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Comment by Tabular-Iceberg | Hacker News Reader

I'm in Europe too, and I have never seen an imprinter either, but I keep being issued cards with embossed numbers, so I figure they must be good for something, if not imprinting, what else?

I'm concerned about the phasing out of cash too as a separate issue, I just don't think the cashless options should have to be subject to artificial limitations like requiring electricity or a network connection to be able to be used. I guess online transactions with chip and pin are much more secure and should be the default, but retailers could keep a log of outages that they are required to submit along with the imprinted slips. They could be corroborated with the logs of the utility companies as well as other businesses in the area, and if something doesn't make sense it could trigger an audit.

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Some EU countries don't issue credit/debit cards by default but they have their own system. The Netherlands is one of them. Such cards don't have embossing. You can get a MasterCard/Visa compatible card but it's not standard, though I believe this will change soon.

But of course the imprinting system is ancient and extremely prone to fraud. As is the magstripe. I wish we had a choice not to have the latter anymore. I'd gladly give up the ability to pay in places where magstripes are still used in return for more security against skimming. Here in Europe the magstripe is just not used anymore except for supporting foreign cards.

The Dutch debit cards are Maestro (Mastercard) or V Pay (Visa) cards which are a pretty standard systems. There is no point in embossing because transactions need to be authorized immediately by the issuing bank for obvious reasons.

They are pretty standard but not accepted where credit cards normally are. In particular Maestro, I'm not sure about V Pay as I've never had it.

But when I lived in the Netherlands I had to get a credit card to do stuff like book flights or order on foreign sites.

They are pretty non-standard as they don't display a number that can be used where credit card numbers are normally accepted (they do have such a number internally to work with the Maestro/V-Pay system).

I like the embossing because it gives my thumb something to grip when I'm pulling the card out of my wallet.

My lastest debit card (issued last year) was the first one I got without embossed numbers. I guess retrocompatibility is no longer a priority. Not that it changes anything for me, virtually every shop has already phased out even the magstripes and use either chip cards or NFCs.

I've seen an imprinter used in Germany I think, but that was more than 30 years ago.

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