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Comment by RandallBrown | Hacker News Reader

> Apple did a great job mainstreaming digital wallets like this, what they do is not unique in the industry.

I may misremember, but I think Apple Pay was pretty unique when it first launched, which is why it was supported at so few places. Other phone payment systems (like I think the original Samsung Pay) just sent the card number straight to the machine.

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In the US it was uncommon. Contactless payments had been supported in Europe and Asia for a while (2007 in the UK), though with fairly low limits at least in the UK.

Interestingly, it seems like the UK still has a £100 limit, while in the US I've paid well over $2000 with a contactless payment using my Android phone.

In Australia it seems like a credit card contactless is limited (was AU$100 or fifty quid if you like) but now might be more.

But the apple pay is way higher I have spent over $1k on it before. Probably because there is at least another layer of security which is a Passcode which is probably a better PIN than the credit card pin itself.

Contactless credit card payment limits in Australia (from my experience) are configurable.

I bumped my contactless limit from $100 -> $500 years ago through my bank's app. Leaves friends confused every time I cover a group dinner out

Australian also. I wish for the opposite, I’d like to be able to reduce the tap-no-pin limit down to $50 or so. I only use the physical card in rare emergencies, and increasing the times I have to enter my PIN by once or twice per year is hardly an inconvenience.

I believe when using apple pay with an apple watch, there's no longer a threshold where you need to use a PIN/passcode as the watch is using 'biometric authentication'.

The UK's £100 limit only applies for using the actual card, if using a device to pay it's authenticated with your PIN or biometric and you can pay up to £10,000. If you look on the receipt you can see "cardholder device verified"

That makes sense, thanks!

There were one or two other things at the time but I think they were glorified autocomplete. I’m pretty sure there was a version of Google pay that didn’t filling stuff on the website, but I think it gave your real card number in the background somehow. Maybe only directly to the bank so the merchant didn’t see it, but it was still your real number.

Apple is the first one I remember hearing of that used DPANs.

I think Capital One had virtual card numbers available before Apple Pay came out, but could be wrong about that. There were definitely a few neobanks offering it.

They did but that’s a bit different as while it’s not your real card number it’s not a tokenized payment in the background. It’s still just a PAN and security code.

Google Wallet (2011) was the first one, AFAIK, but the initial system also provided a "google" card working as "prepaid wallet", which made it less clear.

Apple marketed it better though

EMVCO specs for contactless was always a tokenized card number. Maybe Samsung Pay was passing the PAN for online payments.

They may be thinking of MST

For context, MST or magnetic secure transmission, allows a phone to transmit an EM signal that emulates the physical action of swiping a magstripe based card. As in, it works with all the legacy "card swipe" terminals. Samsung phones up to like the S20(?) supported this, allowing them to technically work basically everywhere with no integration needed.

That's straight Voodoo shit. Getting that to work with most cheapo POS's sounds immensely challenging.

It was I think the last major implementation to enter the market, with first one based on EMV standards being original Google Wallet (which was blocked by Google's typical inability to launch something globally).

USA is just, for various reasons, very very behind on things like card payment technology, to the point that visiting from Poland with card I used worldwide for years I had to first learn special workarounds so cashiers would know how to charge it.

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