Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

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The reason why payment forms are so complicated is because the credit card model is completely broken. Instead of transferring money from your account to their account, you give the other person unlimited and irrevocable access to your account, and then that person takes the money. This is a hilariously stupid way to transfer money. Once they have your credit card number, they can continue to take as much money as they want. Even worse, if they lose the number to some attack, the attacker can take money.

A much better system would be if you could get a temporary number where the merchant can withdraw exactly the amount you need to pay and no more. No charge-backs possible. That's not a problem since the reason we need charge-backs is to patch up the fact that people can randomly take money from you just by knowing the credit card number, which you need to send around to make payments.

Even better is this. At checkout the merchant's site would redirect you to yourbank.com/makepayment?amount=X&target=themerchantsaccount. There you would log in (if you were not already logged in) and click confirm, and the bank would send the money to the merchant. Very user friendly and secure, and no chargebacks. In the Netherlands we have such a system, it's called iDEAL and pretty much all dutch e-commerce uses this. The nice thing is that if your bank is secure, it's secure. You are not relying on thousands of individual merchants implementing security correctly, and you are not relying on the merchant not being evil.

Or bitcoin of course.

You nailed it. Some time ago, my Amex business card had a feature called Private Payments. Basically, whenever you wanted to make a purchase, you would generate a one-time use number that could be used in place of your actual number. Not sure why they did away with it, but I figured it either became a hassle for them to support it or someone figured out how to defraud it. The latter would be insanely ironic, of course.

But, your point in general regarding the fact that divulging your info for one simple payment can expose you so horrendously is very true. Same with other info, like your SSN.

Too much of our current approach to "security" is based on protecting access to informarion, which is the core problem. In my business, we work with a number of retailers, large and small. It is breath-taking how exposed and naive some of these guys are. And, they are handling personal info for millions of people.

In general, we should have learned long ago that it is impossible to secure the data in all cases, so we need systems and processes that assume the data will fall into the wrong hands.

When I moved to NL I was really amazed by this system (no more writing checks!). Since the bank itself is in charge of the payment form, the incentives to fix security are in the right place.

Of course, this is easy to do in a small country with less than 10 banks, which all trust one another.

I had that idea a while back (haven't done anything with it). I was thinking more along the lines of separate PIN numbers for ATMs/at checkout. You would set up different PIN numbers on your account (on the bank website), with specific conditions, like transfer limit, time limits, $X allowed per day.

> Card, PIN 1234 -> bank -> access John Smith's account -> access "1234" setting (max transaction of $50 otherwise declined).

> Cart, PIN 2345 -> bank -> John Smith -> 2345 is only valid on weekdays

I originally thought of it as a way for parents to loan kids their cards, give them a temporary PIN to use.

Might make more sense to adapt it into the CVV system (or a new system), where each specific CVV would correspond to a setting you determine. They can be created by you quickly and securely with a bunch of constraints.

But then I realised I had no idea how CCs worked, and assumed I'd either have to get a bank on board, or a CC company to implement it, and gave up.

Isn't this what paypal does? If so aren't paypal dealing with fraud as well?

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