Coin: A step in the wrong direction
techendo.co
techendo.co
The author basically argues that things should be wonderful and easy and the service providers should handle it all (ignoring the difficulties of such a provision):
I should use a plastic card, cheap, easily replaceable, low cost (free in most cases), and my card account should buffer my purchase as long as the combined total of credit/cash in my accounts is greater than or equal to my purchase. I should then be able to place either the entirety of my purchase or parts of my purchase in separate accounts that provide different benefits. (Think, business, flight mileage, cash back rewards, etc) The service should often be smart enough to learn where I move my purchase and do so automatically if I so choose.
and
I believe we should be moving away from cards altogether. I think google wallet, square, and other RFID/NFC technologies are thinking about the future, where our devices are consolidated and integrated with the world around us. Bitcoin, a virtual currency, proves the success of something that exists purely in the aether, and keeping a Bitcoin wallet on your phone is easy.
How is going from 'wallet filled with cards' to 'one card' not a step in the right direction to 'no cards'? Maybe the technology or industry isn't moving as fast as the author would like, but it's entirely hyperbolic to say that Coin's trajectory runs opposite from the author's ideal vision.
Coin's goal is to abstract the ownership of a credit card away from the plastic itself. If you want RFID/NFC to succeed -- as the author does, as I do, and as I'm sure many other people do, then that's a good thing.
(The preorder legality side of things isn't my domain, so I can't really comment on that.)
While the ideal solution to this problem might be server side, as the author suggestions, that is in no way a feasible solution. The card networks are in direct competition with each other, so there's no way you could get a single card with Visa and Amex/MC on it, not to mention there's competition between issuers.
Heck, I can't even get my Chase credit account and checking account on the same physical card and those two are tied to the same user account at a single bank and go through a single credit card network.
I can't wait to get my Coin. I'll probably still carry around the Coin and a backup card, but that takes me down from 4 to 2.
It seems ridiculous to try to kill the credit card with... a credit card.
I wouldn't be surprised if Clinkle, LoopPay, Square, or any of the many startups in this space kills the credit card (and thus Coin) before Coin makes its first delivery in Summer 2014.
I think Coin is a nice intermediate step between 10 cards in your wallet, and no wallet at all. Intermediate steps are viable businesses. I think Square is an intermediate step, and they seem to be doing just fine. They're obviously going to be at the forefront of eliminating cards all together, but they knew that credit cards aren't going away anytime soon, and so they leveraged that to get their foot in the door with the merchants.
What would constitute "killing" the credit card, anyway? Less than 5% of the population using it? I don't see that happening for a good 15 or 20 years at a bare minimum.
And a large part of the point of chip and pin cards is that they're meant to be impossible to clone. E.g. in France it supposedly cut card fraud by about 80% for in-person transactions. So unless Coin can convince them that it will be as secure or more secure than these cards, they're going to be pretty much limited to the US, and increasingly get marginalised in the US too: Most large US banks have announced rollout plans for EMV cards (though many will be chip + signature rather than chip + pin).
Coin actually increases the complexity of an already complex and archaic system.
The product manages to create more headaches for the consumer and the merchant by consolidating various credit cards in a digital device with a nice "cool" factor but lacking any real solution to the many problems associated with the complex back-ends in the payments space.
Conceptually, it's not a bad product, and it sucks that the founders are probably reading hundreds of people slamming their hard work. But it's reality.
The product manages to create more headaches for the consumer
That doesn't mean that cars were a bad idea, just that I have a crappy car.
Do you have any reason to believe that Coin will be any less reliable than a regular credit card?
Many merchants I swipe my own card and they never see it. A waitress may question it, but I have no reason to believe they won't accept it if it is validated by their card reader.
The website says the battery should last two years.
