Re:Japan facing credit card number shortage
by donor20 on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @12:29AM
(#24279130)
Exactly, but the idea that with a billion numbers to issue they can't get 100 million folks into the structure - that's also silly.
Re:Japan facing credit card number shortage
by lmilcin on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @04:20AM
(#24280335)
Not really that silly. For example, IPv4 address space was initially mostly partitioned in huge blocks to couple institutions and companies without regard for the future.
The difference is that Credit Card numbers are much easier to manage. The routing tables for Credit Cards are distributed by Visa/Mastercard to acquirers in the form of BIN files and it is extremely easy to add arbitrary mapping. So if someone gets an unnecessarily large prefix like "1" then the next day you can change it easily to ten prefixes "10", "11", "12" and so on and have a different organization for each.
Credit card numbers are assigned by payment organizations in the form of prefixes (BINs -- https://binlist.net/, https://www.bindb.com/bin-list.html)
The worst that will happen is that Visa/Mastercard will issue more BINs to those organizations. There isn't going to be a shortage of credit card numbers.