In Europe, they could do away with the magnetic strip on cash cards. All terminals from recent years support the smartcard interface to the chip on the card. Presumably they keep the strip around for when you visit a country that doesn't use the smart card interface, so they can charge you an arm and a leg for exchanging currencies. And that recent case in Germany where the chips didn't support the year 2010, so you could only withdraw cash when you masked the interface with tape.<p>The smartcard mechanism hopefully uses some challenge-response setup that makes it impossible to read out by scammers. (aside from the difficulty of interfacing with the chip during the split second it's in the right position)