Given that, I'd very much hesitate to try to pay with something that clearly isn't the original card. (Of course, I won't be able to anyway, since I'm outside the US, and every single one of my cards these days are chip and pin cards)
Some people can't manage their spending with a credit card, some people can't believe that these companies are giving away all that free shit (even money in return) just by not paying cash. Depends on how they manage their finances.
$500/yr to not have to listen to anyone telling me how I can save a few more cents? Priceless - no wait, not even priceless, only $500/yr!
That is the currency, that you do pay for these "perks".
When they don't take that, I use my Chase Visa card, which has a pretty small limit and pretty crappy rewards. I also have my first card, a Capital One Visa card, which I keep around because there's a cool picture on it.
I also have a business credit card for work, and another for my personal LLC.
And there's my debit card I use for ATMs.
Honest question. I also have 4 cards. They don't thicken my wallet, they weigh nothing, and.. I never had a problem pulling the one I want on first try.
I mean, even in terms of 'first world problems', turning my 4 cards into 1 would never even have occurred to me.
Replacing them with a card that will one day make me say "Sorry can't pay, looks like the battery in my CC went flat" seems outright ridiculous.
First world problems indeed! And people claim there isn't a tech bubble, if projects like this get funding...
It's only good if it works as well as credit cards work - 99.9% of places accept them.
Hopefully not "Google Wave for Credit Card"
The law states that orders must be shipped within the time stated by the company, and there is a default of 30 days if no other shipping estimate is given. In this case, Coin clearly and conspicuously states that they will ship in the Summer of 2014.
If they fail to ship by that time, they are required to offer purchasers a refund. However, the law clearly states that the company can set their shipping timeline, so long as they make the company aware of it.
Visa and MasterCard will allow you to authorize cards for a pre-order (actually for any transaction, they don't care if it is a pre-order ot not), and then finalize the purchase when you ship. They do not allow you to use finalized funds as a business loan.
However, Kickstarter has also done a lot of work to educate the public about the risk of this type of funding (certainly to their own legal benefit or otherwise), and thus the public can better understand that they are dontating money toward a dream, versus buying the next generation video game console a few weeks before it comes out.
Coin is taking your money to bring a product to market, while acting like that product already exists. Answers in the FAQ like "we don't take your shipping address because you might move" are a willfully ignorant slap in the face, because they are far more likely the ones at risk of going out of business than me moving houses.
If they said very clearly that you were funding a new product with all the inherent risks, like Lockitron did, this would be a different story. But not educating the consumer about what's actually going on is exactly what the FTC is trying to protect against.
Besides that, why are digital goods pre-orders seemingly allowed?
http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus02-business-guide-m...
I'm not sure there's anything illegal about it if you give them their money back -- I'm pretty sure I've tried to buy something from a seller on Amazon, been charged, it turned out they were unable to fulfill, they refunded. It happens.
Now, if you run out of money and go out of business without giving everyone their money back -- that's still not exactly 'illegal', it's not in and of itself fraud. Companies go out of business with creditors all the time, almost any time anyone does go out of business they owe someone something (I mean, in a sense, that's what makes you go out of business!)
And consumers are different than creditors. There are different laws that protect each.
Are there going to be issues with it? Of course.
Will it last in the long run? Well, the phone thing is obvious, kids. I bet these guys are aware of that and have a plan.
Regardless, its an innovative piece of hardware that moves the ball. That's better than any of the shit I've built.
One I just read about (yescard) could allow you to clone a card and could be used (most likely) for a half dozen low-value offline transactions. But it has no keys so can't fool the bank.
You can get a card reader/writer on the open market for about $10. Writeable cards will cost you a little more. Problem is that the card you want to clone isn't going to give up the goods in terms of private keys, PIN validation data etc, so like the yescard, it's going to be of very limited use.
Couple that with massively reduced fraud.
Now, if they allow a method for cloning these cards, both of those go out the window: Criminals will just attack the weakest point, which is going to be whatever mechanism Coin would use to allow cards to get added to their device.
