1) Represents money 2) Creating a new phrase - or way to think about credit cards
1) Card thickness. Most makers of programmable mag stripe cards try to make their card the same thickness as a normal sized credit card. Why? Because thicker cards might scrape or get stuck in credit card readers (as old Amex black cardholders know). Unfortunately it has to be think because of the following:
2) Older iterations of this idea usually involved the bank/card issuer supplying cards with multiple card numbers preloaded on it. This card in novel in the sense that it has some writable memory that you can personally store your existing cards to. However this involves a few elements that add to the thickness of the card: It involves a non-volatile memory module for storing the cards, it involves a volatile memory module for holding information about new cards, it involves a bluetooth module for communicating between the volatile memory and your smartphone and it involves a battery to run it all.
3) The battery is non-rechargeable (because any existing type of charging point would add too much to the thickness), so the card only lasts for a specific length of time before needing to be replace.
4) There is a move away from mag stripe everywhere in the world but the US as mag stripe is really shit compared to chip and PIN for security. Even in the US, mag stripe will be phased out within the next 10 years. This card can't even store CVC security codes (the 3 digits on the back of your normal card).
5) They have added a security feature that ties the card to your smartphone such that it becomes "deactivated" (locks the non-volatile memory) once it is loses contact with your smartphone for too long. What this means in essence is that you cant use your card without your smartphone. So that begs the question: Why would the consumer adopt this instead of adopting a smartphone based NFC wallet if its available to them? Google Wallet stores any credit card I put on it, and if the merchant doesn't support NFC Google Wallet still displays an image of the card for manual number input. You might say that a merchant might get scared away from a transaction if you ask them to do that, but a merchant might get scared away by asking them to run a unfamiliar looking unmarked black card.
Regardless of the above, it is cool stuff and there is a niche that it will be useful for, at least until chip and PIN / NFC wallets become widespread in the US. I'm working on some similar ideas so I thought I'd toss in my two cents.
Awesome!
> Once the battery dies you will need to replace your Coin.
Does the replacement cost money? If yes, I think I'll stick with my current situation. Awesome idea though.
Yes, this is "doable" with existing technology, but not for the common man.
Security is going to be an issue, sure. If Kanishk can get the security tech concerns AND human worries calmed down - he's on to something that can fundamentally change how we use credit cards.
Until we realize there's really no need for a device this physical... or something beyond what we're currently carrying. But this'll require losing the magnetic strip need, and that'll take time.
Another benefit I see is that it doesn't actually have the credit/debit numbers printed on the card, so nobody could take a picture of your card and use it to fraudulently purchase things online.
This + Simple would be perfect.
I imagine, due to how the cryptography works, it might not be as simple to create a product like this for chipped cards.
The system doesn't allow to "trust other hardware", the card itself has to sign every transaction.
Would I carry it?
As of yet - no, I would rather use iphone apps etc.
The other problem that it misses is the show that people like to make of using a certain card.
I have an amex platinum for business purposes, but I still get a bit of thrill every time I use it and I get a look, how does Coin approach that problem?
With that said. I still signed up :-)
U.S.-based customers: Coin will work overseas, but we recommend that you bring a backup card when you travel.
Customers located outside of the U.S.: Coin does not support EMV yet. If the country you live it requires it we recommend holding off your purchase for now."
Found this in FAQ section.
A "better" solution would be a reverse square. Something that connected to my phone / had an app that I could then swipe in a card reader.
I'm not charged an additional fee to get those cards, but this would cost me.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1404403369/geode-from-ic...
Title is incorrect here, Coin hasn't yet launched anything besides a pre-order website.
GIGAOM's title here is "Meet Coin, a startup creating a universal credit card"
The real issue I see is that I don't want to carry a phone AND a card. I just want to pay with my iPhone 5S + thumbprint.
Or, if I'm in NYC and want to go running through the streets slash central park, I want to pay with my iPod Nano for the train, for some water, and even some food.
Heck, take it a step further. Just imbed a bluetooth chip inside my thumb so I just have to press it to a payment terminal anywhere.
It's just a roadmap, but you have to start somewhere.
Also, I just bought one.
My wife recently used her debit card at a restaurant and they accidentally double-charged her. The restaurant recognized their mistake, but were being pains getting us refunded, requiring bank statements and such, so instead I called the bank (Wells Fargo), and it was 2 weeks before they said "Sorry, nothing we can do, take it up with the restaurant." We ended up getting the money back, but it was a real pain.
