Fitbit Acquires Coin
engadget.com
engadget.com
It is basically all the negatives of having one electronic payment method (If you lose it, you have no money unless you have cash on hand or can somehow get money out of the bank... if your bank even has a physical branch nearby) with all the negatives of having multiple credit cards (It is a lot more attractive to thieves / skimmers)
With a whole bunch of new negatives like, if you lose your Coin, that means someone has access to all your cards and even if you don't lose it, you are essentially handing people your entire wallet when you use it. Skimmers probably love this thing. Oh, and not to mention: You can't use it online. So all those pesky credit cards; yeah, make sure to keep those around because you still need them.
It just didn't make any sense to me. Pay $100 for no real upsides and a lot of really terrifying downsides.
> If you lose it, you have no money unless you have cash on hand or can somehow get money out of the bank
You keep the actual cards at home. So if you lose your Coin, you just go back to your separate cards.
> It is a lot more attractive to thieves / skimmers
The Coin was secured through your phone's passcode/biometrics/pattern, so yeah if they broke that you'd be boned. The same as with GWallet/iPay. A sophisticated mugger could do it I guess.
> if you lose your Coin, that means someone has access to all your cards
Not without the phone.
> you are essentially handing people your entire wallet
No, before you hand it to a waiter or whatever you lock it into the card you want to use.
>>The Coin was secured through your phone's passcode/biometrics/pattern, so yeah if they broke that you'd be boned. The same as with GWallet/iPay. A sophisticated mugger could do it I guess.
Mugger A: "Give me the wallet!"
(Hands over wallet)
Mugger A: "Now unlock your phone and give it to me!"
(Unlocks phone and hands it over)
Mugger B: "Better chop off his thumb too ... might need it to unlock some apps!"
(Gulps)
While I usually try to stay serious while reading HN, That statement really made me lol. I'm rooting more for Samsung's magnetic secure transmission (MST) to be more mainstream then these card replacements.
Also, my iPhone 5s seems to read my toeprint better than my fingerprint.
They're fine for casual authentication, but really poor for actual security.
More serious, organise, full time muggers might, but I would suspect those are more rare (and you're probably in a whole lot of danger with them anyway. missing digits probably isn't your biggest concern)
http://www.3ders.org/articles/20140308-world-first-3d-printe...
These were not casual muggers, since they resorted to kidnapping, also keep in mind that this was done to steal a very valuable car.
With phones also now also becoming wallets, it's not outlandish to think a thief would cut off a finger.
microwave ?http://www.androidauthority.com/how-fingerprint-scanners-wor...
TL;DR: Cheap phones use optical sensors (can be fooled by an inkjet). Older high end phones and some new ones use capacitive scanners which require the actual finger plus an equivalent capacitance which can be faked by holding the finger with your bare hands (making sure to get close to the actual finger tip). Might take a few tries but it'll work. The latest tech uses ultrasonic sensors which measure the ridges of the fingerprint incredibly accurately. Enough so that blood loss may result in failure but I doubt that any phone's sensor is going to require that level of accuracy (do you press your finger with that precise amount of pressure every time?).
Example of someone unlocking an iPhone with the latest and greatest sensor tech (on phones anyway): https://youtu.be/2u4ZLGsw1zo
They had less than a severed finger: A simple silicone copy. Something you can actually manufacturer with a high resolution picture of a fingerprint (as demonstrated by the CCC).
However, unless it worked at least 95% of the time, it's useless, because you have to carry at least one backup card.
My experience with the Coin 2.0 is that it worked about 20% of the time and was very, very frustrating in every respect. It went in a drawer after a week.
Currently, we have a 99.9998% uptime for the main transactional cluster/mainframe/computer/etc. and that still means 20 minutes of down time in the last 20 years.
That doesn't sound like a lot, but that's like ~$1 million of transactions lost for every minute it is down.
I have a debit card, I don't need to carry anything else.
It does contactless payments, chip + pin payments, ATM widthdrawls, verifies who I am at the bank and has my account details on it.
