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Comment by bloopletech | Hacker News Reader

In Australia, we've even moved beyond EMV; the majority of merchants now accept Visa PayWave and MasterCard PayPass for tap-and-go.

[edit: Oh, and all my debit/credit cards are now paywave/paypass enabled, and they are all from the big 4/5 banks]

The Coin page doesn't mention this at all; does it have this? If not, it sounds like a step backwards.

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I was thinking the same thing. A full 60% of MasterCard and Visa transaction are now paywave/paypass. That's pretty impressive uptake, and I'd imagine it will be just as quick one introduced en-mass overseas. Would love to know Coin's development path for this eventuality!

"Australia leads the world in contactless payments, which have grown from almost zero three years ago to more than 35 million transactions a month and now account for 60 per cent of all MasterCard and Visa credit card transactions, according to Westpac."

http://www.theland.com.au/news/agriculture/agribusiness/gene...

It's times like this that show how backwards the US is in many things.

The whole time I was watching the video, I was thinking "Huh - who swipes their card any more?!"

I don't think they have a path for this. Getting the bank to hand over the keys needed will be next to impossible.

I'll let you in on a little secret - paywave/paypass etc are EMV cards. The interface is wireless and they have a shorter transaction flow. There are less (zero) customer validation techniques, final evaluation (pass/fail) takes place at the stage a 'normal' EMV transaction would decide on pass/online/fail.

As usual there are variations between implementations, but underneath it's all good-ol' EMV :)

So I doubt that these could be supported easily by Coin, it requires various keys that the banks do not allow to escape.

If Coin do manage to get talking to banks about allowing wired or wireless EMV apps to be loaded onto a customer Coin card then that would be awesome. I predict that layers of bureaucracy and brand-management will prevent this.

But good luck to 'em if they try!

Why have the coin with "contactless" payment (as paywave etc is known in the uk at least) when the phone itself should be capable of that itself.

I wonder why the big US banks aren't on board with driving contacless NFC payments?

Commonwealth Bank, the largest bank in Australia is very soon releasing native Android NFC support and NFC style "smart tags" that you stick to the back of your iPhone.

https://www.commbank.com.au/personal/online-banking/commbank...

This pretty much eliminates the need for any kind of "card aggregation". I wonder how quickly other countries will follow suite?

I'm in the UK, and had a NFC "smart tag" on the phone I threw away a year ago. Never bothered getting a new tag for my new phone. Maybe when I next upgrade my phone and get one with built in NFC.

We also have the cheque/savings/credit buttons which I've not seen anywhere else in the world (besides NZ). I have my Westpac debit card set up to use cheque/credit for my personal account and savings for my joint account, but I've not met a single other person who makes use of this feature..

I don't know much about PayWave and PayPass, but this actually sounds even less secure than credit cards. And it still relies on the big two. Sounds like a step in the wrong direction.

It's not about convenience, it's about security and reliability. That's the direction we need to take.

It's less secure than chip and pin credit cards, but it does require the presence of an object that can execute the right encryption operations with the right private keys, which makes it more secure than easily cloned mag-stripe cards. Because it is less secure, there's typically a low transaction limit (in the UK 15-20 pounds).

And it is about convenience - people are willing to accept the risk for the added convenience.

Transaction limits are absolutely an important factor in limiting these kind of risks.

In Netherland, there's also one electronic payment system that does not require a PIN: the "chip knip" (chip wallet). You explicitly transfer an amount of money from your account to the chip (often about $20), and you can use that to pay. You still need to approve the payment by pressing a button on the machine, but if you lose it, you don't lose a lot.

And it probably works without a phone/internet connection, because the money is right there on the card and nothing needs to be verified on any server.

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