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I think some of you are missing key points in why cards are going to be around for a lot longer than you think.  Magstripe cards are no where close to being obsolete..... there is a huge prepaid and gift card market that still uses magstripe (no business case whatsoever to move to chip or the phone).  There are still many acceptance devices that don't accept chip and contactless (US specifically) and may never be upgraded.  Eurpoe could have removed the magstripe years ago but didn't do it - why? was it because the US didn't have chip?  I don't think that was the only reason.....The main point I think we should look at is what does this extra cost bring from a security perspective.  Fingerprint (like PIN) only protects agains lost and stolen and not anything else.  You still need the physical card to be able to do any type of card present fraud.  With most transactions going to CNP and with lost and stolen not being anywhere near scalable from a fraud perspecitve, why spend all this money? This is one of the main reasons there is really limited amount of PIN usage in the US (for credit cards) as it just isn't worth the investment vs the reduction in L&S fraud.

Considering how expensive these cards are €24 is not that much.  In the US the premium cards are in the $350-$600 range per year and most are metal cards.  Not sure if that will work with a biometric reader on it.

I think the main problem is not the PIN as well but the rather how easy it is to hack a terminal or to put a fraudulent terminal in the market.  There is a very easy way to make sure that the terminal is genuine - very similar to the process that happens with the card.  This way the terminal will need to go through a key exchange process which might not solve this issue (which I agree there needs to be harder rules around the way the terminal vendors ship out their terminals) but will solve many other issues that a terminal will have a fake applicaiton and just read the card data.