1) Establish and grow credit rating 2) An extra layer of defense against bad merchants (the CC companies will be your goon squad) 3) Bonus miles/points/etc
Report merchants that do that.
For Visa, call your card issuer.
For Amex, call them.
For MasterCard - http://www.mastercard.us/support/merchant-violations.html
The card brands explicitly train merchants to check signatures against government-issued ID. [1] [2]
Card brands may not prohibit minimum charges per federal law. [3]
Visa and MasterCard agreed to allow credit surcharges in a settlement agreement for a long-standing class-action suit by retailers. [4]
1: http://usa.visa.com/merchants/risk_management/card_present.h...
2: http://www.mastercard.com/us/merchant/pdf/Unsigned_Credit_Ca...
3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodd%E2%80%93Frank_Wall_Street_...
1. Add a surcharge for credit card payments. 2. Have a minimum of up to $10 to use a credit card.
See: http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/27/pf/checkout-fee/
[1] Not that it was ever illegal, only against the CC company rules. But now the law explicitly forces CC companies to allow it.
Even if they aren't allowed to check ID, they certainly are allowed to check signatures.
Since merchants are held at least partially responsible for fraud, I would be surprised if most merchants accept the "coin" card. It doesn't look like a normal credit card.
Nothing. Coin is not an authentic card. BTW that wasn't my point, it was that it's a merchant violation to demand ID when presented with an authentic signed card.
> The card brands explicitly train merchants to check signatures against government-issued ID.
When the card is unsigned. Every card I have is marked "NOT VALID UNLESS SIGNED". It absolutely is a merchant violation to demand government issued ID when presented with a valid signed card. A card signed "SEE ID" is clearly not valid.
As far as you're other points, the US is not the only legal jurisdiction or market in the world.
It is a violation to make ID a condition of accepting Visa at all. It is not a violation to ask for ID from specific customers, regardless of whether the card is signed or not. It says this very clearly in the "Card Acceptance Guidelines for Visa Merchants" booklet. The closest they get to forbidding it is a recommendation that you don't make it part of your standard procedure as, and I quote, "it can slow down a sale and annoy the customer".
In the case of a suspicious transaction, the merchant is also supposed to call Visa for a "Code 10 Authorization". One of the things Visa may do is instruct you to check the customer's ID.
If a store asks you for your ID, calling up Visa to report a violation won't do you any good as they haven't violated anything. As far as your jurisdiction punt, we're talking about a product intended (and only really usable) for the US.
I'm disappointed that they didn't mention that this is hooked to an online service until you get well into their FAQ:
Maintaining the integrity of your Coin’s data is
critical to your peace of mind. That’s why our servers,
mobile apps and the Coin itself use 128-bit or 256-bit
encryption for all storage and communication (http and
bluetooth). Additionally Coin can alert you in the
event that you leave it somewhere.
Also disappointing that it doesn't support chip and pin. Whenever I travel to the UK, I find that people are increasingly surprised by cards that don't have a chip, and need to fumble around trying to remember how to use the card reader; it would be nice if this would be an opportunity for me to get a chip and pin compatible card out of my mag stripe card to avoid that problem (though on reflection, it's likely that a mag stripe doesn't contain sufficient information to make a valid chip and pin card).
$100 for something that lasts for two years and solves only a minor annoyance seems a bit steep. I'm sure that there will be plenty of people who will buy it, but I don't know if I would find it worth the cost beyond the novelty value.
I do appreciate their Bluetooth LE Arduino dev kit: http://blog.onlycoin.com/posts/2013/10/3/coin-arduino-ble-de...
I hate to sound incredibly cynical, but this sounds like a perfect example of Silicon Valley fluff that will never become mainstream. They aren't even the first SV company to be working on this product.
You picked a valid point of concern (if Coin requires connectivity for basic operation), assumed the negative, and then used that assumption to denounce the company as "Silicon Valley fluff that will never become mainstream". Stylised: if A then shit -> I think A -> hence shit.
> I think the online service has the potential to be the most valuable part of this whole product.
This is assumed to be from the user's point of view (rather than from the point of view of the company -- generating revenue -- or from an interested 3rd party).
Then you end with this:
> a marketer's dream
So is Coin targeting marketers, and the users are the product to be sold like so many other start-ups to come out of the Valley?
Do you have a coin?
I lost my coin.
Check out my coin.
I paid for that with coin.
Coin is so convenient.
I got rid of all my credit cards, I just use coin.
Similarly, I have an account at Simple. And while it's a product I absolutely love it's hard to explain to people what I mean by "I do my banking online at Simple" or "I like simple because they charge no fees" It seems like I'm just being grammatically incorrect and I honestly feel like it contributes negatively to peoples perception of the company. Also search is a bitch when you've got such a crappy name.
