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A comment on Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card. Parent comment

Re:Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card by umeshunni on Thursday March 24, 2016 @07:12PM (#11357267)
The short answer is that, in theory, we are running out. It's kept in check now by some amount of BIN & account number recycling by financial institutions.

If you're curious about the number scheme, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_7812

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Re:Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card by codelitt on Friday March 25, 2016 @08:46AM (#11359710)
I don't believe we are that close to running out though, are we?

Using the number scheme, this person calculated^1 that (assuming Amex starts issuing 16 digit cards) there would be 3*10^14 + 10^11 or 4.001e+14 possible combinations.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/3wj8eb/requ...

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