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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

The underlying problem is that the whole concept of cards is insane. Basically, you go around telling every shopkeeper the code for your safe, and ask them to take however much cash you owe them out of the safe.

Sane ways to organize payments:

- Merchant gives you a bill-id. You input it into your bank website - where you see the bill amount being charged. You accept, and bank pays merchant.

- You give merchant your card number (that's the only information - no expiry, no ccv, no name). A notification pops up on your bank website asking if you want to pay what the merchant is requesting. You accept.

- You go to your bank website and obtain a random number, either allowing a single transaction or a recurring transaction. You give the merchant the number. After merchant charges it, no other merchant can charge the same number.

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This would also solve a major annoyance I have with card payments, which is no way to link a particular purchase back to a transaction.

With checks, you write a check and can write down the check number with a note about what the payment was for. When the payment posts, the check number is part of the transaction. With a card payment, they charge your card and, sometimes days later, there's a pre-authorization with some obscure transaction description. So many scary transaction descriptions that make me think "wait is this fraud".

With this method, the approval flow would also allow people to add a blurb for what the transaction is for.

> You go to your bank website and obtain a random number, either allowing a single transaction or a recurring transaction. You give the merchant the number. After merchant charges it, no other merchant can charge the same number.

That's basically how Blik works in Poland. With the exception being that the number is random 6 digits randomly generated when you open the app, that is active for ~2 minutes. So you don't deal with the issue of very long and error prone numbers to copy.

Much better way to pay online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik

Cards have supported strong, positive cardholder authentication at the POS (chip and PIN) and online (3DS) since the 90s.

It’s entirely the US credit card industry and its regulating bodies’ fault that it has made neither mandatory in the way that e.g. the EU did, and is in fact fighting any attempt to do so tooth and nail (please think of the conversion rate!!)

Can you guys still write a check at the supermarket checkout? No pin credit cards are small potatoes next to personal checks in terms of weirdness. But I wish we had that trust culture everywhere.

Which guys? :)

I haven't seen checks being used to pay for groceries in either the US or EU in the past few years, in any case.

Americans :). Glad it's not being used anymore.

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