As for the US market: Consider that pretty much all large US banks have committed to start rolling out EMV cards (though many will roll out chip + signature rather than chip + pin, which seems the height of stupidity)
I personally don't have any hate for Coin or what they are trying to do; I hope they are successful. But it's not something I would buy.
Both my debit card and credit card are chip-and-PIN cards, so I can't replace this with card, and none of the rest have magnetic stripes that anyone actually uses (the few cards that do have stripes, like my Costco card and driver's license, also have my picture on them and I can't replace them with a generic card).
This will be super useful for some people, but not for most people.
Not to quibble, but you have some contradictions lurking in there. On one hand, you're saying that, like Uber, Coin solves a problem for a small subset of people. OTOH, you're saying that they are addressing a big market.
It's an important distinction if you're making the argument that the parent's personal need for the service doesn't matter. That is, if this is supposed to be a mass-market product, then "random" people (including the parent and others on HN) opining about their need for it is much more relevant than in the case of a niche product that is intended for a small audience.
In any event, "small subset" vs. "large market" are the parent's words. And, yes, of course a product that is aimed at a small subset of the market is the opposite of a product that is aimed at a large market. So, it contradicts, as you say.
These are relative terms that speak to the size of the market being addressed, so by definition small vs. large are opposites.
Perhaps the parent meant to say a "small, but profitable market".
It's a great first step towards consolidating the worst and most insecure aspects of credit cards.
It's not going to work with modern cards, because it can't copy chips. And if you have an old mag-strip card, you should really get a new one, rather than consolidating the old one.
The second issue is it's solving a problem that isn't really a problem. I use two cards on a regular basis. I have others but rarely need to carry them with me. So I can reduce two slots in my wallet to one. Doesn't seem like enough of a benefit to me.
Lastly, I can see all sorts of issues with merchants not knowing what these are, and being wary of accepting them due to perceived fraud risk. Something that reprograms its mag stripe practically yells "FRAUD!".
So I appreciate the technical innovation behind this, but I think they're likely to get dashed upon the rocks. It's a tough space. I thought Google Wallet with Android NFC would be super convenient. It wasn't. I went back to the old fashioned swipe. So its hard to see this catching on with ordinary consumers.
The card issuers don't have to buy in to anything. You program the Coin yourself using your existing cards.
> I use two cards on a regular basis. I have others but rarely need to carry them with me. So I can reduce two slots in my wallet to one. Doesn't seem like enough of a benefit to me.
Ah, the old "It's of no use to me, so what's the point?" argument. You're not the person the Coin is targeting. It's for people who have more cards than they can comfortably carry in their wallet.
> Lastly, I can see all sorts of issues with merchants not knowing what these are, and being wary of accepting them due to perceived fraud risk.
I'll admit that I don't shop in many brick and mortar stores, but when I have, the cashiers have never so much as glanced at my cards. Most of the time, the scanner is out of their view anyway. I can see it possibly being a problem if they have to scan it for you (like at a restaurant or something), but I'd be willing to bet that most people just aren't going to care enough to make a fuss about it.
In fact my impression is that in the vast majority of stores now you swipe your own card. The cashier never touches it.
Reality was always a bit different to that.
Nowadays in Canada though, no one uses swipe cards anymore, it's all chip-and-PIN. The only time anyone swipes my card is when I go down to Seattle, and it's really unnerving when they do so.
Depends on where you shop. Some stores (particularly big box stores -- Best Buy comes to mind) always ask to see the card and ID. If they do, it's a showstopper for it to not be real. There's NO WAY a store with that policy would let you buy something with an anonymous black "card".
Not only does this scream "FRAUD!", it almost certainly WILL be used for fraud, almost immediately on release. Think of how easy it would be to allow a server at a restaurant to "steal" someone's card -- photo and a swipe, and POOF, you can use their card the next time you go somewhere that doesn't look at the card. How long will it be before stores that DIDN'T ask to see it before start asking, and specifically disallowing the use of these fraud-enabling devices?
