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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

The idea of walking up to a lock and saying “here are all of my keys. Do any unlock you?” is kind of weird and backwards.

But I realize, thinking about it, I was doing that all the time at a previous job where I’d just mash my entire wallet against the keycard reader.

Bonus tangent: join me in playing “Payment Roulette” where you mash your wallet against payment terminals and let your credit and debit cards sort out which is going to pay.

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A lot of times the machine would say "Use one card only", won't it? I have a Secrid wallet and I was expecting the aluminium to block the RFID reader except for the 1 card I put in the outer leather pocket, but I still need to open the wallet up and present the dangling card in its sleeve to stop multiple signals...

Blocking radio signals is harder than just adding some aluminium. I'm pretty sure most "RFID blocking" wallets don't actually block RFID reliably.

I’ve seen error messages. But usually my Mastercard wins. I think it might just be faster to electrify.

The analogy isn't the same, the lock could copy the actual key to make a replica in the future.

ssh is only flashing the "name" printed on each key and asking if it should try one of them. (not exactly but it's more equivalent)

Not quite because there is no public/private key analogy. With a physical key there isn’t much security and you are relying on the copying of the key (if someone takes a photo) not happening. There would need to be some sophistication and anyone that sophisticated wouldn’t need to burglarise you. And it is that fact you rely on for a key. It is almost like a credit card PIN

That’s very trusting that there isn’t some race condition on the POS that ends up charging them all.

I’m pretty confident that POS transactions are idempotent. It’s an entire state machine that you’re working through, too, so I doubt it’s capable of performing multiple transactions during the middle of one transaction.

We’ll know we’re in the future when the payment gets split evenly amongst all participants. It’s like paying down a bill with the power of friendship.

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