Only slightly more insane than keeping the handy 4x4 format, but extending it from base 10 numbers to base 16, which I would really love to see :D

They would need to EOL over-the-phone payments to do this. People have horrible diction and it's hard to tell the difference between b, c, d, and e when a particularly lazy lipped person says these letters (in addition to non-hex letters like g, p, t, and v). Then they use their own ambiguous phonetic system (b as in ball, c as in call, d as in doll will confuse anyone trying to distinguish between the three). Oh and this compounds on ambiguous sounding digits like 13 and 30; 14 and 40; 15, 16, 50 and 60; 17 and 70; 18 and 80; 19 and 90). It can't be done with DTMF digits anymore either.

All in all not a bad direction to go in. I wouldn't really miss phone payments.

Why don’t we teach schoolchildren the NATO phonetic alphabet? Seems like it wouldn’t take that long, and it would be a useful skill for their whole life.

In English speaking countries, sure - why not.

But it'd take at least 3 generation to use in non-english speaking country since in different languages same letters might be pronounced vastly different. Then you have immigrants and foreigners who might now know this alphabet so clerks would still be able to recognize ad-hoc and NATO alphabet. In the end, it would extend requirements while not providing universal benefit.

Brazilian here. There is an equivalent alphabet in Portuguese, with different words for each letter, better adapted to the Portuguese language. It's ubiquitous in the Brazilian armed services.

Phone service is always in a specific language, I don't see why the use of such alphabets would be harder in non-English-speaking countries than in English-speaking ones.

Not every country even uses Latin alphabet. That’s for one. And you wrote “such alphabets” whereas OP specifically named NATO one. If each country would have their own implementation it would be even more effort consuming and wouldn’t solve anything beyond what we already have.

"each country would have their own implementation" would not mean anyone has to serve all countries. Services only available in English today would only need to learn the NATO alphabet to remain fully available in English.

We should. There are so many adults who think it's cute to make up their own phonetics not realizing the whole purpose is to reduce ambiguity, not make it fun to spell things aloud.

As an adult who tries to remember the NATO phonetic alphabet but can't because I only use it once per month, I don't make up words "for fun" or "to be cute". I do it because I can't remember the NATO word. Compared to just saying the letters, the words I choose certainly do reduce ambiguity, even if using the NATO alphabet would go even further.

Some good advice I got from a HAM was to read license plates in your head using the NATO alphabet. Their letters are mostly random so you tend to see each letter at roughly the same frequency and it can be done daily without taking away time from your schedule. Being random also prevents you from just remembering the order of the words and actually associating them with their respective letters.

After doing that for a week or two (I was bike commuting at the time), I had it pretty much memorized.

This is mostly fine if only done for ambiguous letters and if the understanding is that it is done to reduce ambiguity. There is a contingent of people who painstakingly spell out every letter with a phonetic from their own system and it requires the listener to do a lot more decoding to the point of actually increasing ambiguity. "My name is Michelle that's M/N as in Nail/Mail! I as in Icecream! ..." Nichelle is confused about why we use words to spell out certain letters.

Same, but once every 2 years. Just email me for goodness sake!

Then you'll have to spell your email address using NATO phonetic alphabet.

Dennis Praeger likes to spell his name as: P as pneumatic...

DTMF is actually 16 digits: 1 2 3 A 4 5 6 B 7 8 9 C * 0 # D. While most keypads don't have A B C D buttons, * and # are pretty much everywhere, and easy to distinguish, so adopting base-12 would be relatively easy.

Shhhhhh no more credit cards by phone :)

Many systems here have over-the-phone robots that understand button presses, but yeah, I think they support only decimal digits.

I would be in favour of EOL that insecure mess known as phone payments.

This is genius. Make this happen fintech.

To addresses? Mostly pointless. To a larger number space that had non-numeric representation, genius and probably inevitable.

If we allow for the representation to be 0-9 and then another ten letters selected for uniqueness and clarity, overlapped with appropriate non-roman pictographs, etc, the same 16 characters jumps to 600 quintillion range, or about 60 bits by napkin math.

That's more than realistically enough for hundred billion people to each have millions of real payment IDs with millions more one-time use ones that contained some sort of transaction hash for authorization.

Which conveniently fits in a 64 bit word with some left over. I suspect someone involved in the payment space already figured that out a long time ago, but no cataclysmic event has yet happened to de-rail the existing money train.

If you wanted to do that in IPv6 you'd still have the upper 64 bits left over :)

> What if they switched CC numbers TO IPV6 addresses? Insane or genius?

Depends upon how it is implemented as could go full on 1984 very fast without that ever being intended.

The whole aspect of a static fixed CC number you share with people is what really needs to change. A One Time CC per transaction would be more useful and negates many potential issues in a way that protects the customer and in turn the bank itself.

> A One Time CC per transaction would be more useful and negates many potential issues in a way that protects the customer and in turn the bank itself.

That's what Google pay does. It generates a new credit card number for each transaction that charges the CC you have on your account. It's kind of like a password manager for credit cards.

AFAIK it generates a dynamic CVV. Your credit card number stays the same.

Why stop there? ipv6 license plates, citizen numbers, home addresses, part numbers, atoms, ...

You joke, but that’s exactly what uuid/guid is — 128 bit identifiers. The only difference is that ipv6 is allocated hierarchically.

Do we have enough atoms?

Don't worry, if we live in a cyclical model universe we'll eventually get some new ones.

To what end? You want your card to be internet addressable?

Also, I'm not enthusiastic about trying to communicate an IPv6 address over the phone to the wage slave working at the pizza joint. You'd have to implement one of those address-to-word setups, which would make for some amusing card "numbers". How would you like getting a card with "chinky challis uta ablow wiry rehaul a carotin" on the front?

Something like: http://jubei.ceyah.org/cgi-bin/ipv6toenglish

Hopefully they keep the :: shortener in there....

If you want only identification, you can use a phone number, for some reason there's no problem with those.

Or implement NAT: make cards share the number, but identify them by their public keys.

Or just a UUID.