Chip + pin = Something you carry (card/chip) + something you know (pin). You need the physical card to use it, card number isn't sufficient.

PINs can be changed, so if you came up with a way of memorising them, its easy.

You also don't need PINs for things like loyalty / membership cards traditionally - just for payment cards.

- You can have the PIN reset for all of those cards so that they all match, (or better we should be using PK based push notifications to a smart phone app; plug in the card, and you get a push notification to deny/allow on your phone, instead of entering in a PIN.)

- Signatures aren't even verified the vast majority of transactions. They only come into play if you catch fraud and report it. So it's used after the fact, not in advance.

- Signatures are predicated on pen on paper on a flat writing surface perpendicular to gravity. Your signature is not at all the same to a handwriting expert if you change any of those things, and in particular the digital capture of signatures is complete utter bullcrap: no angular, or pressure information is captured. We should just use smiley faces on all such POS systems, in lieu of even attempting a signature (it is in fact what I do).

Digital signatures are Tonka Toys. They are nothing like a finger print.

Pick 4 digits on the card, multiply/add them by some constant number you know. You're now done 'memorizing'.

I force them to process it as a credit card because I get the consumer protections of the CC processing agreements. If I use my PIN, it's more like an ATM transaction.

LK

Whether you're costing the merchant more money with higher fees for credit transactions, or if this gets normalized to a debit transaction later on, I'm not sure. But either way it's ridiculous to "force" a credit card transaction on the merchant.

There is no benefit to me to go with a debit transaction and the risk of significant liability if there is a data breach. So, I don't do debit transactions.

I do it more often because of the number of times I've been screwed by trying to use debit mode and end up with a non-functional gas pump or forced to reswipe with the mag stripe because they only support credit transactions from the chip.