maratc

As long as the non-in-person option exists, the results won't be trusted.

In the US, there was a lot of discussion that the Biden win over Trump in 2020 is a result of the younger family members quarantined on Covid with their parents and mail-voting for them. I don't believe that's what's happened, but this discussion could not have taken place at all in a world where mail-voting is not an option.

You cannot solve it with cryptography. I understand cryptography but my parents don’t, so I will be voting instead of my parents. This way, I get three votes while they get zero votes each.[0]

I'll quote Bruce Schneier [1]:

   If you think cryptography can solve your problem, *you don’t understand your problem* and you don’t understand cryptography.

0: I already do anything related to any interaction with a computer system for them (including payments, social security, medical, travel, etc.)

1: He dug into the origins of this here: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/05/laurie-anders...

> so that solar noon might not happen at 12:00 anymore

The solar noon never happens at 12:00 anywhere anymore. We've left that era about 200 years ago when we synched clocks with the capital city for the benefit of train schedules.

P.S. Well, technically the solar noon happens at 12:00 in New York on January 2nd, Chicago on Jan 14, Denver on Dec 25th, Los Angeles on Jan 9, etc. (on other dates, it's off.) In Santiago de Compostela — where they want to be on the same clock as Warsaw — solar noon happens as "early" as 13:18 and as late as 14:40.

> When it is present, WebAuthn attestation tells the site the make and model of the authenticator, identified by its AAGUID, with a certificate chain from the vendor to back it up.

Me: The person who posted this post critical of The King on Facebook was totally not me!

Police: Here's "a WebAuthn attestation" that told Facebook "the make and model of the authenticator, identified by its AAGUID, with a certificate chain from the vendor to back it up" and it fits Evidence A.

No thanks.

Can confirm: I was on a holiday there and took reading it as a "side quest." Within a week I was fairly proficient. Note: this says nothing about understanding what you read, of which I had none!

> it's not crazy to think you'd be held to them there.

It's not crazy to think that I won't be served meat if I'm going to a house of a vegetarian. It is however crazy to think that I will be stoned in that house for having eaten meat in the past.

And it's absolutely bonkers to think that I could be driving on my business on the road that just so happens to pass through some property belonging to a vegetarian, who will drag me out of the car and stone me as "a perpetrator of Gallinaceous Ordocide" or something.

This is not a perfect analogy: when I choose not to join a club, I have a reasonable expectation of that club not declaring me its member, and not fighting me for failing to follow the rules that the club established.

> trust bootstrapping problem that could only be solved

Onus of proof is on you that it needs to be solved, as the alternative exists and is working well. Think of it this way: I have my trust in US dollar (because everybody else has it too); maybe I could give the same trust in Swiss franc, or Emirati dirham, or South African rand — but why would I? US dollar already gives me everything I need.

> it does generally protect you from merchant data breaches

And from rogue merchants, too.

> the original merchant can post some subsequent charges

This has never happened to me; however my original point is that Apple Pay gives me better protections than regular CC, and it was given as a response to your point of "exactly the same dispute protections". Apple Pay is better since using it leads to fewer disputes in the first place; once the dispute is happening, the protections might be the same.

> The legal right... backstopped by law

In theory; in practice, one reliably and repeatably works, and the other I'm not sure (and not willing to find out.) I've had some experience with stolen checks; while the money has been ultimately returned to me, it was a major hassle, and cost me several sleepless nights.

> How does Apple Pay factor in here?

Apple Pay gives the merchant a generated CC number (per-card, per-device) with a generated one-time security code (for every single purchase.) If the merchant is breached, all the hackers are getting is a generated CC number and a (expired after single use) security code, so they can't charge my Apple Pay card at all — and of course not my real card (which has never been exposed to the merchant to begin with.) The easiest and fastest chargeback is when there is no charge!

I just gave AI the original Cleo integral, and it came with a solution dissimilar to any answer on Math.StackExchange page in question. The answer also differs in presentation from Cleo's answer, being "2π arccos(sqrt(5) − 2)" (the numerical values seem to be the same.)

The fact that someone has "a legal right to do" something does not mean that realising that right in practice is fast, easy, or even possible.

I'd rather not be in the situation where I have to realise my "legal right" to ACH chargeback — which will involve hurdles, wasted time, and probably also legal fees — by not giving anyone the authorisation to perform ACH pulls in the first place. Cash works best for this — you're never out of more than what you hand over — but Apple Pay gives me similar protections.

> Everybody with access to, or capable of guessing, your account number is capable of "access to your checking account".

No, ACH authorisation is an entirely different matter. I could agree to show you the check I wrote to my landlord, but I'm not willing to give you my check book with my signature — and no other data — on all the blank checks.

ACH authorisation is an analog of the latter, not the former.

