Topic: On a panel with MasterCard and Visa (Read 5637 times)

I think that is ultimately semantics.
The important point is that I am choosing the amount to be transferred, I am not relying on the merchant for that.

Not quite.

The card reader is provided by a merchant acquirer.

In this model, it simply isn't possible for what you said to be true.  The communication is from the merchant, to the merchant acquirer, to the switch and then to the issuer.

Sure, you may well authorise the request and provide a credential (your PIN) that allows the merchant to attest to the fact that you were present and authorised the request.  But it's still a *request*.  And you're trusting all the parties in that chain to present the request to the issuer such that what you authorised matches what is taken.

And I would argue that it's unambiguously a "pull" from the merchant, not a "push" from the purchaser.

Chip and Pin doesn't work like that.
The card reader is supplied by the credit card company, and communicates directly to them, not through the retailer.
The retailer enters the amount to be charged, and hands the device to you. You see on the screen how much money will be sent, and choose to enter your Pin or not. You are pushing an amount of money you choose to the retailer, not trusting them to pull the right amount.

ROFL.
The smartest 1 percent?
This community here, at bitcointalk?
ROFL.

Keep it positive, make Bitcoins community shine, a dedicated community of the smartest 1 percent of the population backing and supporting the cryptocurrency movement; with them all problems can be solved.

The point I was trying to make was that the architecture of card processing has a fundamental weakness: the consumer authorises the merchant to generate and send a message to the consumer's card issuer (via the card network) to take funds from their account  However, ensuring that the amount you authorised matches the amount they request is decidedly non-trivial.  In the absence of controls, the amount they ask for could be anything.  This means that every time you use your card you are open to the risk that the merchant asks for far more than you were expecting.

To mitigate this risk, the edifice of card security grew up over time....  in the paper days, the fact that both the merchant and retailer had an identical copy of the voucher allowed the consumer to dispute a fraudulent transaction. More recently, technologies such as chip+pin try to do something similar.  But they're all really just sticking plasters on the funamental problem: card processing relies on the merchant "pulling" the funds from the consumer's card issuer.

I recently was at a conf where a woman from Visa gave a talk on the "future of money". She was all about NFC payments as well.

I agree that it's a rather damning indictment of the existing payments industry that switching from a wired to wireless interface for the last few centimeters of a transaction is considered the the cutting edge of innovation. From their perspective though it's a big deal - it means changing all the point of sale equipment, it means somewhat more convenient payments for common transaction sizes, etc. They aren't even capable of imagining things that shake up the organisational status quo at this point.

The event started better than expected: The second speaker a partner from Deloitte demonstrated his knowledge of cutting edge technologies by asking the crowd (it was about 150 people) if they heard the name Satoshi Nakamoto. I was one out of 4 who raised a hand. At the end of his speech he had a slide exemplifying Bitcoin as real innovation to watch out for. I talked to him in the pause, but figured that he had only a rather shallow understanding of what Bitcoin is, but who cares, recognizing it as a disruptive innovation is the right first step.

The next talks were rather boring about online-banking innovations and security of banking applications. Innovations they were touting paled in comparison to Bitcoin, but they did not seem to know yet.

The final panel was the one I participated. It was preceded by a talk of the head of regulations department of the national bank (comparable to FinCen that operates within the national bank in Hungary). He spent quite a few minutes explaining why cash is bad for the economy and what benefits more frequent electronic payments would bring on national scale. I used this to catch him in the pause and telling him that cash and electronic payments is not a contradiction but Bitcoin is electronic cash. He got interested, so I have an invite to his office

My panel was with local MDs of Visa and MasterCard and a company launching a mobile wallet in cooperation with them that enables credit card payments via NFC. I managed to go over couple of arguments you shared with me. Let me draft the most notable exchanges:

They called NFC payment a breakthrough innovation, even a butterfly moment. I made the point that changing the infrastructure behind the payments is likely a bigger a breakthrough than the difference between sliding a plastic card into a slot vs. waving the mobile phone over the slot. The MasterCard guy said that the biggest obstacle in introducing a new payment method is gaining trust that they successfully established, I countered that people likely trust even more mathematics than them. They said in 5 years we will have majority using mobile payments with NFC, I said in 5 years we will no longer talk about innovation in payments but settlement of financial instruments and rights via technologies that learned from the Bitcoin network.

Close to the end the audience could vote (with a voting machine) on the question of what they see is future of payments is and a staggering 11% voted for Bitcoin (alternatives were credit card, mobile, bank transfer and cash payments)

I think that is as good as I could possibly get it, considering that only 2.6% new Satoshi's name at the begin of the conference.

Please let us know how it went today.

Please let us know how it went today.

I am invited to join a panel discussion with local managing directors of MasterCard and Visa at a high profile Finance IT forum on 19. September.

Please feed me any arguments and facts with links you think would be helpful to make Bitcoin shine in comparison. Thanks in advance.

Yes, it seem to qualify as innovation that cards are loaded into a wallet app and charged via NFC (up to a limit of about 20$ without further interaction by the customer) They were pretty excited about soon combining it with biometric authentication (say iPhone).

Sounds good man!

Just out of curiosity, was their innovation talk built around NFC? Does it have anything extra above chip/pin methods, like any new types of security or communications behind it?

The event started better than expected: The second speaker a partner from Deloitte demonstrated his knowledge of cutting edge technologies by asking the crowd (it was about 150 people) if they heard the name Satoshi Nakamoto. I was one out of 4 who raised a hand. At the end of his speech he had a slide exemplifying Bitcoin as real innovation to watch out for. I talked to him in the pause, but figured that he had only a rather shallow understanding of what Bitcoin is, but who cares, recognizing it as a disruptive innovation is the right first step.

The next talks were rather boring about online-banking innovations and security of banking applications. Innovations they were touting paled in comparison to Bitcoin, but they did not seem to know yet.

The final panel was the one I participated. It was preceded by a talk of the head of regulations department of the national bank (comparable to FinCen that operates within the national bank in Hungary). He spent quite a few minutes explaining why cash is bad for the economy and what benefits more frequent electronic payments would bring on national scale. I used this to catch him in the pause and telling him that cash and electronic payments is not a contradiction but Bitcoin is electronic cash. He got interested, so I have an invite to his office

My panel was with local MDs of Visa and MasterCard and a company launching a mobile wallet in cooperation with them that enables credit card payments via NFC. I managed to go over couple of arguments you shared with me. Let me draft the most notable exchanges:

They called NFC payment a breakthrough innovation, even a butterfly moment. I made the point that changing the infrastructure behind the payments is likely a bigger a breakthrough than the difference between sliding a plastic card into a slot vs. waving the mobile phone over the slot. The MasterCard guy said that the biggest obstacle in introducing a new payment method is gaining trust that they successfully established, I countered that people likely trust even more mathematics than them. They said in 5 years we will have majority using mobile payments with NFC, I said in 5 years we will no longer talk about innovation in payments but settlement of financial instruments and rights via technologies that learned from the Bitcoin network.

Close to the end the audience could vote (with a voting machine) on the question of what they see is future of payments is and a staggering 11% voted for Bitcoin (alternatives were credit card, mobile, bank transfer and cash payments)

I think that is as good as I could possibly get it, considering that only 2.6% new Satoshi's name at the begin of the conference.