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I agree - I don't see the comments here as Hater News, but rather the exact sort of questions pretty much any consumer or business user would ask. There's a glint of "oh this is useful" and then there's the "oh, but what about this... and that...". That's not Hater News - that's pretty much exactly what any non-technical person would inquire about this product.

I agree. Perhaps I was really just promulgating the Critical Thinking News stereotype instead! I actually love to see progress, especially if something would really make my life better, even in a small way, but I really don't feel like this is going to be worth it.

I think Coin is going to be wildly successful.

I was looking at my wallet the other day, and wondering why i can't slim it down even further to carry one digital card instead of multiple. i even thought it would make a good startup. and here we are.

the only drawback in my mind's eye regarding coin as a business is that there will be no reason to have "swipes" anymore if you can just scan a smartphone, as with the starbucks card.

however, the widespread use of scan technology is years away, whereas the swipe is ubiquitous now.

ergo, IMHO, coin will be a success if they can execute on the product.

My problem is that I tend to wear out card before I get a replacement. For example, my debit card currently requires 3-4 swipes to get it to work. I'd probably keep a backup card in my wallet if I decided to get Coin, just in case, but really like this idea.

But how many of the cards in your wallet could be replaced by Coin? For me it's maybe three. If it can't replace nearly all of them it seems pretty pointless to me - I'm still going to be carrying my wallet, it'll just have two fewer cards in it.

Yay? In any case, it does seem odd to build a business around something that is virtually guaranteed to be extinct in a few years time.

What about bars? A lot of bars I go to hold onto your card until you tab out. I'd hate to keep getting notifications about losing my card every time I'm out on the town. When you go back up to the bar, they ask what your name is to tab out. I didn't see anything on the Coin to do that. I also wouldn't want the bartender to press the button and change to a business account or something similar.

I'm not being a hater, this is just an occurrence where this might not work well. I still think it's an awesome idea though, and I'd like to get one.

I've been to a bar recently where they didn't have to hold my card to keep a tab open. So much more convenient!

Yeah they always go both ways here - I guess too many people run off without signing in some bars.

No, that's the point... they held a tab by swiping my card up front, and then didn't need it to close out. They still could have charged it if I ran off.

It's probably like a gas station authorizes your card for a certain amount before pumping, but then actually charges the specific amount you pumped at the end.

We are all deeply moved by the future of bar tabs not holding credit cards :)

In all seriousness, most bars hold a CC and ID for a tab.

I don't think I've ever been in a bar that held my ID, just my CC.

Very good point.

Add another item to the list of problems.

Wow! Is that common in the US? I've never seen that here in EU. And I go to bars A LOT!

I'm pretty sure every bar in the US does it. That said I go to bars all the time and rarely open a tab.

Isn't that actually an amazing feature though? Low energy bluetooth can give you a decent range (and some range detection). Wouldn't it be great to tell it to notify you only when you leave a larger radius. Unless you're in a GIANT bar, it could actually help keep you from leaving your card behind accidentally.

Yeah I guess part of it is a good feature, depending on if it lets you do this. But that's still in cahoots with the other "bugs" if you will stopping it from actually being useful in this scenario.

From the looks of it, it will handle rewards cards and whatnot just fine. If I could just store my Qdoba, Panera, Gameworks, Dave and Busters, REI, Best Buy, Safeway, Kroger, etc. cards on one single card.

Now I can keep as many rewards cards as I want, without having to stuff my wallet full of junk I don't need 99% of the time.

The money I save from rewards cards I wouldn't normally carry would probably pay for the price of a Coin, even if I don't use it for any of my credit or debit cards.

I think you've misread what I wrote. It might be able to handle rewards cards, but the card itself becomes a bottleneck because it can only function as one card at a time. I'd have to select the rewards card, have that swiped, then fumble with the card again to select my payment card and proceed to pay. It seems like a ghastly hassle.

If I had this I could see myself using this for rewards cards only. But then again, I don't have a lot of rewards cards that are fattening up my wallet.

Your fears sound irrational to me. It's just a button, on something already in your hand. I doubt you're going to "fumble" it, or that it's going to be a "ghastly hassle" to press a button one or more times. Once you've shopped at that store at least once, you know exactly how many times to press it to advance to the card you use there. All of this should take less time than putting a rewards card back into your wallet/pocket and taking out a separate credit card, which requires more mechanical actions in which you might "fumble" something.

