Mike Hearn [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: 📅 Original date posted:2014-03-10 📝 Original message:> > I just did my first ...
📅 Original date posted:2014-03-10
📝 Original message:>
> I just did my first contactless nfc payment with a MasterCard. It worked
> very well and was quite delightful - definitely want to be doing more of
> these in future.
>
A bit more competitive intelligence - turns out that the experience isn't
quite so good after all. After trying a few more times to use contactless
payments, I found it has a ~75% failure rate based on my usage.
By far the biggest problem is also the most predictable - it's very common
here for merchants to require minimum payment sizes before they'll accept
credit cards, often quite high, like 20 CHF or more. But the PIN-less mode
only works for payments below a certain threshold, I haven't quite figured
out what it is yet, but in the UK it's 20 GBP so maybe it's about 30 CHF.
So there turns out to be an incredibly thin price range in which the simple
touch-to-pay system actually works. Most of the time, either they:
a) Reject cards entirely because the payment is too small
b) Don't have the right hardware, or the hardware just mysteriously fails
to work.
c) Require a PIN because the payment is too large
I'm sure Bitcoin can do better than this.
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📝 Original message:>
> I just did my first contactless nfc payment with a MasterCard. It worked
> very well and was quite delightful - definitely want to be doing more of
> these in future.
>
A bit more competitive intelligence - turns out that the experience isn't
quite so good after all. After trying a few more times to use contactless
payments, I found it has a ~75% failure rate based on my usage.
By far the biggest problem is also the most predictable - it's very common
here for merchants to require minimum payment sizes before they'll accept
credit cards, often quite high, like 20 CHF or more. But the PIN-less mode
only works for payments below a certain threshold, I haven't quite figured
out what it is yet, but in the UK it's 20 GBP so maybe it's about 30 CHF.
So there turns out to be an incredibly thin price range in which the simple
touch-to-pay system actually works. Most of the time, either they:
a) Reject cards entirely because the payment is too small
b) Don't have the right hardware, or the hardware just mysteriously fails
to work.
c) Require a PIN because the payment is too large
I'm sure Bitcoin can do better than this.
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