For a number of reasons, for some banks doing a pilot in Eastern Europe, I prototyped a card-interoperable system that does something like this. From the user's point-of-view. - You shop and check out
- You are presented a QR that you scan
- The "app" asks you to sign into your bank.
- The bank issues you a virtual card with your billing address details, but a one-time-PAN (credit card number), CVV and expiry.
- There is a sub-account created that is the amount you are about to auth with the merchant. The merchant about to be doing the authorization is linked.
- The "app" presents the merchant "POS" with the virtual card details
- The merchant "POS" authorizes it using any gateway they happen to be using. Which in turn does the Brand-Net auth dance with the issuer.
- On positive auth, the sub-account balance is transferred to the merchant (thanks, VisaNet!), and the OTP (one-time PAN) is tossed in the recycle bin.
In any case, they don't have to deal with 6,000 banks like we have in the US. That said, the US could probably do this easily enough in cooperation with FDC or Total Systems or both.If the merchant doesn't have the QR-code thing, you can still manually key-enter your one-time PAN virtual card details like you do today, knowing that you don't care about the number past its use right now. There are a lot of weird details about how it all works if some party or another isn't an active full cooperating member of the system, but the idea is to: 1) Limit card number exposure 2) Get a user's explicit pre-auth for a specific merchant, amount and date 3) Get the usability factor you are talking about 4) Leverage the existing bank card consumer protection rules already in place Which is not to say that Bitcoin isn't cool. But I'm not sure that it is useful enough for consumers to replace the thin-veneers like this that the existing payment infrastructure players will inevitably roll out. There may be (and probably are) lots of uses for the blockchain. Consumer payments may not ultimately be one of the big ones. *EDIT: I apparently am an idiot that can not figure out how to convince the system to let me wrap "bullets". |