And I'm amazed that this hasn't caught on in the US yet. Last time I vistited, I was horrified when they swiped the magnetic strip and asked me to sign for it - felt like I'd jumped back in time.

After I got back from my last visit to the states I kept handing my card to the staff when I was paying. They usually looked funny at me and put it in the machine rather awkwardly.

By 2014-2015 all of the cards should be Chip & Pin in USA.

Guess what? It's broken as hell ;)

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland10chipbroken.p...

It's not that broken. It's still not trivial to clone them like swipe cards.

The thrust of that paper is that using special equipment it's possible to use a genuine stolen card to do a non-PIN transaction, and that banks will often claim that PIN was used in a card-present transaction in order to avoid refunding money.

In the UK at least, and with a credit card, the bank is legally bound to return the money pending investigation, regardless of the circumstance.

(I agree this doesn't help with the BTC situation because chargeback is still a possibility)

Is it really more broken than just having to sign?

Fair point, "as hell" was unwarranted. I mainly just wanted to post that PDF tbh.