Regardless, there's no way I'd risk getting to the point of purchase somewhere and finding out at that point they won't accept my card. And I AM part of their target market: I probably have 8 cards in my wallet, maybe 10. It's complicated, but they all have a unique need that makes me carry them.
I'd love to have something like this that "just worked," but I doubt this would be it without orders of magnitude more education and many layers of security protection to prevent fraud -- probably enough layers to be an impediment to people actually signing up to use it (receiving physical mail being required to register a new card comes to mind).
It seems odd that big stores would require this, since this is explicitly forbidden in the merchant agreements. Also, I've never experienced this myself in the US.
1. http://www.mastercard.us/support/problems-using-mastercard.h... "A merchant must not refuse to complete a transaction solely because a cardholder refuses to provide additional identification information."
The thing is, a lot of the people who don't originally see the use to something can wind up using it later on because they have a need for it (DropBox, etc). This has a built-in usefulness limitation in that it is only of use to people with lots of cards that need to carry them all. Sure, I have 6 credit/debit cards, but I only ever carry 2 in my slim front-pocket wallet. I only know 2 people that Coin would apply to for their use-case scenario and neither of them would carry this device instead of their cards.
> I'll admit that I don't shop in many brick and mortar stores, but when I have, the cashiers have never so much as glanced at my cards. Most of the time, the scanner is out of their view anyway. I can see it possibly being a problem if they have to scan it for you (like at a restaurant or something), but I'd be willing to bet that most people just aren't going to care enough to make a fuss about it.
I'd wager that at least 25% of the merchants here in NY would refuse to accept this. Easily at least that many. While many cashiers don't look at your cards when you use them, that's because it still fits the profile of a credit card: thin plastic, bank logo, Visa/MC/Amex logo, magnetic stripe, raised numbers, etc. Giving them something that fits none of these criteria will instantly set off some alarm bells.
They do define the policies that merchants have to follow, including whether to accept payments from this device.
I'd rather have a chip in my arm.
For what it's worth, this is false.
Look, author has 1 or 2 cards. I have an Amazon card, a Target card, a Debit card, my FSA card, my Company credit card. I have rewards cards that I don't keep in my wallet because I like to keep my wallet thin.
Like it or not, Coin presents a hopeful solution to solving this for me. And don't go telling me I need to reduce the number of cards I have and simplify my life. I don't want to hear it. I just want Coin's product to exist and hopefully my pre-order is helping that.
On a side note, I'm not used to charge first ship later. Isn't Coin YC backed? I'm surprised they need to rely on pre-orders for funding unless that was their financial plan all along.
If you're smart enough to realize potential risks, you're probably smart enough to ask if Coin's considered solutions to that use-case, or offer up a suggestion. They've clearly spent more time thinking this through than we have, and I doubt they've detailed everything on a marketing page and F.A.Q.
Personally, I'd be worried about travelling and my phone dying or disappearing and effectively locking my card when that pre-determined time elapses. But I'm sure that could be configured in the app, or workarounds created once this goes live and more feedback comes in. (Web login, a friends' phone, etc.)
As for the product itself, I'd love to see it work. It would solve a problem for me, and I'd happily replace my wallet with two of these and my driver's license. Is it the best technology for solving consumer-merchant interactions? Maybe, maybe not. But I'd rather see 15 companies develop divergent ideas until a clear winner emerges than see everyone forced to Bitcoin, NFC, etc.
This is very new to me. This source here: http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/card-acceptance-guide...
States:
>> You should not bill the customer until merchandise has been shipped
That is a best practice, not a requirement.
>> Transactions cannot be deposited until goods or services have been shipped.
The first half isn't even criticizing Coin at all -- it's just saying the author wishing there were even better things. The author says "The problem with these technologies is vendor adoption. It’s not here yet, but it’s on the way." Yeah, it's been on the way for the past 10 years, but nothing's changed yet! I don't see RFID/NFC anywhere I shop. But that's not any reason for Coin not to improve things in the here-and-now.
