@Anonymous wrote:
@r34dy2fly wrote:
Okay so after reading and watching their intro video, I guess I have a better understanding. So you have different card numbers for different merchants. No printed number or permanant number on the card itself and if you deny a transaction, that number gets trashed. How... exactly is that going to be feasible for them? I understand that there are 20 trillion combinations but I'm pretty sure credit card companies are given a set number of numbers so there is no overlap with other providers no? Just thinking what day to day would be like for me, that's like.... 100 numbers a week as I travel quite frequently for my job. Man... I don't know. The disgusting annual fee doesn't help either with only 1% cash back.
Right-o.
Major credit cards have a specific set of rules in regards to how the numbers are (store cards are different so I won't include them here):
the first number indicates the network. American Express is 3, Visa is 4, MasterCard is 5, Discover is 6.
The next 5 numbers indicate the bank and the type of card (example: 517805 is a MasterCard issued by Cap One - both my plat secured and QS1 have this sequence so I think the indication here is that it's not co-branded and they are lower tier cards).
The remaining 9-10 digits (15 total for AMEX, 16 total for Visa, MasterCard, Discover) are the account number and a couple check digits to assure it's valid, based on a formula involving some fairly simple math to check for a valid number.
So the reality is there's still a TON of combinations that could be there, but they'd blow through them pretty quickly if a lot of people are constantly generating new numbers for this card.
According to my very loose math, that's about 3,628,800 different combinations they can run with with the card number breakdown you've provided (thanks for that!).
As I said, I travel the state / country for work doing about 100 transactions a week, give or take. This is for vending machines, breakfast/lunch/dinner, drinks with co-workers, flights, hotels, gas, etc. That means within 1 year, I'll blow through about 4000 numbers a year and that's a modest 40 week calendar year instead of the 52 to account for vacation time, re-occuring transactions, etc. That means there can only be 907 of card users like me or they'll be out of numbers or will have to recycle numbers. Is that what they're going for? Recycling numbers at some point? I mean, with enough users, that may just be a week or two between the # being active.
I'm sure they got this all figured out or they wouldn't have pushed ahead but it seems a bit silly to me. Interesting to see though... I'm hoping to create a card myself one day so I'm almost always interested in seeing new and different types of cards out there .
anything that isn't straight forward when it comes to $ isn't worth the hassle of figuring it out.