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Comment by fleg | Hacker News Reader

Contactless payments don't need PIN (up to some small but comfortable amount) and go through almost instantly.

I tried to use android pay for a few months. In theory its great (and it's great when it works!) but like 30% of the time it doesn't really work the first time, you have to play around with it on the card reader. Then the phone vibrates like it worked but nothing happens. You look at the phone and it says "please hold the card to the reader again." and despite Subway accepting android pay (and the cashiers insisting that it works for everyone else) whenever I try to use it there I get a message "please insert card." I was never able to figure out the workflow to get it to work on a vending machine. Also the first time I used it I froze the register.

So 70% of the time it saves time and 30% of the time it wastes time. Then I broke my phone and bought a replacement without NFC so I don't have the option anymore anyways.

It's a great system, however, I think the kinks need to be worked out a little.

(I had a Nexus 5x FYI)

Contactless debit cards are a lot more reliable than phones, mainly because they have one unique job. My card plays up now and again but that is only since it went through the tumble dryer, which distorted the card and seems to have affected the reliability of the NFC chip, in practice this means I sometimes need to tap twice.

But Germans don't trust contactless payment because in theory anybody could hold a card reader against your wallet while you're innocently waiting in some line.

And just what would they do with it?

That seems an easy way to get your merchant account cancelled very, very quickly.

But why would they care? Stripe does payments every 3 days or so and you can easily create more accounts. I never ever checked my credit card history, and I assume many people who only use it as secondary payment system don't. It's easy as fuck therefore IMO a valid scenario.

Without the CVC code, Stripe isn't going to accept the payment.

Even if it did, the bank is likely to block the transaction, or call/text for verification.

> CVC code

I heard that those are very easy to crack. It might have been this article from 2011 where I read about this (German, sorry): http://www.zeit.de/2011/21/Kreditkarten-Sicherheit

Not to mention half of the database leaks in recent years, especially of porn sites, contained them anyway

The defence against that for me is that I have like 6 rfid enabled cards in my wallet, between my Oyster Card, student ID, library card, key card to access my work building, you can't scan any of them without taking it out individually.

I carry two contactless cards: the metro pass and an office key. They are just taped together (because I want to make sure I always have both) and still reliably work, so I doubt you are protected.

I have tried many times to use a single one of them without the other 5 interfering and it has literally never worked.

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