Chip and no PIN?

In an announcement I missed last year Visa announced that they would be issuing Visa Cash cards in the chip and pin format. The idea is to support low value transactions, paying for a newspaper, coffee or the like.

The idea is not new of course, Mondex tried the same thing ten years ago. The big difference is that today there is a chip and pin terminal on every merchant's till.

The press release talks about 'wave and pay'. Presumably this means that there is some small value purchase that can be made without inputting the PIN.

If they could print the remaining balance on the card with electronic ink!

Now consider an OATH OTP token. It has a microprocessor, a display and in the future one would expect a bluetooth connection. I think we might be starting to see the emergence of the payment systems we will be using in the mid 2010s.