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by urda 3982 days ago
Except when you're the top country by economic standards the "everywhere else" has zero weight. Thus why it's still the standard.
2 comments

>Except when you're the top country by economic standards the "everywhere else" has zero weight.

That's really ignorant. Bank card security sucks enough without mag stripes (I'm looking at you, online payment). Really, magstripes need to die.

Well for them it is money lost due to fraud vs money spent on tech upgrade. Until money lost to fraud is tolerable banks are not going to upgrade, it also seems that a lot of big banks are very short sighted, like it was with 2008 housing bubble.
It's not just the banks, the major US retailers are very resistant as well, or so I am told by people in the industry who deal with the US market.
> That's really ignorant.

Not at all, sounds like you to need a little review yourself [1]. At no point in my comment did I support mag stripe, just simply explain why it's still in widespread use. If you ever have worked in the finance industry you would understand that. Nobody is arguing that it should stay, but it's important to understand WHY they are still around. Just because it's the major standard doesn't make a good one.

Ignorant? Really? I expect more constructive comments here on HN instead of running around and calling people's comments "ignorant". Perhaps you need to review the HN Guidelines [2]. Specifically: 'When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."'

Alas, it will not be happening based on the latest abuse of downvotes on HN.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=9920207

Being number one out of two means you're the majority. Being number one out of over a hundred does not. You claimed that because the US is number one (with 15.6% of world GDP), the other >100 countries (with 84.4% of world GDP) have "zero weight".

"The rest of the world is irrelevant" doesn't go over well and gets downvoted because it's obviously false.

Is GDP the relevant metric to assess this?

On credit/debit card transaction volume North America represents 40+% of global market.

https://www.capgemini.com/resource-file-access/resource/pdf/...

Right, except it's not in widespread use, it's only in use the USA.

The USA does have a huge economy. However in this matter it does not dictate the standard, and there are more people doing more card transactions outside the US, with non-stripe technologies, than there are in the US doing them with.

Except it's not still the standard, at all. In many places now you won't get very far with a mag stripe.

The USA is an anachronism here, the rest of the world has moved on and has other standards.