However, if you mean a gift card with pre-loaded money, things may be different, but then it'd probably be a similar reaction if you tried to use Coin instead of a proper debit/credit card?
My initial questions/concerns are as follows:
Will this be usable in ATMs? I can't visibly tell if it's too wide to fit.
Is there any planned security functionality to lock the card via your paired mobile device? I'd like to be able to supply a password to unlock for a short period of time for usage.
1. Yes, it should be usable with ATMs without issue.
2. You cannot lock your coin with a password, but it will deactivate after it loses contact with a phone after a user-specified amount of time. In theory, I'd assume you can disable Bluetooth on your iPhone and it will effectively "lock" your Coin until it can pair with your device again.
Perhaps do the card selection from the app? Or at least an option to require confirmation in the app?
Now there's a super easy way for someone working in a restaurant to get your credit card information and sell it.
In Canada I haven't' seen a place that doesn't use chip and pin for about 3 years now.
Can someone shed some light on how they get around this?
Really? I'm very surprised. Canada has moved over many years ago. I thought we'd be following the US here.
Is chip and pin in the works? ie is this a stop gap for the next year or two until its rolled out or is the US just not bothering with it?
All of the Starbucks in the Toronto area that I was going to only started using chips in the last year. Prior to that you had to swipe.
Although as a US product only it seems surreally cool and practical. I wouldn't use that for my credit card, but for a membership card? I have way too much H&M card, Levis' card, Virgin Megastore card, Cinema Card...
I've been on two internships in the valley, and despite the availability of Google Wallet, I couldn't find a merchant that would accept it (apart from McDonald's) because everyone was still using magstripe-only terminals. (There were even a few merchants at trade shows who were still using triplicate carbon-copy forms...!)
I think Coin is a product that makes sense for the US market right now as a transitionary product, and wouldn't be surprised if Google acquired them some time in the next year or so and rolled them into the Wallet product offering. When and if US merchants upgrade to chip-and-pin capable offerings, (almost) everyone who owns a Nexus device made in the last two or three years will be ready with unified wallet offerings that already exist.
My only question was can I use for my ATMs too (which pull card in vs. being swiped)?
And the answer is yes, great FAQ by the way:
Q. Where can I use Coin? A. You can use a Coin everywhere cards are accepted including dip-style card readers and ATMs. Use a Coin just like you use your cards now at gas stations, restaurants, the mall, the gym, or other places you frequent.
Dip-style card readers do not pull the card into the machine.
Though it only supports a maximum of 4 cards, at scale it would cost ~500x less.
I call it "penny." Here's my prototype: http://imgur.com/49auKC4
You can purchase this compatibility adapter for $3.95 for 66 feet: http://www.amazon.com/Scotch-Electrical-75-Inch-66-Foot-0085...
*the remainder of the world.
> The US is dragging its feet on the whole PIN/CHIP migration.
Merchants are dragging their feet. The liability shift deadline is instituted by the card schemes themselves.
Coin is betting the EMV deadline will be pushed out indefinitely or is using this gadget as a trojan horse for something bigger.
Even if US retailers were accepting magstripe and taking on the risk, I doubt they would accept a sketchy-looking unlabelled card.
Royalty Cards. I simply don't use them because that's way too many cards to have in your wallet. But say I'm at a restaurant, without coin, you give the waiter your credit card and your royalty card. With coin, do you make him run back twice so you can hit the button to switch from your credit card to your royalty card?
I guess you could get 2, one for credit / debit cards, another for royalty cards, but that seems to start defeating the purpose.
Is this a real problem? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you can't determine a problem by telling me this is a problem we all have. I'm not buying the angle, sorry. Not like I'm against this idea, but the sell is a little ridiculous.
How would this work with chip-based cards? In Canada, some of the banks have ditched the magstripe, so not sure how scalable this is - since the encryption on the chip is specifically engineered to prevent this kind of interception.
Not everything has to have global reach or impact.
Another concern is in bars - your CC# gets a tiny bit wet (drunk ppl, spilled drinks on table, etc.). Does this card stop working if its splashed a little?
My two cents.
This is awesome though.
If merchants will accept coin, it creates trust for this devices, and lookalikes. I think it would be much easier to create Coins, or Coin clones with stolen credit card data. This is rather concerning.
On another note, I really want one of these to tear apart and mess with. The hardware is pretty slick.