When I think about standing in line pressing a button, iterating through a list of all my credit, debit, and rewards cards to find the right one, it seems like a hassle. Imagine I go past the correct card in my haste and I've got to keep pressing the button until I've looped back around to the correct one. Did I screw it up a third time? Now people in line behind me and the cashier are getting pissed off with how much time I'm taking. Oh wait, that was just for the rewards card and now I have to select the payment cards? I'd be regretting my mistake and wishing I could just pull a card out of my wallet.

Looking in my wallet to pick the silver card on the middle right and the brown card on the top left is so much easier. People can pick out location and color far faster because of our evolutionary history.

Stories are fun, let me try one :)

"I go to pay at the checkout counter. Oh wait! I suddenly remember I have a rewards card here. Good thing I carry it in my wallet along with the other 10 rewards cards I have...shoot, which pocket did I put it in? Maybe it's here? no wait...oh shoot, now I have to take all the cards out. I know it's a red card, but so is my Target and Walgreens card. Now all my cards are out all over the place. People behind me in line are getting pissed off with how much time I'm taking. Now all I have to do is collect all my cards from the counter, reorder them, and put them back in my wallet. I wish I just had one card in my pocket that could work for everything."

That's not ever been my experience at least, even when I carried every rewards card I'd ever applied for! In fact I can tell you where everything is in my wallet right now without even looking!

Seriously, someone downvoted you for knowing where your stuff is. Keep it classy HN.

I use my phone number for that purpose. Haven't had to produce a physical membership card in years.

But this is preventable. In most cases, while you're waiting in line you can get out both cards and be ready to go when it's your turn to order and pay.

With Coin, you have to find the cards serially, no matter how much lead time you have.

A "ghastly hassle"? If I don't use this it's because I only carry a few cards and so I don't have the problem it solves, not because of the solution itself.

Every rewards card I have is a scanned barcode, not a mag swipe.

I have a mix of both TBH. So you'd still have to carry the rewards cards that don't have a magstripe!

Same here. Speaking of which, surely someone has written a phone app that will scan and display all your barcoded cards on demand?

Google Wallet, Apple Passbook, and a number of other apps will let you do this. Scanning from a phone screen is not perfect though.

Lemon wallet will do this - though I've had very mixed success using it, with barcode readers.

There's an app called Key Ring that I've used for some time that accomplishes exactly this. It works quite well.

Just enter your phone number. I don't carry rewards cards

in their FAQ it says that the coin can only hold 8 cards at a time, but the app can store an unlimited amount. So I assume that you'd have to sync the one(s) you want to use via mobile app (I'd hope) that you'd already have stored, then select it via toggle button on the card. It makes it sound kind of cumbersome for that purpose. I do like the overall idea though, I think its really cool and hope they succeed!

Most rewards cards are linked to your phone number, which you can use at the POS instead of the card.

The entire smartphone industry for the last five years has been driven by people paying hundreds of dollars to make their phones a few mm thinner. Why not their wallets? This isn't for your ATM card or your driver's license, it's for those random cards that you either never carry or fatten up your wallet.

I think a lot of that has been driven by the fact that your new phone is faster _and_ thinner. If it wasn't both, I have my doubts that people would always pick the thinner option. The large screen android options of recent years show that size isn't a trump for everyone.

Not to be pedantic but there's actually a fairly recent example of consumers choosing style over substance: the motorola RAZR.

Just saying...

That's why I spent a ton of money on bellroy wallet. I've got the slimmest wallet in the office!

I've got a TGT for $13, it's a band of elastic with a layer of leather stitched to it. It's that slim I often think I've lost it, until I put my hand in my pocket.

We've got a winner - best solution to the "too many cards in the wallet". [1]

[1] http://www.tightstore.com/

Compare the time a phone spends in an owner's hand vs the time a wallet does. Those that fancy the same tactile experience from their wallets usually go for money clips, or single pocket wallets.

As far as "gobbling the card" is concerned, their FAQ states that they can only be used with "dip" ATMs, which may also address the button pushing issue.

EDIT: More details from the FAQ:

Q. Can someone accidentally change which card is selected on my Coin?

A. We’ve designed the button to toggle cards in a way that makes it difficult to trigger a "press" unintentionally. Dropping a Coin, holding a Coin, sitting on a Coin, or putting the Coin in a check presenter at a restaurant will not inadvertently toggle the card that is selected.

