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Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

plastc.com

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Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#141

Post by chrisseaton »

Symbiote wrote: post #129
chrisseaton wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you ever use a EC card instead of a credit card? Credit card companies literally pay you to use their cards. Why turn down that money? I carry two credit cards because one is American Express and pays me more but fewer places accept it, so I have a backup Visa that pays me a bit less but everywhere accepts it.

("EC card" implies Germany.) The EU imposes a maximum 0.3% fee to the merchant for accepting a credit card. This is to avoid any unfair competition between cash and cards, and between poorer people not eligible for cards that get cashback. The UK used to have cards giving 2-3% cashback, sometimes more, but they've all been withdrawn. I don't bother with a credit card, since it's one less automatic bill payment and on…

You can still get 1.25% back in the EU. It's not a lot, but it's still just free cash.

https://www.americanexpress.com/uk/content/platinum-cashback...

I have a card that gets me miles instead of cash. I did the maths and worked out those were better value for what I wanted. Again, they're just free miles and I'm always flying with the airline anyway so I'm never making extra trips in order to spend them.

The genius of the system I use is that I have multiple credit cards (American Express, Visa) but actually they all just feed into the same account with the same bill to make managing them simple.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#143

Post by mathgeek »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #110
moeadham wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chip + Sign reduces 80% of classic fraud. Chip + PIN reduces ~98% (last I heard in 2016). Someone I spoke to at capital one said that Visa/MS decided to do Chip+Sign in the US due to the increased support costs of forgotten PINs.

I'd be interested to know how much of a problem this is in Canada. Maybe it's different here because debit cards are so common that we've been trained to remember our PINs. My bank even uses Chip & PIN as the first step for an in-person transaction at a teller.

> My bank even uses Chip & PIN as the first step for an in-person transaction at a teller.

Some banks do that here in the US as well, as do retailers. Those are both for debit card transactions, though.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#144

Post by mathgeek »

pjc50 wrote: post #140
icelancer wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They could have opted to not use the pre-order money to fund their operations Exactly. Sequestering pre-order money - at least some fraction of it - should have been one of the first orders of business for any company who cares about integrity.

People talk about this as customers, but: surely the point of pre-order money in many cases is precisely to fund operations - to provide the working capital needed to do manufacturing? If I have a hardware product that costs $80 to make (x10,000) and I'm selling it on Kickstarter for $100, are you saying that after taking in a million on kickstarter I should just sequester it and then find a spare $800k to do the act…

The key difference here is that the manufacturing never actually happened. They seem to have used preorder money to fund other steps in the process but never actually made the product beyond some initial devices.

Kickstarter to fund manufacturing should happen at the appropriate time in the process, if you're "doing it the right way."

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#146

Post by GuB-42 »

ricardobeat wrote: post #134
abalone wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everywhere that accepts cards Given the shift to chip-and-PIN, which can't be emulated like this -- Plastc claimed they could but never demonstrated it (because it's impossible) -- they were way too late to market with this idea even 3 years ago. And if merchants are going to roll out new POS hardware they might as well jump to NFC as it leapfrogs cards on convenience. And security, if your device implements tokeni…

> Given the shift to chip-and-PIN, which can't be emulated like this I don't know the tech behind it but this Dutch startup is doing exactly that: https://www.bunq.com/en/

From the looks of it, Bunq is a bank. I didn't see the product you are talking about but I suppose it may be like a payment processor forwarding orders to third parties. Plastc is a purely technical solution, it has a rewritable magnetic strip so you can copy any card to it, not just payment cards. You can't do it with chips because chips are designed to be impossible to copy. They have secret keys inside and I don't think card providers are willing to reveal them and weaken their security.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#147

Post by abalone »

hocuspocus wrote: post #138
abalone wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curve has its own card number. The closest thing to Curve here was a card called Wallaby. It somehow redirected charges from one card to another... I think they were getting creative with the processing rules and got shot down. Not sure how Curve does it exactly but I'm skeptical of their long term viability. Either they're similarly creative or they are acting like a merchant and recharging every transaction and eat…

As far as I understand, Curve is viable due to the fact they issue corporate cards (you can see "for commercial use only" on their cards). Europe has capped interchange fees to 0.2% and 0.3% for debit and credit cards respectively. However, three-party schemes (like Amex) and corporate cards are exempt and charge more. But you're right, I'm not sure how MasterCard is happy with that (since the product is clearly targ…

I see, so they're charging merchants high corporate card interchange and then recharging the consumer card. Yeah, that's sketchy. I wonder if they're pocketing the difference.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#148

Post by dboreham »

vosper wrote: post #112
dboreham wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also people in US are in the habit of handing their card over to family members to use, which works with signature because the POS operator never checks the signature, but won't work with PIN because PINs are supposed to be super-secret. Hence requiring PIN would reduce the spend on credit cards (no lending and spending), hence fewer smaller boats for credit card executives.

Huh? Someone trusts their family member to spend responsibly with their credit card, and is happy for that person to forge their signature, but wouldn't tell them the PIN code because it's "supposed to be super-secret"? That doesn't make sense to me.

Should have explained the logic better: it is the banks that have taken the decision not to use PINs (partly) because they do not want to get into a position where they both tell people never to reveal their PINs, but also tacitly condone card sharing that implies PIN-sharing.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#149

Post by blackguardx »

kolinko wrote: post #130
blackguardx wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your link just describes decapping and reading the state of mask programmable PROM. Reverse engineering a secure IC and coming up with an exploit is several orders (like 10) of magnitude more involved.

So if the first takes a day, the latter - 10 million days?

But seriously, difficulty also implies required skill and equipment.
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