[chrisseaton]

> As asked elsewhere: how is this secure?

It's more secure than your two weeks' worth of untraceable cash that you're lumping around everywhere.

If you lose your card you cancel it. I can do this on my phone in 30s flat when I notice it's gone. Things bought in the mean time are covered by the card provider, and they prosecute the criminal to get the money back.

If you lose your two weeks' supply of cash what do you do?

[mpweiher]

> more secure than your two weeks' supply of cash

Nope. If my cash is gone, that's all that's gone. With a card, you can do a lot more damage.

Cash also doesn't get denied for random/unpredictable reasons when you are abroad.

> 30s flat when I notice it's gone.

Coordinated gangs will clear out your bank accounts faster than that.

If I lose my cash, that's it. I don't have to cancel anything, I don't have to reapply for anything. I can borrow cash, or loan out some cash. Easy peasy.

Contactless is a solution looking for a problem.

[chrisseaton]

> Coordinated gangs will clear out your bank accounts faster than that.

But a credit card doesn’t give access to a bank account - it’s a credit line.

If someone except me uses that credit line then the purchase is taken off my credit line in minutes.

[mpweiher]

Oh you were talking about credit cards?

Well, that's another whole can of worms.

Virtually no retailer in Germany accepts credit cards because the fees are too high and price competition in Germany is pretty brutal (just for reference: Walmart, which steamrollered US retail had to retreat from the German market, in part because they simply couldn't compete).

So you are paying for these services, and yes, cost of living is higher in the UK, for example:

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...

Oh, and the terms imposed on retailers by credit card companies are pretty brutal, too. For example, they push most of the risk of fraud onto the retailer. If you think that doesn't matter: KAGI went out of business due to fraud.

https://tidbits.com/2016/08/04/kagi-shuts-down-after-falling...

So what's happening when the purchase is "taken off" your credit line is that the retailer gets hit, doubly, meaning they have to raise prices on everyone to stay in business (see higher cost of living above) or they go out of business (see KAGI example). German retailers don't want this and German consumers don't want this either.

And of course the credit card companies have managed to create a tax on the entire economy, essentially a rent-seeking/parasitic business model, while pushing all the cost and risk onto others (the general public and the retailers). Now if I were a credit card company, I'd be all "Yay!". As a consumer or a provider of products and services...not so much.

And again, the convenience, while shiny and cool, is at best trivial, and I would say offset by other conveniences such as haptic processing, fungibility, loanability ("Quick, can you loan me €50?", "Er, here's my card?").

And there is significant added complexity in the system, which can fail fairly dramatically. For example, when I was in living in the UK my UK card would not work just about every time I went abroad. "Fraud protection". Hah. I've had that happen a lot more than I ever had cash lost or stolen, and the consequences are more severe. The bank suggested I should contact them every time I went abroad. Excuse me? I need to ask my bank for permission to travel?

That's one thing that's also a very important lesson for software, particularly performance: in almost all cases, resilience is more important than (peak) performance. You really want to strive to avoid bad outcomes, not make the already good outcomes a few percent better. This is harder, but more worthwhile.

And of course the point of credit cards is to get you to spend money you don't have, which is also why eliminating that haptic feedback of money leaving your wallet was and is so important. And surprise, surprise, credit card debt is (shockingly) high at least in the US and the UK.

So don't get me started on credit cards :-)

[germanier]

It should be noted that nowadays that pretty much every German retail chain takes credit cards (MasterCard, Visa at least). Lidl, Aldi, Rewe, Kaufland, many Edekas, Media Markt, Ikea, Rossmann, DM, Obi, etc. all take them.

[ianhowson]

The only place I consistently couldn't use a credit card was train tickets, where I had to use the EC card.

Everywhere will accept a credit card, they're just slow about it.