What else could I want, a credit card for things which belong more on credit? OK so now I have 2 cards, but really beyond that what else is there?
No amount of mobile hardware / phone apps are going to replace 2 cards both of which fit easily in a wallet and don't require charging, don't wear out for 5+ years (by which time the bank has replaced it free of charge), and I don't need to take out of my pocket for any other reason (so I'm not likely to lose it or leave it elsewhere).
If your card hasn't been stolen (via a hacked merchant) and your account wiped out yet, consider yourself lucky. You might want to carry a credit card as your primary instead. When (and I do mean when) it is stolen, at least it's only credit instead of your bank account balance that is impacted (and which can takes weeks or more to get back).
That said, my experience with Coin was abysmal. It worked maybe half the time, when it did work it took the cashier and embarrassing number of swipes while I stood there wondering if it would work at all.
When I wrote in to support they said that there was a certain set of POS machines that the card wasn't recognized on. At that point Coin becomes completely and utterly worthless because I now have to carry the other cards in case it fails. If someone made a card that worked in 100% of the places that I can currently use an ATM or credit card I would get one in a heartbeat. The fact that Coin claimed to and wasn't even laughably close to delivering on this makes me hate them
I was in Europe 2 weeks ago, using a local SIM so I was not getting calls on my "home" phone number registered with my banks.
On a Friday night at the bar in Copenhagen, I happened to see an email from my one bank saying to call them immediately about possibly-fraudulant charges. So I called international to confirm that i was overseas and the charges were legit, and which countries I'd be traveling to over the next week. (Previously my bank said it was NOT necessary to notify them when traveling, so I hadn't up until then).
The very next day I flew to Frankfurt and had both of my chip cards rejected at a fast food restaurant.
That night I had to make a Google Talk call to both credit card companies; the first one to bitch them out that I had JUST told them about my travel.. but it turns out they had no record of the attempted charge, something must have gone wrong with the terminal. The SECOND credit card company notified me of fraudulent charges that happened while I was on my flight from the US. They cancelled my card immediately and shipped me a new one, which did me no good since I was overseas.
However, conveniently, the "replacement" card popped up in Apple Wallet before I even got off the phone with them, so at least in theory I could use NFC payments with the new replacement card.
I was extremely nervous because not 12 hours later I needed a credit card for a 6000 euro preauth for a track car rental. Obviously my 2 debit cards would not do, I couldn't use the compromised card (unless they had NFC and I could use ApplePay for it), so I NEEDED my remaining card to work. Fortunately it did.
I happened to have a 3rd credit card which used to be EMV but was replaced with a non-chip card a year ago, and which I haven't used since; that was my only backup plan (assuming they could take a mag stripe card, which typically is not an issue in Europe). (short of spending another 20 minutes on the phone with credit card companies the next day trying to figure out why my charges were still failing).
I absolutely never charge anything to a debit card, and I make sure I have at least 2 or 3 credit cards whenever I travel, in addition to the debit card(s) for getting cash.
It's so risky from a fraud perspective that interesting travel cards like Revolut now let you toggle magstripe transactions in their app.
EMV PIN's are a crappy solution too, a four digit PIN is all banks in Europe need to consider a transaction "genuine" even though numerous attacks against EMV are already in the wild - makes for great fun trying to reverse fraudulent charges in many stories I've read online.
There is zero hassle reversing fraudulent charges, in many cases the bank itself will tell the person they think something is fraudulent, and a quick "Yeah that was me" or "Oh dear that wasn't me" is all it takes.
4 digits is enough security given it requires having the card itself, and locks out after a few incorrect attempts.
And security is about traceability not preventability.
For fraud where the pin is used? In the UK if the criminal uses your pin you're going to struggle to get the bank to repay you.
"banks / credit card companies always repay the victims of fraud" is a bit of a meme, and it's dangerous because it's often not the case. The repay in certain clearly limited cases, but not in others.
