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Yep. That just confirms what I mentioned in the last paragraph of this blog post. No one fooled here.

Chip-only sounds like a great idea for lots of card products. Late adopters who do not have an EMV-terminal can enter the card number manually instead.

Visa Electron and Maestro still need the magstripe though since they generally do not allow manual entry. That magstripe doesn't need to be on the same card though (actually, I would prefer to not have the CVV2/CVC2 on the same card as well, but that's another story).

The only issue I see is that some ATMs may still require the magstripe even though they use the chip. That was my experience two years ago both in Thailand and Sweden after the magstripe was rendered unreadable. I could still use the chip in POS-terminals but the card was declined in all ATMs.

"it will cost 2.9% plus 30 cents per load to put money into accounts"

Who wants to put their money into such an account?

@Neil Chip skimming is only interesting if you can use the data to produce a new chip that mimics tha original.

If all you want are card number and expiry date it's enough to have a camera since they are both printed on the card.

@Keith I assume the codes are more than 4 digits to prevent people from randomly enter numbers until they get lucky. Maybe you have to enter the amount too and they check that the amount matches what you entered on the phone.

I agree that information like this should be included in the article.

My Visa is a debit card (with no withdrawal fees) so I guess the money would end up in my bank account instantly. I assume there is some transaction fee though for the sender and/or the receiver.

A step in the right direction that should have been made 20 years ago. Good that PayPal is around now to push innovation forward.

Does anyone know what the fees are for such transfers?

Matt,

That's a really lame article. People who leave their phone on the table in a café while going to the restroom should worry about loosing their phone, not about loosing a cup of coffee. And yes, it takes less than 90 seconds to steal a phone.

In other news: If you leave your wallet somewhere people can steal money and cards from it.

Yeah, I guess Starbucks doesn't need more security right now. I'm more interested in how this technology can be used in other locations as a replacement for debit/credit cards. Most people seem to agree that NFC isn't going to happen any time soon because there isn't enough phones or terminals that support it. If this technology works with the current phones and cash register hardware this could be a cheaper way to introduce mobile payments. Just need to add the software part.

Ok, stacked linear barcodes. That doesn't make much difference to me. The question remains - is it the same barcode each time or is it unique for each purchase?

The obvious way to make this secure is to have the app download for instance 10 unique one-time codes from the central system, then display one at a time for each purchase. When the number of codes goes below 5 (or whenever the device happens to be online) more unique codes are downloaded.

Another question is how easy it is to make cash registers feature this payment method. Can stacked linear barcodes be read by the same readers the cash register already use for scanning EAN codes?