And the second half has nothing to do with Coin itself either, but is about Kickstarter charging in general.
Along with transistor counts, other technologies follow a Moore's Law like improvement curve. Network (bandwidth) technologies are among those, but they have a strong step-function characteristic to their improvement. This accounts for the delay in end-to-end deployment of hardware improvements needed. This also creates a perception of sustained changelessness followed by rapid change (e.g. dialup modems to DSL/Cable).
Any improvement to payment infrastructure suffers from a much more entrenched form of the network upgrade problem. This stasis works to the benefit of companies (e.g. Square) who can provide value without having to move the world. Coin also fits into this opportunity/risk model.
The risk, which that quote hits on, is that Coin is already too late: if a payment network transformation lands too soon, it could leave Coin's bright idea in the dust. In that light, saying "it's been on the way for the past 10 years" is more worrying rather than less.
But there are upsides. Imagine that Coin grows into its meta-card future, eventually supporting EMV[1] as well as easy revocability and reissuance. Lose your Coin? A quick report and it's revoked and all of your cards are reissued onto a new Coin.
[1] Per Coin's FAQ, they do not support EMV, aka "chip and pin", yet. This is problematic for non-U.S. usage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV
Well, no, its about a company pretending to be doing normal product ordering but actually doing a do-it-yourself Kickstarter, and how they may fall afoul of various rules, like those of the credit cards they are accepting, in doing that.
Banks aren't going away soon. Banks are not going to make it easy for third-parties to proxy transactions soon. NFC or other non-card POS technologies are not going to be everywhere soon.
Those are valid hopes or dreams, and I hope someone is working on it. But Coin promises to be a product that will reduce many cards to one now.
And arguing whether a "pre-order" scheme is legal or not is kind of a moot point: Pre-ordering customers show agree to the transaction, and show their intent give Coin their money now for something later -- even if it is forced by law to be done in a different matter.
I mention this because you propose banks as active resisters, but from how I see it they stand to make significant efficiency gains by just maintaining an app and website, as opposed to making plastic squares by the million, maintaining thousands of ATMs, even still printing chequebooks...
I see nothing wrong with encapsulating/combining multiple mediums into one solution. One solution that extends the innate functionality of magnetic cards and provides additional functional layers. The author talks about Bitcoin as being one of the "other" directions in the horizon, I believe that Bitcoin or any other digital currency is on the same level as the magnetic cards. If Coin is able to tap into your Bitcoin wallet and execute transactions, that would help Bitcoin further infiltrate the market.
I also believe that Coin has the potential to provide an extra layer of security that magnetic cards don't.
1) Coin can implement a one click/touch procedure to disable a given card at any point in time and prevent its usage, which currently requires a call to the bank and a bureaucratic nightmare to reactivate the card. (at least in my country).
2) I'm sure Coin are able to implement an approval/rejection transaction workflow adding an extra layer of control in case of unauthorized usage.
3) Coin can add a key based security layer to their application also preventing unauthorized usage.
Really, the ideas are endless and this is why I love projects that are an extension/middle-layer for other outdated technologies.
I think the hate is originating due to a narrow vision of this product's potential.
Stripe, Square, Coin, whatever - they all are just more convenient ways to make fee-based payments.
Why don't we just make payments from our banks directly? Did you know that's not only possible, but extremely easy now AND feeless? What if you didn't have to even give out your account number to merchants, what if you didn't even need to KNOW your account number to make them? What if I've been processing payments like this for 3 weeks now, have processed thousands of payments, and have done so without asking the user for anything they didn't know off the top of their head?
We don't need fees on our payments - if you agree and you're a developer who takes payments, email me @ tommy@thecityswig.com and let's talk. Not gonna try to sell you anything, I need your thoughts.
