I don't have a use for Coin - I have few cards, but the product reminds me of a quote often attributed to Henry Ford, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." While I think it's great for people who have many cards, and there are probably tons of customers like that, it doesn't seem that interesting from a tech point of view.
Coin: A step in the wrong direction
61–70 of 193 posts
Re: Coin: A step in the wrong direction
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Isn't the "old crusty infrastructure" in this case the credit card itself? It seems ridiculous to try to kill the credit card with... a credit card. I wouldn't be surprised if Clinkle, LoopPay, Square, or any of the many startups in this space kills the credit card (and thus Coin) before Coin makes its first delivery in Summer 2014.
Absolutely not. The old crusty layer is everything you don't see running in the background. The banks, the payment systems, the clearing houses, the entire system as a whole.
Re: Coin: A step in the wrong direction
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea but it's still a wireless radio. Who knows what sort of exploit some malicious and clever person could come up with.
IMO, if we worry about that we would never use NFC or any other technology, really. I dare to say that everything is exploitable.
No, we should just always be careful with new technology.
Re: Coin: A step in the wrong direction
#64The hating on Coin is unbelievable. It seems like a great first step towards backwards-compatible card consolidation. 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.
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.
Exactly. Currently in my wallet: a California driver's license, a Green Card, a medical insurance card, and a gym card which works via barcode. There's also a credit and a debit card. Thats's just 2/6 which I could replace with Coin.
Re: Coin: A step in the wrong direction
#65Coin 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.
Coin is sorely needed.
Re: Coin: A step in the wrong direction
#66This 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.
Re: Coin: A step in the wrong direction
#67"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.
Re: Coin: A step in the wrong direction
#68I 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…
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.
Without a doubt.
Coin actually increases the complexity of an already complex and archaic system.
The product manages to create more headaches for the consumer and the merchant by consolidating various credit cards in a digital device with a nice "cool" factor but lacking any real solution to the many problems associated with the complex back-ends in the payments space.
Conceptually, it's not a bad product, and it sucks that the founders are probably reading hundreds of people slamming their hard work. But it's reality.
Re: Coin: A step in the wrong direction
#69I don't hate Coin.
I do find it astounding that magnetic cards are still the standard in the US though.
Re: Coin: A step in the wrong direction
#70It 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 "…
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 thous…
Slight tangent, but I'm pretty sure sending money to phone numbers is pretty much how 90% of banking in Africa gets done, it seems like pretty cool stuff. Also, I have a bank account with PNC, and if I need to send money to a friend, all I need is their email address, and PNC sets up a transfer, and shoots them an email with a link and instructions for retrieving the money/depositing it into their (not necessarily PNC) bank account. Also the whole cashing a check via taking a photo on my phone is a pretty awesome feature.