current magstripe cards in US have names ... whether they are used or not ...
allow relying party to cross-check name on card with forms of identification
hopefully containing the same name.
One economic model has chipcards in europe for offline transactions as being
more cost effective ... versus magstripe in US doing online transactions ...
i.e. telco cost difference in europe vis-a-vis US offset the cost difference
between chipcards and magstripe cards. However, much of the world is
transitioning to cost-effective online infrastructure ... changing some of the
chip/telco cost tradeoffs that had been made in the past.
The play that chipcards do have (even in the face of declining online costs) is
1) chip costs decreasing and 2) migration to more & more non-face-to-face.
electronic transactions. chipcards can provide a higher level of integrity and
lower risk & fraud compared to magstripe (even in online transactions ... and
especially in non-face-to-face online). The cost/benefit play for chips in such
an environment is the increased cost of chips vis-a-vis any reduced fraud & risk
from using chipcards (compared to existing magstripe fraud & risk).
It is possible in X9.59 digitally signed financial transactions ... to enhance
privacy by removing the requirement for name/address/etc in authenticating the
transaction ... but neutral from the standpoint of anonymity; i.e. the rest of
the infrastructure business process determines whether the overall transaction
is anonymous (body of the transaction doesn't contain identification information
... but the business processes could associate identity as part of processing
the transaction). In a payment card scenario ... X9.59 would provide a tight
authenticating binding between the payment transaction and the account; whether
or not the bank provides a binding between the account and a person becomes a
business process outside of authenticating the transaction.
The identical transaction protocol works also in the Business<->Employee
scenario ... there can be a tight binding between a transaction something like
an employee serial number. Then it is up to the business what processes are used
for doing a tight between the employee serial number and the employee.
