Canadians had already been trained to enter a PIN at retail anyhow; Canada has over half a million merchants with Interac debit terminals (every bank card is an Interac card), and has the highest debit card usage in the entire world. We’ve been typing in our PINs at the cash for the better part of two decades, and 2001 was the tipping point where Interac passed cash as the most common payment method.

This “two-gee” (scoff) is just a stupid marketing gimmick that no one else in the world is gonna adopt; it’s a dead technology to begin with, and it just delays Chip & PIN introduction in the US for the last breath until we realize we need to make the switch anyway.

In contrast, Chip & PIN is fastly becoming a global standard from Europe, Canada, Mexico, Latin America, Russia, all over Asia, Australia, and many places even in Sub-Saharan Africa made/making the switch. The US is one of the last few hold out (how can the best country in the world be so far behind along with non-Chip countries like Sudan, Mongolia, Iran and Iraq?) ; the world’s not going to change back to mag-stripes, the US should just go with the flow with the rest of the world. The more we hold out, the more problems Americans face when they travel abroad.

I think the main advantage of Chip+PIN is the PIN. I don’t know why we don’t have swipe+PIN credit cards. It doesn’t seem plausible that the signature does much for security, right?

A related note: I thought the main advantage of Chip+PIN was never giving someone else possession of the card?