The EMV chip credit card transition in the US has been a disaster

I&#x27;m amazed at how EMV chip technology which has been in use in my country for over a decade, with chip based transactions being the de-facto mode, became a &quot;disaster&quot; in the US. Banks have started issuing chip-only cards, and several retailers don&#x27;t use magstripe any more. ATM cards too are chip-based for several years.<p>This &quot;disaster&quot; in the US appears more like a case of poor education and training than a problem with chip cards themselves.

All of this FUD about bars and restaurants is a solved problem in Canada, where almost everyone uses Interac chip and pin cards. There are lots of hardware choices of portable wireless chip and pin terminals for restaurant use.

Articles like this (&quot;chip cards are annoying and they&#x27;re pointless because we aren&#x27;t using pins&quot;) keep coming out lately, but I think it&#x27;s important to consider two facts.<p>1) The user experience is mostly only bad because it&#x27;s not clear whether terminals accept the chips or not. Once everyone has chip cards this will be a nonissue.<p>2) Chip and pin cards in Europe have had serious problems with attacks that make it possible to use a small device between the card and terminal to use stolen cards without knowing the pin, making the whole pin system fairly pointless.<p>Chip cards still provide a lot of security, and chip+signature allows restaurants to continue the system where waiters take the card to terminal away from the table.<p>Anyway, in my opinion the bigger issue is that chip cards do nothing to secure internet transactions. This is sort of a shame, but it would require much more effort on the part of the credit card processors, merchants, and banks to fix.

I remember the first chip terminals in Denmark as being annoyingly slow. This was probably 5 years ago. Today they are as fast as swiping. Rollout of nfc based cards &#x2F;terminals has been going on for 10 months or so, and those are super snappy, don&#x27;t know about security implications though.

I live in Massachusetts, and the stores near me have recently switched from accepting swipe cards to using chips (in the same cards). It&#x27;s worse, for silly reasons. With a swipe card, you can swipe any time while the cashier is scanning your items, then after they finish scanning they indicate they&#x27;re done and then it asks you to confirm the result. With a chip card, if you insert the card before the cashier is done scanning, it won&#x27;t work; it&#x27;ll give an error and you have to take it out and reinsert it after they finish. On top of which there&#x27;s also a ~20% read error rate.

In Brazil, probably all cards have chip and chip+PIN has become universal. It works great:<p>- it&#x27;s as fast as swyping and signing;<p>- there are portable terminals using gsm, so no waiter has to take your card far from you (yes, take a photo of your card from front and back and go shopping online!)<p>- there is competition among the providers: you can stick to the company that will have a smaller fee providing you the equipment.<p>When used my card in travels to the USA, found it funny to have to swype: the magnetic strip is easily damaged (and wouldn&#x27;t work sometimes) and the &quot;signature&quot; on those equipments were laughable, since you sign whatever you want.<p>In Europe, don&#x27;t remember to have swiped my card. But the PIN had some problem (and had the same in the USA with chip+pin): cards can have 4 or 6 digits inn Brazil, but there were room for just 4. Sometimes it works if you type just the first 4, some countries you type the last 4.

&quot;Critics have told me that banks opted for a signature versus a PIN code because it saves them large amounts of money by not having to store PIN codes for everyone.&quot;