Coin, Wocket, Plastc: The all-in-one cards trying to sprint ahead of Apple Pay | Hacker News Reader

Coin, Wocket, Plastc: The all-in-one cards trying to sprint ahead of Apple Pay

arstechnica.com

19 pointsnikunjk17 comments

I'm fully aware I'm buying into a rather risky and possibly disappointing piece of tech with Coin. That's a risk I was aware of when I paid up, because the potential gain for me is pretty big. I'm always forgetting gift cards, my card looks just like a bunch of my friends, making mix-ups common, and I like to carry as little as possible in my pocket — generally I leave the house now with my license, one card, and a twenty. A smart card helps me achieve this. I'd like to give it a shot.

Just about everything I've backed on Kickstarter and elsewhere has been delayed or had its features tweaked. I kind of assume that will be the case now! If you're not okay with that, the early adopter game is probably not for you, and that's a perfectly reasonable reason to avoid it.

This kind of talk is what bothers me about investment in this industry -- I've never seen anywhere else where people are so OK with no ROI. This is where all the dumb money in SV is coming from.

Not sure I see your argument. Credit cards can obviously be improved upon and it doesn't seem that credit card companies are doing much in regards to its form factor and ease of use.

We've got a couple choices. 1) Wait for companies that have enough R&D budgets to develop something that doesn't directly cost consumers or 2) fund another company to do so.

For #2 it doesn't differ much if that comes from a VC firm or crowdfunding campaign besides the VC firms adding a layer of abstraction.

I agree that we don't see this kind of money flowing around in other industries but you also don't see much change on most industries.

I'm not advocating the VC model or saying that SV spends money on what I believe are the most important problems. But I'm also not seeing how it's dumb money.

Five years ago, these would be futuristic.

Now, compared to a pure-phone solution, they're retrograde: an extra thing to carry, perhaps useful to interface with legacy, insecure magstripe-readers. "A day late and a dollar short."

Do you honestly shop at only places w/ NFC readers? Do you not eat at restaurants? Do you not take cash out at ATMs? I mean - sure Apple Pay is slicker and maybe more secure - but I can not imagine anyone now ditching plastic to go 100% Apple Pay, Google Wallet, whatever.

I like it when internet folk comment about current technology as legacy because some tiny fraction of its market now uses something new and shiny.

With the prospect of fraud liability in the US shifting to the merchants starting next fall, many merchants will be swapping in terminals that are EMV compliant. I suspect many of these merchants will go for a terminal that also has NFC.

http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/2014...

I'm not paying $50-150, and futzing with some idiosyncratic offering of a small company, just to maintain magstripe-compatibility when magstripes are rapidly on the way out. Carrying a couple fallback magstripe cards for the last days of magstripes isn't a big hassle.

Carrying tons of magstripe cards when there were no other options – 5-10 years ago – is the only problem these seem to solve.

I backed Coin on kickstarter, and am yet to get mine. It was supposed to be in my hands in November after delays, and now it is nearly January and haven't heard a word from them.

Same story here.. I actually 'ordered' two (one for my SO), and applied to be in their Beta. I still have an iPhone 4s, so they have about 2 months to ship it before I upgrade to an iPhone 6 and never look back..

I pre-ordered several coins in November 2013. I tried to retrieve my Coins during the beta, following through their convoluted "get an invite to our iOS app to request your coin" process. I did not receive even one coin. I have not heard from them since August. As far as my opinion is concerned, they're frauds.

They did have the courtesy to email me before Black Friday and offer me $1 off more preorders, though.

I actually just got a shipping notice for my "Beta Coin" yesterday. So at least something is happening.

Note. Shipping notice does not actually imply actually shipping, as I just discovered from their customer service agent. It just means they've created a shipping label for you and some time in the future (exactly when he didn't know) it will be used to ship you your coin.

Late reply, but they definitely shipped it, and it works really well: http://i.imgur.com/WsuBttk.jpg

I've seen at least one "Coin Beta" backer that actually got a Coin. It looks like a credit card - the button does not have a great clickly felling you would expect and the quality does not feel premium. but it seemed to work.

How does the EMV compatibility work? I thought the point of EMV is that you couldn't copy/forge it.

I think the plan is to partner with issuing banks and convince them to reissue emv-like tokens to plastc when a card is added (similar to what apple pay does with tokens over an NFC link).

Also Stratos https://stratoscard.com/

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