It's a neat concept, but I just don't think this gets anywhere.
Dead in the water - as much as I would personally like to see them succeed.
The biggest problems here are security.
() Merchants will hate it since there is no physical imprint / swipe of the bank-issued card. This will lead to chargebacks in favor of the customer. So this alone kills this company/product.
() Banks might change their terms forbidding customers to create digital copies / clones of their card. As per card holder agreements, if you (or Coin) has ever read one, you don't own your card. You're fully bound by the terms of the agreement.
() There is the issue of PCI-DSS compliance. They mention they're "in the process of earning" it but this is a lengthy, difficult and _costly_ process ($100 k). They're using a loophole to ensure consumer peace of mind but this won't last at all.
() Adding a card seems flawed. You're asked to take a picture of the physical card after swiping to "prevent fraud" ok but unless Coin uses some advanced image processing/OCR to validate the card with the swiped data, you can take a picture of any card. So big fail here.
() Coin seems to access a cloud service. Another major reason that this simply isn't going to work. If you've paid any attention to the NSA situation within the past 6-months, ordinary/average consumers (not the HN crowd) are becoming weary of cloud/hosted service. Not to mention, Coin will never ever work outside of the US (or San Francisco for that matter).
Practical usability problems:
() Most users are totally fine with credit cards and big wallets. It's actually empowering to them. I spoke to a guy who loves the fact that he has every color Amex card! So in essence, this is geared towards a micro-niche of tech savvy SF/NY/LA crowd.
() Selecting a card by tapping the button - great. What if the waiter taps the same button? Or someone you're paying does? So many issues with this button here.
"We’ve designed the button to toggle cards in a way that makes it difficult to trigger a "press" unintentionally" -- yeah, well most of the time, credit card fraud is an intentional act. What a stupid response. And quite frankly, offensive to anyone with half a brain.
() The obvious issue of losing Coin and losing everything. People like backups. It's a mindset.
() Battery issues with digitizing a non-battery product (credit card). Be in no doubt that more than half of users will forget to charge their credit card (as if we don't have enough things to charge). So you'll see people having lunches and presenting a dead Coin. And since you don't have any plastic, well, now you're screwed.
Products are supposed to make life better, easier, more intuitive.
Conceptually, it sort of makes sense. But the execution is flawed in so many ways.
You're being sold a product that now requires more steps than you did before. And that is the killer fellow HN'ers.
I don't want to have to sync, take photos, select a card by pushing a button, make sure it's within range to my device, update the app when needed for it to work, deal with merchants who won't take it, CHARGE my credit card (!), deal with issues because I tapped/selected the wrong card - vs - take out and swipe. Done.
Fuck that.
The product is inherently flawed