This is probably the first time you've heard me talk about this, but I'm starting in the comment section here on HN to start getting the pulse. I can't wait to discuss this hear in the coming months!
> I believe we should be moving away from cards altogether. I think google wallet, square, and other RFID/NFC technologies are thinking about the future, where our devices are consolidated and integrated with the world around us.
That's like, his opinion, man. I personally think that cards are going to be around for a very long time whether we want them to be or not; for one simple reason: infrastructure. There are just too many card readers in the wild to feasibly displace the technology. For example, I can't use Google Wallet in South Africa (even though I would love to be able to) because we simply don't have NFC paypoints here. I doubt there will ever be. Dynamic cards seem like a really clever compromise in the direction of that "perfect world," and when I say "world" I mean it - cards are a world-wide technology. NFC is not.
The author clearly has a problem drawing a line between what is feasible and what he wants. We probably all want NFC payments - the reality is that most of the world won't get them.
If you really think about it all Coin are doing is creating a compatible addon for existing card reader that let you use NFC (or BLE, but the technologies are similar) with any of them.
> Legality of preordering
I am struggling to figure out how exactly this argument means that the cards are a step in the wrong direction. His one commenter (Alec Joy) also points this out:
> For those to lazy, or too trusting of Dan's word to click the link, I would like to present the first sentence of the article he linked to, and suspiciously the ONLY sentence of the response he omitted from his quote. > "It is not illegal for merchants to charge for a product before it has shipped. "
Shameless link baiting.
The author is incredibly underestimating the difficulty of driving vendor adoption of a new payment system.
Google just spent years and enormous amounts of money trying to drive vendor adoption of Wallet, and has more or less given up on the NFC part.
Square's achieved the most so far, but only by bundling it with its POS & processing service, which not all vendors are going to switch to (or even if they took over the POS world it would take a decade).
Considering that's the crux of his argument, it's entirely unsupported.
Its most immediate use is to consolidate physical cards into one, but its true killer feature is the ability to instantly act as a physical proxy to a digital account (i.e. BitCoin, Paypal).
Do you own a Blu Ray player? It's more than likely to also play DVDs. If it takes a lot of time to get consumers to change over their media collections, I can only imagine how much time it takes to move the financial industry.
Coin is sorely needed.
If you make a finished perfect technical device that's better than creditcards - great job, you're 1% done in replacing CC's, wake me up when you're atleast 33% done on the other major issues.
After living in Hong Kong for 12 days, I can safely say they have a superior system for this premise alone.
The octopus card. Accepted virtually everywhere any other card is accepted. It's like any other e-wallet with load, but its ubiquity in service acceptance is amazing.
Everyone has an octopus card. Everyone important to the infrastructure of the country accepts octopus card.
How durable will it be? I routinely neglect to take my wallet out of my pocket, and end up putting it through the wash. Can Coin survive total immersion in water for an hour? What happens when my dog invariably decides to chew up my wallet? What happens when I drop my Coin in sand?
Moreover, the cost of a Coin becoming inoperable is far greater than that of a traditional card. Worst case scenario, my bank will send me a new card within a few days, which will cost nothing because the cost of manufacturing plastic cards is negligible. If my Coin breaks, I have to shell out another $100. Unless Coin is as indestructible as plastic cards (which is highly doubtful simply because the mechanics and circuitry in Coin create a level of complexity far greater than that of a piece of solid plastic), It will end up costing me more in the long run.
What about security? If I were to lose a plastic card, the maximum risk I'm exposed to is a single account being defrauded. If my Coin falls into the wrong hands, the bad guy has absolutely everything.
In a perfect world, Coin would be great. Unfortunately, the limitations of modern life and commerce make Coin impractical and even dangerous.
Even if it's valid, which I don't think it is it's not really what HN should be about.
It's not constructive criticism since it basically writes a company off.
Even the legal issue is BS. So what if it's not 100% kosher if they get away with it, good on them. All companies when they start take risks.