Q. Can I lock my Coin?
A. Currently you cannot lock your Coin, but you don’t have to. Coin will automatically deactivate if it loses contact with your phone for a period of time that you configure in the Coin mobile app.
Bummer! Seems like there should be a way to use your phone to lock it down. Either way this is cool as hell.
[A]ctivate the device with a fingerprint on its biometric strip, scroll through a list of cards on its screen and choose one. Out pops a plastic card with a magnetic stripe, temporarily loaded with the chosen card's data. Just swipe the card and pop it back into the iCache. After one use, the information on the card disappears.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/23/technology/one_credit_card.b...
Although I'm not sure if the information disappears after the swipe or after it's loaded back into its case.
Too bad about what happened to it. (Actually just found out about iCache and what exactly happened and while I'm sad, I can't say I'm surprised.)
Of course I could mitigate this by carrying my cards with me, but that kind of defeats the point, right?
I suppose I could also replace it after two years like they suggest in the FAQ. But at $100 a pop I'd like to get as much use as possible out of it. And from the usage numbers they cite for the 2-year estimate, it sounds like you could probably get well over 2 years of battery life in practice.
Also, shouldn't the merchants be checking the signature on the card?
Conversely, if I were MasterCard or visa I would bar merchants from taking this card for my transactions to maintain competitive advantage.
I hope the founder comments on this point. If it is usable and merchant contracts are in place for long enough, this is really cool. If there is a whole in the legal side, this feels like something that may not be ideal to back on kickstarter.
1) This can already be done using a simple stripe reader.
2) Coin can identify, investigate and proactively block anyone who has more than the average number of cards, so Coin actually seems well positioned to reduce fraud. Also, Coin could identify that multiple Coin cards have the same credit/whatever cards on them and, the next day, prompt you to swipe your card again to confirm. [Provided that Coin uploads suitable data to its servers...] In fact, using a Coin card could be a signal to fraudsters not to commit fraud against your card.
Not as much as the credit card company (e.g. not the amount of the purchase), but still quite a lot.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/media/photo/2011-08/64038442.jpg
All of that can be done better though when you get off the credit card rail, which is what I'm working on. tommy@thecityswig.com if you wanna talk
Conversely, you hopefully don't mean to imply that technology that is newer is much more likely to be secure.
I am not making a judgment call one way or the other as to your intentions. I just think it is important to the discussion.
It seems easy to me, in modern cultures, to think that newer always equals better/faster/bigger/smarter and in all other ways superior. I think this is exacerbated by the fact that modern technology has made so many things possible that most people 200 years ago would never have dreamed of. From automobiles to computers to smartphones, the technology of today is very impressive. Because all of those things are "modern" it is easy to develop the mindset that anything over a certain age is likely to be inferior. However, we need to remember that all of those technologies were built upon things learned by people in the past. Also, often newer technologies make things cheaper, but manufacturers often chose to make those with poorer materials, and thus they don't last as long. In some cases, newer isn't better. Right now I'm wearing a sweatshirt that is over 20 years old. It was a high-quality product to begin with (and I recognized that when I bought it), and it has been worn very frequently. The silk-screened logo on it is still intact, and looks very good. The material has a few small tears here and there from abuse, but overall the shirt has held together very well. A lot of the clothing I've purchased recently (in the same cost-adjusted price range) has turned out to be junk that doesn't last. There are probably better examples of newer != better, so do what you will with that one.
There is also an inverse mindset which is equally as bad. That is the idea that anything older is bound to be better. Not surprisingly, the first mindset is often held by younger people, and the second by older people. As people get older, they often fall into thinking the "old school" way is always better. The important thing to realize is that, yeah, sometimes the old way is better (and probably more often than many young people realize). However, it is equally bad to assume that just because an item or an idea is older that it is better. I certainly don't want to get out of my car and turn the engine over by hand to get it started, and I'm glad I don't have to hitch up the horses to go into town (though, admittedly a lot of things about having horses would be cool).
The long and the short of it is this, we should evaluate thing on the basis of their own merit, not on their age. There are new treasures and old treasures, new junk and old junk. I realize that this is probably just common sense, but even so I still think it is worth talking about.
... I'd like to again point out that I'm not saying that Kiro was implying a direct newer=better/older=worse relationship -- I just wondered if he might be.
Oh, and yes, if you "haven't seen a merchant where you swipe in ages", then it is very unlikely that you live in the U. S. (at least, not in any part of it that I've been to recently).
You go to the app on your phone and select the card you want. The coin will now function as that card for the next 5 minutes only. Otherwise, the coin is nothing.
