I don’t quite understand how electronic payments came about after physical payment. How did they know for certain it would always work and there would be errors and things would get sent such as a payment or refund. How did people know it could be trusted to a point where it’s now probably the main payment method.
I don’t understand how they managed to take that leap.
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The industry has created a specific set of minimum standards that nearly any hardware directly handling payments must comply with, and modern credit/debit cards are designed so that they can’t be copied (except for magnetic strips)
“They” knew because they spent years testing the process before releasing it
People learned t trust it by either using it (early adopters), or seeing other people use it
Same as any other tech, except that when that tech directly influences peoples’ money, it is very much tested and regulated. The regulators don’t want the tech being used to rob end users, and the developers don’t want their asses sued off if/when there is a problem
Self interest is a great motivator. Payment system operators want to convince merchants and banks that their system works. Banks don’t want to lose money and prefer customers keep more balance in their bank accounts. Merchants want to attract customers without more effort.
Different groups are motivated to ensure the system works and keep the other party honest.
They invented and tested the contactless communication mechanism until it was extremely reliable. It can detect errors and recover or force a retry or recognize the error and prompt the user. This took a long time and a lot of testing. Then they ran payments over this new way of communicating between phone and payment terminal. Almost the same as a payment you do online.
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