The power of a Barcode !!!

As world moving towards digital economies, two issues often come up are security and usability of various transaction methods in this digital world. While security aspect may have multiple layers, usability largely revolves around how easy it is for a customer to pay through digital payment methods.

Many times, when using a digital payment method, consumer or merchant has to enter the instrument no. (Credit card #, or some other Id number) manually, which takes its own time and also makes the method vulnerable to user-side security attacks.

However, this problem can easily be solved by the barcode technology. At zero cost, it can bring in the much-required anonymity in the transactions.

So you may ask what the hell I am talking about and if it's something new, how can it be implemented. Valid questions and this is how we may do it:

Until Credit, debit, and other payment cards start having the only barcode on them and not character string, users can easily create a barcode of any string of characters, which, when scanned with a barcode scanner will regenerate the string. This string can be encoded to ensure it can not be intercepted by external attacks at any point in the network.

Barcode reader & generator are simple apps and don't need any additional hardware. Individual users can carry simple prints of those barcodes and scan them at merchant kiosks or during online payments.

It will not only allow secure Card transaction but also, mobile# based payments, email based payments, and all other kinds of identity-based payments.

Identity payments, in particular, will get the greatest push from this as they are based on individual identities such as SSN (in the USA), SIN (in Canada), Aadhar (in India), and similar in other countries. In many countries, your national identity is a private key (for ex. SSN) that shouldn't be shared with others and therefore payment based on this haven't been expired yet.

Once it could be done through barcode entry method, the biggest concern that didn't allow this possibility from becoming reality will go away.