[aspenmayer]

> I’m thinking about implanting one into my hand :^)

On the one hand, I approve of self-administered biohacking.

On the other hand, you might need a Faraday glove to prevent tap to pay shenanigans by folks with a mobile card reader who bump check you.

I would not do this type of biohacking myself, but if you go down this path, look into how NFC skimmers work, because that and compromised card readers and unauthorized tap to pay events on portable card readers is a threat vector. I have heard that Google and Apple are working to roll out tap to pay from card to phone and phone to phone, which could allow folks to skim your NFC device to run an unauthorized transaction.

[notpushkin]

It is possible, but very unlikely. You’ll need to know where my chip is (I guess for an average thief an implant is not the first idea of where to look for an NFC card), and then get quite close to me to pull this off. Even if you do, I think it’ll take about one chargeback to get your merchant account blocked.

> roll out tap to pay from card to phone and phone to phone

It’s already here! Stripe has supported it for a while now, and I’ve seen a bunch of other payment providers have it, too: https://stripe.com/terminal/tap-to-pay

[aspenmayer]

> It is possible, but very unlikely.

Life, uh, finds a way, after all.

> Even if you do, I think it’ll take about one chargeback to get your merchant account blocked.

Well, someone's merchant account might be blocked, but carders don't necessarily use their own accounts; in fact, I would doubt that many do, but criminals are often underestimating risks and overestimating rewards. It's almost a truism at this point that folks who do crime are not usually acting rationally, but I don't want to stereotype.

> It’s already here! Stripe has supported it for a while now, and I’ve seen a bunch of other payment providers have it, too: https://stripe.com/terminal/tap-to-pay

Finally! This feature is going to help a lot of small businesses in isolated areas where mobile phones are the primary (or only) computing devices that are commonly owned. This can create virtuous cycles that are somewhat unpredictable, which should help make these markets more dynamic and competitive.

Thanks for posting that Stripe link. Here's some more tap to pay links I was able to find, eventually. The search terms match too much, so it is a bit hard to disambiguate legacy NFC payment flows that use traditional or modern terminals from the new device to device payment flows. I remember hearing about Stripe's work on this feature, but since I didn't hear much after that, so I wasn't sure if the feature had ever shipped. I'm glad that this tech is getting in the hands of end users.

Apple-specific roundup of apps and vendors that support the feature:

https://apps.apple.com/story/id1620226212

https://www.apple.com/business/tap-to-pay-on-iphone/

These two are available on both iOS and Android, in case that is important for folks:

https://squareup.com/us/en/payments/tap-to-pay-android

https://www.paypal.com/us/business/pos-system/tap-to-pay