locarno24 said:
In the case it's stolen, damaged, or lost, a new stick can be reissued, but only after communicating with the world it was issued and every world on which the stick was usable - effectively, a stop payment message is sent, and every world must affirm that payment is successfully stopped (i.e. the stick hasn't already been used and can no longer be used on that world). At that point the original stick is worthless and a new stick can be issued to the owner.
Fine in theory, but if you wait for confirmation, that 'stop notice' could take months to process. I doubt a noble would accept being without his
Imperial Express Black card for more than a couple of weeks...
And this spoils one hypothetical advantage of stored value devices over cash. If one loses the device, it may be possible to recover the stored value
eventually, but that could be a long time. The ability to
eventually recover the value in a lost stored-value device
is an advantage, but all it takes is a few instances of important customers complaining about a severe inconvenience before banks decide that they're more trouble than they're worth.
One possible solution is to update the usable region of a stored value devices every time someone holding one visits a port with an appropriate bank branch or correspondent bank relationship. For example, if I get stored value card on Regina, it might by default be set to be usable in ports that are within one jump by xboat or by scheduled courier routes. That would mean Extolay, Ruie, Jenghe, Hefry, Dinomn, Roup, Yori, and Regina itself -- but not Forboldn, Dinom, Wypoc, Djinni (assuming "D" or lower starports don't have regular courier service), or anything beyond Jump-2 other than the xboat-linked Roup.
If I travel, I'll want to let the bank know, so they can adjust the range of worlds that need to be contacted to allow for a stop notice to be sent out and confirmed in the event that I lose the card. For example, if I travel to Efate by a Jump-1 route, and tell the bank, they'll change the settings on the account so that there's no need to seek confirmation from Dinomn. (It might still take a while to straighten out a problem on Forboldn, Knorbes, and Whanga, given their rudimentary starports and modest tech levels.) If I change plans and divert to Moughas on someone's Jump-6 racing yacht, my card might still work, but I might have a long wait if I have to get my card re-issued.
Of course, the big advantage of the 'credit stick' is that you essentially carry your account data with you. TL12+ computers supposedly have functionally unlimited storage capacity, so your 'credit card' can hold your updated financial records itself (backed up every time you connect it to the bank, of course). This also allows you to cover the situation where a new customer turns up at a branch on a world before that branch is ever aware that the customer has an account. Theoretically, you can't pull off a fraud on multiple worlds because you need to use the card - which records the change of account balance - to make the transfer/withdrawal.
Even at the time
Traveller was originally published, technology allowed a person to transport a pretty complete set of financial records in a compact form. For example, I got a
5.25-inch floppy drive around 1978, a year after
Traveller was first published; although those things only held a few hundred kilobytes, that was enough for about a year's worth of routine personal financial transactions.
Computers of that era had the capability to encrypt data well enough that the data would still be secure against today's decryption technology, as long as the encryption software was configured to use encryption that would have been overkill at the time. For example, there was a time when a 56-bit encryption key was considered reasonably secure, but today some web sites are switching from 1024-bit keys to 2048-bit keys. No one in 1978 would have used a 2048-bit key, because it was unnecessary -- but a
Traveller world that lacked the technology to defeat a 64-bit key would still have access to the knowledge that they'd need a lot of extra key length to protect data against decryption by more advanced technology. There are limits to that, however; a TL5 cryptographer might know that even the most advanced eight-rotor
Enigma machine, with best security practices, might still be vulnerable to the computer in a smart-phone made near the end of TL7 -- but he or she still wouldn't have the technological capability to lock up the data more securely.
One exception is the one-time pad, which is provably secure against all means of cryptanalysis, except for exploitation of mistakes such as re-use of pads. However, the one-time pad only works for secure communication; it doesn't work for data authentication of the sort one would need to implement a stored-value device.
Back to the point, however: a stored value card doesn't need "functionally unlimited" storage; a late-1970s floppy disk is more than enough space. What it needs is secure encryption.
Of course, if you can somehow 'create' a fake card with appropriate encryption, you can beat the system, but (a) the bank is going to pay for really, really, really good encryption for something like this, and (b) is (as F33D says) going to be massively suspicious of someone it's never heard of turning up out of the blue and asking to withdraw MCr10 in cash.
The catch to "really, really, really good encryption" is that it's completely out of the reach of lower-technology worlds. As I noted, present day (late-late TL7 or early TL8, depending on how the lines are drawn) computing can readily defeat TL5 electro-mechanical encryption, and electro-mechanical devices aren't up to the task of encrypting and decrypting data using the public-key technology necessary for stored value devices.
One solution is that banks on low-tech worlds still use advanced-technology authentication devices. Maybe they rely on typewriters, carbon paper, filing cabinets, and teletypes for most of their operations, but when it comes to reading a stored value card they have a TL15 card reader bolted to a column next to the vault. Alternatively, maybe they just deal in cash.
That's not to say the system's perfect, but - as with most things in Traveller, as it is today, compromising the systems security is done via people, not via 'hacking'; getting someone already has access to the system to issue perfectly genuine cards, for example.
I agree. Inside jobs are an ever-present threat, and I can't see any technological fix to that.
Somebody said:
If you work in a restricted area and most traders, even tramp traders, do then you have a bank account on each of the worlds you deal at/with. Your ship safe carries the money needed for some basic stuff and emergencies but if you buy or sell goods on WayOutaThere you use a local account. Money transfer between the systems is by telling 1st Bank of WayOutaThere to send x credits to 1st bank of Whatchammacallit and a few weeks later it is there. How the banks handle the transfer is not your problem. The transfers might be balanced so no physical money is ever send between systems or they might be imbalanced and one bank transfers cred notes (Likely using armed and armored couriers from a MegaCorp). Costs for the transfer are partially based on how much the banks trust each other.
That's pretty much what
Far Trader explains, particularly the point that physical transport of large amounts of currency is typically uncommon, because transfers of financial account balances in one direction are usually balanced by transfers in the other direction.
