[Cryptography] The actual history of EV. Was: Well, that only took ten years

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

On 2019-08-16 05:18, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> The original design brief was to enable online commerce by making use of credit cards online at least as safe as in a store or failing that, at least as secure as traditional Mail Order/Telephone Order (MOTO) transactions. The principal concern.

Online transactions were mapped into the existing MOTO transactions and fee structure.

Around the turn of the century (nearly 20years agp) there were a couple different "safe" transaction products pitched to major internet merchants (accounting for 70-80% of online transactions) with very favorable acceptance ... expecting that their MOTO fees (person & card not present) would be reduced to that of an ATM machine pin-debit transaction (like a 90% cut). However, the merchants were then were told by financial institutions that instead of major fee cut, there would be a fee surcharge on top of the highest fee that the were already paying ... and the cognitive dissonance sets in and the whole thing falls apart.

The issue was that for decades merchants were indoctrinated that transaction fees had fraud surcharge proportional to fraud rate ... with MOTO (and then internet) being the highest. They were then being told that the safe internet transaction products would just about double the surcharge they were already paying for fraud ... initial surcharge for existing MOTO/internet fraud rate ... and then large additional surcharge for eliminating that fraud.

After that there were number of discussions about bottom line of major financial institutions is dependent on their being some amount of fraud ... which they can bill the merchants for (with significant profit markup). Worse, eliminating that (low-hanging fruit) fraud, criminals would move to other types of financial fraud ... for which they couldn't bill somebody else for.

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970