Kazakhstan, according to one popular source.

> if merchants stop supporting Visa/Mastercard

In this case, people who don't have local cheaper option won't be able to buy from them.

Cash/local-card-only might be OK for a grocery store in rural area only serving the locals, less so for a coffee shop in tourist centre of a major city.

YMMV, but I still carry cash and find no inconvenience in this. Cash is never out of battery, never out of software support, and unaffected by AWS outages, cellular outages, or electricity outages. I also don't install apps that are supposed to make life convenient for others but not me. WRT that hairdresser chain, I suppose I'd simply use a different hairdresser that would accept both walk-ins and cash, and I'd hope there's no shortage of such.

Too many things have to line up exactly the way you imagine for this to happen, and I think your scenario is too optimistic as a result. Specifically, the merchants "can now lower their price" but they might not do it, especially considering that the costs of integration with this system are probably non-zero for them.

Wizz is a Hungarian (so: European) airline (since 2003) and girocard is a German (so: European) instant low-fee payment system (it's been rebranded in 2007 from EC-Karte that existed since 1960s). At this moment, as far as I'm aware, you cannot pay for your Wizz ticket with girocard (they only accept Visa/MC/Amex or "co-branded" girocards.)

Currently, a cost of "something" is:

1. 100€ if paid with cash

2. 100€ if paid with sovereign-European low-cost GPDR-compliant ISO-certified processor

3. 100€ if paid with American expensive monopoly behemoth Visa/MC.

Currently, it stands to reason to pay with Visa/MC and not bother with carrying cash or switching from Visa/MC to anything else.

In the future, it might be that the cost of the same "something" is:

1. 99.5€ if paid with cash

2. 100€ if paid with sovereign-European low-cost GPDR-compliant ISO-certified processor

3. 102€ if paid with American expensive monopoly behemoth Visa/MC. (Note: Visa/MC explicitly prohibit this.)

If this is predictable and repeatable, everyone needs to change their customer habits. It stands to reason that the change would be to carry cash.

What banks "can offer" is irrelevant until they offer it in practice.

As a customer, I have zero interest in paying for my lunch via "QR codes, email addresses, and mobile numbers" when I can do it with near-zero friction with a double-click on a phone (funded by a credit card), or with a tap or swipe of the credit card. I also have better protections. Switching costs are non-zero and I will only switch if there are some substantial benefits; pure "feature parity" is a reason to not switch.

The benefits to merchants are tangential to me, but there is a substantial downside of all the merchants having to do integration with an additional system.

The problem with your argument is that the price to the consumer stays the same, regardless of the payment processor involved (or cash when none are involved.) These are the rules set by payment processors. With these rules, the prices will stay the same with any amount of the supply. If these rules are changed, all payment processors will suffer in cash's favour, and as governments oppose cash-based economy for tax maximisation, the change of the rules is unlikely.

We seem to agree that "lower prices" have no place to come from. If "lower prices" can't happen, what are the benefits to users now?

…within that specific country.

I know that JCB exists in Japan and Mir exists in Russia, but never saw them accepted anywhere except these countries respectively.

You can't convince millions of users to switch from one payment method to another by the "weaponised" and "reliance" and "essential security" arguments. These arguments might work on me but not on my parents nor my children (who do not care much about these but do care about having a universally accepted payment method which is easy and safe to use.)

The question here is "what is the benefit to individual users," not "what is the benefit to the users community as a whole."

Usually, a product that costs $100 costs me the same $100 regardless of the payment processors involved (and $100 cash when none are involved), so I can't see where "lower prices for consumers" could come from.

In communist China, the party joins you.

Nitpick: Poland was wiped off the map after the Third Partition in 1795, not after the first one in 1772. There was a Polish "Constitution of 3 May 1791."

Starting price alone doesn't give you the full picture.

After five years, Apple Watches are out of support, so even if they work their value goes to $0. The battery is gone by that time, new OSes don't support them, and their only destination is a landfill.

Mechanical watches can last decades, and hold some resell value at any age.

Casio WSB1000 is probably the cheapest with phone pinging ability, but it's about $40.

None of that applies to my (non-biometric) passport, and we were talking about banks that don't have the passport-reading equipment to begin with.

This move looks like a nothingburger to me but everyone's invited to treat this as a Rorschach test and see whatever they want to see.

Already today nobody can open a bank account in my name with just a picture of my passport, as the original would be required. My passport doesn't have any of the "eID/CAs/ZKP/PKI", so the question of "what exactly the addition of it solves" remains open.

My national ID card supposedly has some of it, the 17-year olds who want to pass as 18-year olds usually show a doctored gif file of their ID card, with a year of birth one or two years before the actual one; this works in ~98% of the cases.