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In response to the last comment, if issuers mandated the use of CVV and expiry date and checked the information given you are right that it would be more difficult to guess card details but the reality is that they don’t and a card number alone is enough. This is, at least in part, due to the PCI DSS mandating that the CVV must not be stored so for websites that store card details they must send transactions without the CVV.

As to why Cards are always the bad guy? PCI-DSS and massive fines have been mentioned. Add to that the cost of doing business with the card schemes. Visa currently has a market cap of nearly a quarter of a Trillion dollars. That is a huge investment to get a return on every year.

There has to be a better way. If we always continue to work with what we have there would be no such thing as progress.

My congratulations to the law enforcement bodies involved here but it's worth pointing out that the real losers were not the 3000 citizens but their banks, who would have to reimburse them for the losses.

It seems to me that the real culprits are the card schemes for creating such a fundamentally insecure system and the PCI DSS is, at best, a stcking plaster over a gaping wound. Can we now start to talk about a network that provides the security that people need in a modern world?

This is great news. The PCI council is answerable to no one on whom they impose these standards and each iteration bring in more and more draconian rules for which they bear none of the costs. The merchants and service providers have no alternative but to comply or fold. It makes no difference whether an individual rule has any meaningful benefit in one particular case as the "one size fits all" approach is taken for the ease of the council and eventually the merchants and the card holders get to pay.

Thanks, Chris

Why is it that every article about block-chain always starts from the technology and, only at the end, has a little piece about how we might use it? With very few exceptions (POST-IT notes spring to mind) really successful products are produced by looking at a problem and then using or creating technology to solve it rather than coming up with a clever technology and then trying to think of something to do with it. I can’t think of any other situation where so much money has been poured into a piece of technology with so little idea of what we are going to do with it.

To paraphrase Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. I have the answer! Now, what was the question?