I've had my Maestro debit card skimmed twice, causing about 3k to be withdrawn from my account. In both cases my bank had:
* Filed a police report
* Disabled the card
* Mailed me a new card
* Started recovering the money
Before I even noticed the money being gone. The first time I actually had my money and new card back before I noticed my old card got disabled. The second time I noticed because I couldn't buy lunch using my card, but in both cases I had my money and a new card within like a week?
Besides, no one here really has/uses credit cards and stores mostly don't accept them.
It's not as bad an experience as you're making it out to be. My credit union handled everything the last time I was skimmed, including giving me the money back and overnighting a new card.
Stolen credit card = bank is missing money; bank is incentivized to retrieve money.
Stolen debit card = you are missing money; bank may choose to help somehow.
For the record it was my debit card that was skimmed.
(I'm in Canada, though, where NFC is commonplace. And it's still in the rollout process, so I won't get a lighter wallet until June at the earliest.)
It is kind of humorous that their website now as a big "Sold Out" banner right at the top next to this announcement.
https://support.onlycoin.com/hc/en-us/articles/207353218-Wha...
Seems like mostly an acquihire, does Coin even have a steady revenue stream?
https://investor.fitbit.com/press/press-releases/press-relea...
I'm also guess getting NFC transmitter though FCA inspection/compliance isn't cheap nor easy.
EDIT: interesting examples provided in the replies, thanks. To buy things while running without having anything with you is a good thing, also if this technology allows to, like, register in a gym or alike and enter without any other token.
About simplicity, yes the Alta is selling well as a simple product, but the Blaze is also selling well as a less-simple product.
Imagine your access card for the gym doesn't provide free access to everything, but every time you enter the sauna it bills you one dollar, or physically walking into a class bills you the individual class tuition. Unlocking the racquetball court door costs three dollars. Then after your workout you walk up to the vending machine to get your bottled tapwater or fancy water or whatever and pay with your gym access card. Inevitably there are not enough treadmills for peak times, so something is set up today like signup sheets and time use limits, but crazy as it sounds you could pay per use or bid to reserve, high bid on treadmill #7 from 6:00 to 6:30 tonight is two dollars, wave your magic token thingy here to give you the new high bid at three dollars. Gamify things such that every 100 miles on the treadmill means a free run next time. Insert anecdote of people hooking up their fitbit to a cordless drill to get 100 miles per day so as to get free treadmill time.
Coin was a company that stood by it's products, Fitbit is the kind of outfit that will find any lame excuse to not issue you an RMA.
I wouldn't exactly say they had a good product or stood by it, this seems like an acquihire to me. They did try hard to do something that many said would be impossible, which is HARD, I'll give them that!
Coin was a company that stood by it's products
Here in the pacific northwest, a rather high-tech area, perhaps one out of ten shops/merchants I use actually supports some manner of NFC payments, while everyone supports magnetic stripes. Any payment mechanism that only works with NFC is DOA for me.
I think they required receipt information for the Flex (that was a few years ago). For the Charge HR, they just asked me where I bought it and what country I live in, then offered a replacement.
Fitbit devices haven't shown good durability, in my experience, but the company has proven very willing to replace defective devices.
1. I had an old FitBit Ultra that stopped syncing to the base station. They sent me a replacement base station but that didn't work, but I forgot to follow it up. Fast forward a year and I find my (now out of warranty) Fitbit in the back of my Man Drawer. I dropped them an email on the off chance that they'd take a look at it for me and instead they sent me a free Fitbit One.
2. My wife dropped her Fitbit One on the school run and didn't notice until later in the day. On the way back to pick up our daughter she found her Fitbit by the side of the road with half of the electronics hanging out due to having been under more than a few car tyres. I suggested contacting Fitbit to see if it could be repaired or if they offered refurbished units, and again they sent her a brand new Fitbit One completely free of charge.
I'm sure the level of customer support varies geographically, but since the above I've had nothing but good things to say about Fitbit UK's customer support.