Adafruit shows off the Square dongle for credit card payments on the iPhone

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I wonder whether this isn't just hype about old technology.

In the UK you cannot get a payment through without your Chip & PIN on your credit card and if you have a card without PIN merchants look at you strangely. So while cool technology it is already unusable in one country that is a heavy user of credit cards - the UK.

Anyhow, nice idea and s long as the US doesn't switch to the more secure Chip & PIN methodology this product probably has a market, but I will only get excited once these systems will be more universal and deal with both the magnetic strip and the chip :)

Everybody who sees this has to admit this is pretty cool for the general public. It's starting off targetting the iPhone crowd, which many users are probably NOT technologically savvy, and will see this as a cool gimmick they could use whenever someone needs to pay them for something (which is most likely to be rare).


HOWEVER, the problem I do see is the REST of the public who DOESN'T know about this technology. Sure it'll be on the news and everything, but good luck trying to convince a guy to swipe his credit card on your little dongle which looks like a hack job (which for all he knows could be stealing his information) just to buy his $5 lamp.

It's nice, it's cool, but the general public most likely will never use it. Then again it's not really targetted exactly AT them.

I would refuse to use any payment system that does not have independent security evaluation. Does it?

And anyway the future is Smartcards, this is not a chip reader, but an old fashioned mag-stripe reader.

Today's Smartcards anyway carry portable cash in them, which you can upload at any ATM and spend in a flash. Some even use RFID technology and do not need to be inserted in the reader.

Now if the iPhone had an RFID reader...

This is the way to go.

Ryan S., indeed, you are *exactly* the kind of merchant who will benefit from this, as will your customers. I have no argument for the 2-4 CC sales a week, or even per day; it is the author' example of tossing out a CC for a hot dog that irks me.

Right now, I'm paying Paypal $0.30 + 2.9%, so for me, this is going to be great. I have maybe 3 customers a month that pay with credit, so this is perfect. I just have to wait for it to come out.

No, it's illegal to refuse services or force them to pay for it in another way. If I choose to comp the ticket and not charge them, it's nothing close to illegal; and "illegal" isn't close to correct, anyway; there re no federal laws governing it, only private service agreements between merchant and CC processor.

And I can also refuse to accept CC for certain types of purchases, like any other company, as long as it doesn't violate that agreement.

As for cash, yes, I can offer a discount for cash, but I can't charge more to use a CC. Works in certain business models, but not others, and not this particular model.

@Fredrico- It's illegal for you to not accept credit cards for whatever the transaction amount is.

Yeah, it's so revolutionary.

It's not like credit card readers have been available for mobile devices for years already...

http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/5608/magnetic-stripe-reader-for-palm-handhelds/

But of course in the sycophant Mac Fanboy world, anything Apple does 10 years after everybody else, is always considered"revolutionary".

I worry more about misuse than use.