news either, but it does explain a lot of the sad state of affairs we are struggling with today.

You need them in some scenarios. For example, lots of car rental companies refuse to take anything but a physical card.

> I’m not sure I personally know people who use physical cards over Google or Apple Pay.

You live in a pretty weird bubble. (And I live in San Francisco, so I know about weird bubbles.)

Like half of the UK adult population use them: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2ejvld0ypyo

That's from a year ago, I'm sure it's only grown since.

I think it's you who's in a bubble, my friend.

I'm starting to come the the same conclusion, but not for practical reasons. My thinking is about privacy. If I buy some chocolates from retailer X (with or without their loyalty system), these parties will know what I purchased and where: The retailer, the bank, the merchant (visa/mc), wallet provider (Google/Apple/Samsung). Any upstream 3rd parties for analytics, big data warehouses, ai companies (fraud detection, spending predictions), marketing companies, research companies, manufacturers. Then there are bluetooth beacons, microphones, cameras, facial recognition, keyboard/screen capture (Gboard, Samsung Keyboard, Whatsapp texts). Then there is sms and popup notification on device that gets ingested by x amount of systems too. So the whole pipe just exists to gather as much as possible data to sell me more stuff. Having a card will take some of them out of the loop or less rich metadata than using a digital wallet.

A card is a good step to reduce that. I want to go farther and pay cash as much as possible, but it's not trivial to manage when all I have is a pocket full of coins. Is there a 3D printed wallet with slots sized for European coins so you can quickly identify and extract the coins you need instead of rummaging through a mixed pocket?

For the Americans: https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/6844022/Nadex-Coins-4...

I assume the same must exist for euros.

Haven't used a normal card in over a decade. I don't think my bank actually makes physical cards anymore, last time my card expired I just had a popup in the bank app that told me I have a new card. This was like 2-3 years ago. I use Google/Android Pay (or whatever it's called now) for NFC payments and have since 2018 and never carried a physical card since.

I would never use a physical card with NFC anyway because it is both inconvenient (have to enter PIN every 5 transactions) and insecure (for transactions without PIN there's no verification layer), whereas on my phone I have to unlock it for every transaction no matter how small, and doing so is a small matter of pressing my finger on the fingerprint reader.

I'm as anti-capitalist as they come but this is kind of a lost fight in my mind because if not Google - then Visa/Mastercard and the bank itself will know every transaction I make anyway.

"open solution for mobile wallets"

define open wallet then

Reply on news.ycombinator.com