I'm curious as to the experience of people taking EMV cards from the US to Europe, is it any faster than in the states on the same terminal hardware?
But to your point I found chip terminal manufactuer that claims to have optimized the communications between the chip and the terminal [2].
[1] http://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2016/Visa-Speeds-...
[2] https://cayan.com/insights/emv-doesn-t-have-to-slow-down-the...
NNNNnno. 1) the price on everything is inflated 3% for what amounts to an archaic and insecure way to process transactions 2) It's not opt-in: that is, with few rare cases, I gain nothing, and in fact, must spend more money to not participate and 3) Even if I do participate, all I can hope for is, at best, 1.5% or so cash back. You might say, "Oh, well that's a fee for convenience and security. OK, then what the hell is that fee I pay for the card every year?
It's bullshit. Get rid of it. Make consumer credit illegal. People are too stupid, greedy and short sighted to consume it well.
As for the theory that prices are inflated by interchange, there are two problems with it. One, reward card users don't experience inflation because most of the interchange is refunded to them. Two, when Australia regulated down interchange, it didn't actually result in lower prices.
> what the hell is that fee I pay for the card every year?
Most cards in the U.S. don't have annual fees. The ones that do usually offer enhanced benefits like richer reward programs.
There is no reason to think that the 2-3% tax is going away anytime soon once you understand the network dynamics. The key element that almost everyone overlooks, even people on HN building alternative payment systems, is that that tax mostly gets refunded to consumers via reward programs. It does not just go into Visa or the banks' coffers. They certainly take a healthy slice of it at scale but they key point is, they have aligned themselves with consumer interests. Reward programs keep consumers loyal to the "high tax" system, because the tax mainly goes to them.
This can be demonstrated very simply by comparing credit and debit usage rates. There is already a "low tax" payment method that has near 100% adoption in every consumer pocket and merchant register. It's called debit cards. They work exactly the same as credit cards at the register -- you can even sign for them (and it's no more expensive than PIN thanks to the Durbin amendment). Yet consumers still widely use credit cards. Why? Because no rewards. It's mostly merchants who would benefit from lower interchange fees, at least in the short run.
So this is why Apple Pay et al did not try to build a lower-fee system. It would have misaligned them with consumers. This might shed some light on why Bitcoin never had much of a chance as an alternative consumer payment method.