> It is possible, but very unlikely.
Life, uh, finds a way, after all.
> Even if you do, I think it’ll take about one chargeback to get your merchant account blocked.
Well, someone's merchant account might be blocked, but carders don't necessarily use their own accounts; in fact, I would doubt that many do, but criminals are often underestimating risks and overestimating rewards. It's almost a truism at this point that folks who do crime are not usually acting rationally, but I don't want to stereotype.
> It’s already here! Stripe has supported it for a while now, and I’ve seen a bunch of other payment providers have it, too: https://stripe.com/terminal/tap-to-pay
Finally! This feature is going to help a lot of small businesses in isolated areas where mobile phones are the primary (or only) computing devices that are commonly owned. This can create virtuous cycles that are somewhat unpredictable, which should help make these markets more dynamic and competitive.
Thanks for posting that Stripe link. Here's some more tap to pay links I was able to find, eventually. The search terms match too much, so it is a bit hard to disambiguate legacy NFC payment flows that use traditional or modern terminals from the new device to device payment flows. I remember hearing about Stripe's work on this feature, but since I didn't hear much after that, so I wasn't sure if the feature had ever shipped. I'm glad that this tech is getting in the hands of end users.
Apple-specific roundup of apps and vendors that support the feature:
https://apps.apple.com/story/id1620226212
https://www.apple.com/business/tap-to-pay-on-iphone/
These two are available on both iOS and Android, in case that is important for folks:
https://squareup.com/us/en/payments/tap-to-pay-android
https://www.paypal.com/us/business/pos-system/tap-to-pay