I dislike this article: it seems to suffer from 'perfect is the enemy of good'-itis and willful misunderstanding of how complex -- and difficult -- commerce can be.
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.)
Coin is like "Google Voice for Credit Card". Its a layer that sits on top of an old, crusty infrastructure that hopefully crumbles with time, but until then, we have to deal with it somehow.
I used to work at the Federal Trade Commission, so I'm quite familiar with this particular legal issue. What Coin is doing violates neither the spirit nor the letter of the Mail Order Rule.
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.
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.
To clarify about the pre-order issue: There's nothing inherently wrong with asking for funds to push the development of a product forward. Kickstarter has done a great job of promoting that model, and the world has seen a lot of good come out of it.
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.
Actually this is very much illegal. You cannot charge someone for a product and then not deliver it. Kickstarter doesn't charge you for a product, you pledge or donate to a project on Kickstarter and if it's successful, you get the item(s) for the level you pledged to for free.
For me, it's like the classic Spolsky critique of the "Cue Cat". It's solving a problem that I don't have. I carry a wallet anyway to contain my ID, my cash, and other cards that are not credit cards. Carrying a couple of credit cards along with all that is not a problem.
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.
Some of the 'hate' is coming from places (eg. Canada) that have already moved on to chip cards (which won't and probably can't work with this) and are now slowly moving on to nfc. It's just already late for this kind of development. 5 years ago? I'd have been all over this. Now? I'm just waiting for Apple to adopt NFC so we can all move forward on better solutions.
> The hating on Coin is unbelievable. It seems like a great first step towards backwards-compatible card consolidation.
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.
For me part of the issue is that I have enough money troubles where I am in life (and I'll admit Coin isn't probably targeted at me in that case) that I don't have time to worry about there being issues with the device that delivers purchases. I don't need, for example, one of those issues being that something that should hit a credit card hits a debit card or vice versa. When I give someone plastic they can't change the payment account when I'm not looking.
Two issues with Coin. One is this has been done before, exact same approach, and it did not work out because the card issuers didn't buy in (a credit card is also part of the issuing bank's brand). Maybe that's changed in the past few years, but I am skeptical.
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.
> One is this has been done before, exact same approach, and it did not work out because the card issuers didn't buy in
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.
Another point. If they opt to let consumers copy their own cards without the issuing bank's permission, I'd be very surprised if copying the mag strip is not a very big violation of TOS. If they go the guerrilla route, they'll basically be asking for legal trouble. I don't like to be critical, it's innovative, but I think they'll have a tough time.
Plastic credit card costs next to nothing to manufacture, can be dropped from a 10 story building (good luck finding it afterwards though), can get wet with me in a heavy rain, can be replaced in 24 hours (at my bank) and I have $0 liability if I lose it or someone steals it from me. Compare this to Coin (or other solutions like phone based payments) and you will see that it is indeed a step in the wrong direction though not for the reasons discussed in the article.
Cool. I didn't know if it was a bug or I was actually gagged/filtered, but my reply button disappeared, then later reappeared. Glad I wasn't banned. :)
I feel like some people on HN thrive so much on negativity. I don't even think this feedback is constructive.
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.
I feel like a lot of feedback could be useful if it was framed differently. Everyone talking about the potential to lose multiple cards at once, or fraud, or theft, or the 8-card limit seems to come at it from a position of snark and sarcasm.
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.
That's an interesting document. One would think that Coin would be used in "Card Present Transactions," however, none of the security features of a real card can be verified using a Coin, since they don't exist. Why would a merchant accept Coin?
This article is ridiculous and doesn't even have anything to do with Coin.
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.
> Yeah, it's been on the way for the past 10 years, but nothing's changed yet!
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
> And the second half has nothing to do with Coin itself either, but is about Kickstarter charging in general.
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.
It really seems like this author has some kind of bone to pick.
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.
Why would banks go away? In the UK Barclays ran a load of ads a year or two back about "PingIt", their app for sending money to phone numbers or paying for things with QR codes.
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...
This would be like saying, in 1994, that Amazon was a step in the wrong direction for selling books online instead of realizing that physical books would stop existing altogether.
This article "is the step in the wrong direction".
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.
Coin is actually a step in the perfectly fine, sideways direction. It keeps everything on the credit card rail - something where there are fees so ridiculous that Congress actually PASSED legislation to limit them - that's amazing.
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 @ [email protected] 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!
This is definitely link bait. Indicate that a YCombinator startup is a waste of time and you are guaranteed to get some hits. Or get upvoted on HN.
> 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. "
"I think google wallet, square, and other RFID/NFC technologies are thinking about the future... The problem with these technologies is vendor adoption. It’s not here yet, but it’s on the way."
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.
What this article suggests is pretty much impractical. The writer clearly does not understand the financial / payments infrastructure. Coin is not perfect, but at least they're taking a practical and pragmatic look on the problem.
Coin is absolutely a step in the right direction for one simple reason: it offers a convenient transition option.
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.
I am always paranoid when it comes to technology and money, and this will be no exception. BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) has been around for 2-3 years now, but I still consider it to be in it's infancy. This is especially true when it comes to security. A quick Google Search produced two examples [1] and [2] of potential security flaws with BLE pairing and authentication, and I'm sure there are many more I'm not aware of. Building new payment technology based on new and cutting edge communication frameworks does sound exotic and cool. It's probably one of those "cool points" that gets investors excited. But for the security minded folks out there, this is likely a red flag. Instead I see it as building payment related technology on an un-proven communication framework, and it just does not sound like a great idea. And it is because of this that I will probably never personally use something like Coin regardless of how useful it might be. All it takes is one person to create an effective exploit, and there goes both your money and your trust in the Service. In any event, good luck to Coin with this new Product, and I hope they prove me wrong. If they are looking for a recommendation (which I'm sure they're not), I would recommend a sharp focus on securing the BLE connections between the Coin Wallet and the Smartphone Device.
> Coin is trying to replace your credit cards (no other cards, like ID, Buss Pass, etc) with a single electronic card.
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.
No. octopus card is just another card but because people like using it so much places like 7-11 won't mind to have it. You load money into the octopus card (not sure if now banks allow account linking). At least when I was kid that was how things worked.
Coin is a very neat idea that will be hampered by many practical limitations.
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.
[+] [-] jmduke|12 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] bradgessler|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbecker|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] socalnate1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martingordon|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rickyc091|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aclimatt|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] samuelkadolph|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carsongross|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ams6110|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stormbrew|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcv|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lanaius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianmcconnell|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cypher543|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] brianmcconnell|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsh123|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] negrit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg|12 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, this is false.
[+] [-] lowglow|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kin|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] loganu|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] martin-adams|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dnm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gergles|12 years ago|reply
>> Transactions cannot be deposited until goods or services have been shipped.
[+] [-] gmjoe|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] saidajigumi|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] dragonwriter|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chavesn|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jebus989|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] RRiccio|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Link-|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tomasien|12 years ago|reply
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 @ [email protected] 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!
[+] [-] zamalek|12 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] abalone|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nayefc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namuol|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danudey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shawnreilly|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://lacklustre.net/bluetooth/
[2] http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/309.pdf
[+] [-] nickstinemates|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yeukhon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ruswick|12 years ago|reply
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.