[obblekk]

1yr timeline is ambitious if it means fully deployed.

Clearly the right thing for Sweden and others to do. Also worrying that even 3yrs into the Russian invasion, bordering countries are urgently increasing their preparedness for future conflicts.

[jcul]

I believe most of those POS systems can operate in offline mode, in Europe at least. I have friends who work for large event organizers, and they have spoken about how if the system is offline the bars can continue to take payments, but there is a risk as a person's account may not have sufficient balance to make the charge when the system comes back online.

Most people here pay by card and I would say the vast majority use debit cards. A lot of people don't even have credit cards, unlike the US.

I'm no expert so may be wrong about some of this, and maybe huge events like these have these systems in place due to the risk of having to shut down bars etc. Many events are completely cash less these days.

[pndy]

> I believe most of those POS systems can operate in offline mode, in Europe at least.

I was able to pay "offline" for my groceries at corner store nearby when their terminal had really bad or no connection at all - and that did happen a lot. They were just gathering all payments and when the "computer guy" was around he'd upload these to the Internet. The only caveat was that for some reasons these payments would be stuck for more than a week on transactions list

[londons_explore]

The standards are already designed and widely implemented in Europe and a smallish percentage of transactions are already fully offline.

I suspect this could be implemented with just policy and config changes, with no need to reissue cards or deploy new readers.

[hocuspocus]

Right, basically all EMV cards are ready. You just need one that has some offline tolerance, as there are limits on both the amount and number of consecutive offline transactions. I believe these settings can be updated on the chip, i.e. your bank will tell you to go to an ATM perform any operation to make sure it's up to date.

Payment terminals might be trickier as we've observed during outages that they currently don't fall back to offline transactions. But their software and business rules can obviously be updated.

[DavidVoid]

This is also partially due to hacking incidents in recent years. In 2021, all 800 Coop grocery stores were closed for a few days due to the Kaseya VSA ransomware attack [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaseya_VSA_ransomware_attack