That pretty much rules out a lot of ATMs, and all ATMs I've seen outside of the US.

Surely you'll get a waiter that will be curious and intentionally press the button... then what do you think happens?

My thoughts exactly. I feel like there should be some sort of locking mechanism tied to toggling.

Seems straight-forward to disable toggling when the card is out of range from your phone.

Wait, is it easy to toggle cards or hard to toggle cards? I don't think you can have it both ways.

My phone, like many others, has a simply way to lock it so it doesn't accidentally call it. That doesn't make it difficult to make phone calls, it just makes it difficult to accidentally make phone calls.

I can imagine multiple ways they can handle this, all of them fairly trivial.

I didn't see any concept of locking in their video or faq. I hope you're right and that this either has that in v1 or is added in v2.

Definitely agree with your points.

> I wonder how this would fare in an ATM. What happens if the ATM accidentally presses the card selection button?

This might be solvable by making it a capacitance-based button.

Nope, because the mechanics can also act as a "finger" in the same way these capacitance-styluses work.

> Oops, now your boss wants to know why you just paid for your groceries on the business credit card and you have to explain that you cloned your business credit card and there was a mistake!!

I'm not sure how every corporate card works, but I have accidentally made purchases on a Corporate Amex before and it's not a problem. I just pay that part off myself and don't mark it to be expensed. Don't see this as a problem.

I know mistakes happen and things do get charged to the wrong card, but can you imagine your boss being a happy bunny if he or she found out you've cloned the card?

At a minimum, cards should be issued to a specific person and immediately revoked when no longer authorized. If this infrastructure is in place, why should the employer care?

If it's not, then we're assuming a shared account, which increases the risk exposure for normal loss, theft, etc. by the number of people using that account. Can you afford to have your organization's payment ability severely hampered because a field rep got mugged?

Why does my boss need to know I cloned the card? I'm saying, mistakes like these already happen without cards being cloned, it won't be introducing a new problem. You don't need to say anything to your boss more than, "Sorry, I used the wrong card."

Many Amex cards look very similar, for instance. I and others I know have accidentally handed the corporate amex over instead of the personal one. I've also had the case where, a company (in this particular case, a rental car company) had saved my corporate card, and automatically billed that when I went for a personal purchased.

OTOH in other companies you might be in serious hot water. Or, if you work for the government, potentially going to jail for putting personal expenses on a government card.

This is a bit hyperbolic - mistakes like this happen all the time and I have serious doubts you'd ever go to jail or even lose a job over something like this, as long as you get it corrected once you recognize the problem. The issue in my mind is that the hassle of correcting this kind of error quickly negates any convenience you'd have gotten from using the card in the first place.

In cases like that it would be unwise to put your company card on this card. You'd now be carrying two cards. In the case of having to carry two cards, it still fixes my George Costanza wallet.

I had a purchasing card when I worked for a state university. They monitored the transactions on the card extremely closely since it was tied to state money and federal grant money. If I had mistakenly charged a personal expense on it, I would have had to contact a couple different administrators, explain the mistake, and get the transaction refunded (and then pay for the expense myself). It would have been a bureaucratic pain, but I would not have gotten in trouble for it, certainly not jail.

In regards to accidentally pressing the card selection button, I think a simple idea would be some sort of "hold to lock" functionality. You hold down the selection button for 3 seconds or so and the currently selected card is "locked in" until you perform the action again.

EDIT: What the person above me said =)

The first bit has to be the simplest thing to fix: just require the user to hold it to lock/unlock or some particular sequence of presses.

That sounds more complicated than pulling a card out of my wallet that I've instantly identified by position and color -- something the human brain is really good at doing without much thought. It's far more of a cognitive burden to fumble through a voodoo incantation of keypresses at the register to make the wizard card clone the correct card.

From my understanding, the point of the card isn't to be less of a cognitive burden but to be less bulky in your wallet or w/e

> Oops, now your boss wants to know why you've just paid for your groceries on the business credit card and why you've cloned your business credit card!! The first can be an innocent mistake, but the second can be grounds for disciplinary action.

What's your point? If you're not allowed to clone your business credit card, and you do, of course there will be disciplinary action. That would be true if you used this "coin" or any other method to create the clone.