It’s Time to Evolve Beyond Credit Cards

March 23, 2014 / Sarah Gooding / No Comments

photo credit: Anthrocopy – cc

A California DMV credit-card breach was confirmed.

In the old days (20 yrs ago) there was massive paranoia that packet sniffing hackers would steal credit card numbers passing over the wire.

As it turns out, the use of credit cards for online payments is insane for a different reason: E-commerce system databases themselves are vulnerable. Credit cards were never built for this. Better systems exist: Paypal, Dwolla, Bitcoin.

The universe is sending us a message: it’s time to evolve.

Corollary: Giving your credit card info to an online merchant in 2014 is the data equivalent of unprotected sex. For the love of God, please stop.

Source: Tweets – 1,2,3,4,5

Responses:

@patrickc The mutualized deadweight losses of credit cards are just going to keep piling up.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 23, 2014

@patrickc Meanwhile, merchants not nearly incentivized enough to protect themselves. Banks, CC companies, and consumers eat the losses.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 23, 2014

@patrickc Classic case of misaligned risks and incentives. Was OK in old days, steadily escalating disaster now.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 23, 2014

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