What do you mean legal issue is BS? You can't even use this damn card in Macy because of legal issue.
Coin is most definitely a step in the right direction, and it's a simple solution. One of the hallmark traits of great design is its obviousness -- and Coin's design is obvious. A credit card that can act as multiple credit cards. Who would have thought?
The technology is here. NFC has been in virtually every Android smartphone since 2011, plus Google Wallet and Apple's Passbook. It's all here, ready to go. Businesses, and consumers, aren't sold.
Regardless of my personal opinion on the crudeness of NFC, the problem is point-of-sale systems are (at least) three years away from adopting these technologies at any level of ubiquity.
Go to your nearest farmer's market, and they're still dealing in cash! Square is doing wonderful things to bring credit card processing to the masses, but _that_ is cutting edge. Coin is the next step on the consumer side.
If you're collecting money without selling something, you need a license from the authorities. To get a license, you need to be a registered charity.
You can't just say "we'll probably use your donation to build something you might like and may send you one when it's ready".
My point is that Coin is a much smaller stride for the typical consumer; only SV geeks (guilty) are as excited about NFC payments as HN is, and the typical person sees this aggregation of cards as 'technology' that they're much more familiar with. No surprise that it's blowing up.
Just my two cents.
https://www.commbank.com.au/business/merchant-services/maste...
(Version 1)
(Version 2 & 3)
https://www.commbank.com.au/personal/online-banking/commbank...
Interesting that Android is a first-class citizen here.
I personally had no issue giving them $55, the same concept behind kickstarter, for the money to produce my goods. Consider me an investor of 1 unit.
For the OP to combine two entirely separate things--1) I think it's a bad solution, and 2) and it's illegal to charge money that way--makes it just seem like he has an axe to grind. Those things have nothing to do with each other. The security issues are at least related to the technology, and he could have brought them together: "I think it's a bad solution because it involves challenges to doing it securely, as demonstrated by..."
But the payment stuff? Come on.
Coin is completing the transactions and using the money to fund their venture.
It probably isn't black and white either. I am no expert on credit card transactions.
I'm not too worried. I ordered one.
That said, there's lots of reasons to be worried about Coin from a security perspective. But, at least in the US, consumers bear few of the penalties and costs associated with fraud -- only the credit card companies and banks do. So we will likely see significant adoption from savvy consumers and some resistance (or outright revolt?) from CC companies and banks.
I honestly would be stunned if this happened in <10 years. I think we very often underestimate how slow adoption rate is for new technology and how much money can be made by playing nice with the incumbent technology instead of trying to disrupt it from the onset.
If I'm carrying a wallet or keys in my pockets in 10 years I'll be pretty disappointed.
Specifically online card payments. Unsure about through other processing facilities.
I'd be interested to see a business coming up from the article's author from the ideas he put in the article. But I guess writing a blog post is much easier than investing time and money to build up something new to make some people's life easier.
Because if we all just blindly praised every new business that came along and never gave them our true opinions we'd have a lot more bankruptcies than you have now (and that's saying something).
A large number of businesses fail because they have terrible ideas. If you think a business has a bad idea why shouldn't you be allowed to tell them that? Yes, there are businesses that succeed despite of everyone saying otherwise. Good for them - but they're the minority.
In other words, you or me calling an idea horrible on the Internet is not going to stop a bankruptcy. If Coin gets enough preorders they are going to build a product, whether it is a failure or not.
Combine this with the "you can't sniff my card through my pocket" capabilities and I am very excited.
This is just a troll post by someone who either doesn't understand, or has sour grapes.
In todays world evolution isn't linear, its parallel. Many people work on similar problems at the same time (innovators dilemma comes to mind) and some may prevail, some won't. But thats the process of moving forward to the perfect solution.
I do find it astounding that magnetic cards are still the standard in the US though.
I'm just going to carry my bitcoin mining rig everywhere - suckers.
So does your credit card