As the mod of /r/chipcards I think you should upgrade. :) However, I also realize that the business case for upgrading just to accept chip cards is pretty iffy, especially for smaller businesses in certain industries.

First, almost all US credit cards will be chip and signature, not chip and PIN. What this means is when your customers insert their cards into the credit card terminal, a signature slip will print out for them to sign. Pretty much just like today. This means that our credit cards will be more difficult to clone and will be easier to use overseas, but they don't really provide any other protection.

Debit cards will also have a chip, however. The chips in those are programmed to ask for a PIN if the business is capable of running debit cards over the debit networks instead of Visa/MasterCard and will behave as chip and signature otherwise. One benefit of upgrading is that you can add support for running transactions over those networks. If most of your customers use debit cards instead of credit cards, that means your business could potentially save significant amounts of money. IIRC debit card fees per swipe are something like 20-30 cents flat rate vs. 2-3% if run as credit.

Another benefit is that if you upgrade your equipment, you will also likely be able to accept Apple Pay and Google Wallet. The former uses a fingerprint for authentication and something called tokenization. Tokenization is where a different set of numbers is used for every transaction. This means that if for some reason you got hacked, your Apple Pay customers will most likely be protected. The use of a fingerprint instead of a signature will also possibly make fighting chargebacks a lot easier. And if you accept Apple Pay, it makes it easier for customers to pay if you add mobile app ordering later on, which will increase your sales.

So yeah, the migration shouldn't really be thought of as just accepting chip cards, but adding the potential for improving your bottom line now and in the future. Hopefully this helped explain things a bit better.

(BTW if you still decide not to migrate and in the unlikely event that someone gives you a chipped credit card without a magstripe, you can always just buy one of Square's chip enabled readers for $29 and process it with that. If you use it for all of your transactions you will be pretty much set for the liability shift as well.)