Saturday, July 11, 2015

Payment processing vendors are in for a fall

Make the smart card work like cash!

Somehow they get this idea that replacing cash means instant communications with some server at a bank.  These dingbats know that the better way to eliminate cash is to improve it. Make the Smart card work like cash. The check out counter simply bring the company smart card to the register. Then the customers simply exchange balances between cards, no connection required; the card acts like cash.

What is the problem? CardLogix cannot make tamper proof smart cards? No, they can make them as immune from human counterfeiting as regular cash. Human tampering with smart cards? No, humans can no more tamper with account balances in in their cards then they can print counterfeit bills. The smart cards can still visit the human banker once in a while, no problem as long as the human banker has a smart card.

A better thought process 

Pretend you want to simulate paper money. Start there. You have a card, a chip inside and you want that card to simulate cash. Is that so difficult? How would you make cash register out of a smart card? First, make the cash tamper proof. Second, make the card exchange balances. Get it? I can point to twenty mathematicians who can make this work.  Then I can point to three of them who can make the account balancing smart. I can identify hardware security that works.

Think about Apple and Google, all those famously smart engineers and none of them thought, 'Why not make cash'? 

So the payment processing industry is building these proprietary network protocols and they all vasish once digital cash is installed on the smart card.

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