Now even if your wallet is stolen, without your phone (+ unlock code, etc.) they don't have any of your cards!
Your bank statement has ads. Your credit card issuer sells your transactions to their partners. Retailers sell your data to data processing companies. The three big scoring companies have access to all your key financial information - and they sell it back to you (in the form of credit score monitoring services), and to marketers. DSPs allow marketers to bid on impressions at a very precise level, based on which sites you visited yesterday.
Marketer's dreams were already fulfilled years ago. They have a more data than most can handle.
Coin can become the credit card of credit cards. They could offer financing, revolving credit, analytics (like Mint), and tons of other financial products based on credit history. These are a lot more interesting - and profitable - than selling ads (or data) to marketers.
It's an obvious idea, but (apparently) nicely executed. It's a perfect acquisition target for Square. Or Visa/MC/Amex.
What happens in the EU doesn't always effect the US, and vice versa.
The fiasco over not implementing GSM like the rest of the developed world did is a good example - less NIH might help.
Coin apparently aren't a MC/Visa issuer, so they can't claim to issue a valid card or mobile payment device. In addition, merchants are supposed to judge cards by the system logo - and Coin can't have MC or Visa logo if they aren't an issuer, and certainly no card is allowed to have both MC and Visa logo (even if they would technically support both), MC/Visa prohibit that.
On an anecdotal basis, the recommendation given to cashiers when teaching them how to handle cards and detect fraud is not really in-depth but more or less "if you see something suspicious that is not a normal card, call the cops", or something like that.
It looks like those cards will create a huge security issue if they are accepted.
On top of that, there's all the convenience issues that plastic brings when out in the real world. Using bitcoin requires a computing device of some sort that's significantly less robust than Coin, a chip & pin card, or a piece of plastic.
I could imagine someone making a credit card that was denominated in bitcoin, but that would be a whole different technology stack than using raw bitcoins.
So the pedantic response to your second sentence is that they consider the See ID irrelevant (and once there is a signature, it is apparently a violation of the merchant agreement to ask for ID, but I didn't look for that in the operating regulations).
The US banking system is incredibly antiquated compared to Canada's (and much of the rest of the world's).
Having only a few big banks makes it much easier to roll out new technology.
This isn't really accurate, in that creating a bank nowadays requires only conformation to The Bank Act, not any royal (or by-proxy Governor General) consent. There are 44 domestic or domestic-subsidiary-of-foreign-corporation Schedule 1 banks in Canada, and 600+ credit unions. The big 5 dominate, but more for historical reasons than anything else.
The long prevalence of things like chip-and-pin and email money transfers and other modern amenities that are just starting to show up in the US has more to do with a marked preference for standardization governed by industry consortiums like Interac in Canada, rather than multiple competing, incompatible credit networks that debit piggybacks on top of, I suspect.
Say you sell a camera to someone using a stolen credit card.
The real owner of the card gets his money back after doing a chargeback. The thief keeps the camera. The merchant loses a camera, the money, and gets a ding in his credit card merchant reputation.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is sided on the other extreme. The merchant has almost all the power. However, the merchant still has a reputation, which might be sufficient incentive.
Neither are airbags in cars, yet the government stepped in and made them mandatory.
> [Credit card companies] all have the incentive in the world to start rolling out chip and pin technology.
No, their incentive is to make sure people keep using credit cards.
They've done the math and concluded that the amount of user confusion resulting from chip and pin technology resulting in less credit card use is less than the cost of fraud. The fact that chip and pin works in Europe, and also that credit card processors still exist in Europe proves that implementing chip and pin isn't going to drive Visa and Mastercard out of business.
> Neither are airbags in cars, yet the government stepped in and made them mandatory.
that's simply untrue.
http://www.riskworld.com/news/97q1/nw7aa029.htm
this testimony is from 1997, and even with mostly first generation airbags in play at that time it's still wrong.
They are even more effective at saving lives now, and many of the problems with passenger side airbags have now been alleviated.
saved lives = saved money (unless you're looking at cost-to-state of an entire life rather than cost-to-state for medical/funeral costs, but that's outside the scope of this)
* the replacement will be when folks like Square, PayPal, etc grow large enough that merchants can replace credit card systems with them for a decent % of customers
Quickly glancing at the ownership of 9 of the 10 largest credit unions outside of Quebec, 8 of the 9 were unrelated to Desjardins. The 4th largest (Meridian Credit of Ontario) was the sole exception. I couldn't find info on the 9th largest, Cambrian Credit of Manitoba.
