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Jonathan's Card

jonathanstark.com

131–140 of 232 posts

Re: Jonathan's Card

#132
"Jonathan's Card is an experiment in social sharing of physical goods using digital currency on mobile phones."

What, exactly, is the hypothesis? While this _seems_ cool, I really don't understand what he's setting out to prove, that we don't already know: This will work until the number of people who abuse it grows to a certain point, after which everyone will loose faith, and nobody will contribute more funds.

[Ha. I just noticed the posts describing how this is being hacked.]

Re: Jonathan's Card

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there a way to figure out what store the purchases are coming from?

Someone is DEFINITELY messing with it -- nobody buys exactly $45 in Starbucks: http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10035604975584460...

you never know -- multiple purchases could've added up to $45.00 exactly I guess

Re: Jonathan's Card

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone is DEFINITELY messing with it -- nobody buys exactly $45 in Starbucks: http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10035604975584460...

you never know -- multiple purchases could've added up to $45.00 exactly I guess

I'm inclined to go with Occam's Razor on this one and I am usually Devil's Advocate arguing that highly improbably events don't by themselves prove "guilt". However, multiple such? Even I think this looks very suspicious (and have become somewhat appalled at the amount of money people are willing to throw away to test if this has been hacked or not).

Re: Jonathan's Card

#135

Standing in line waiting for my drink. Cool experiment. Going to put the cash back when I get home.

Follow-up, going to add money now but learning why for the modest bunch, this is genius. I spent a bout $5.50 USD to get a drink for my girlfriend and I. When I go to the Starbucks reload a card site, I have to put at least $10.00 USD on the card. What's more is this made me really think about the idea of Google Wallet and any other phone-based credit card apps. In theory, I could take a screenshot of anyone's card and just mail it to myself. Does anyone know if there's plans to randomize barcodes/symbols to prevent things like this? This really just brightened up my Sunday evening.

Re: Jonathan's Card

#136
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they?

Because he gets a lot of free coffee rebates.

Why would they care as long they get 15 cups of coffee sold? And one person with lots of free coffee tokens is very less likely to use them all than various persons having them.

Re: Jonathan's Card

#137
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aha, you are right. I will edit that. Any ideas?

I wonder if Jonathan is around and is able to look up the transaction history on the starbucks website, and if that shows any information on where the money is spent/moved?

Jonathan here:

The transaction info available on the Starbucks site and mobile app is pretty limited, but I can see that the transactions are listed as "In Store Purchase". For example:

http://cl.ly/3H1j3g443X0y0O3j2M2L

Unfortunately, there is no info about which stores the purchases were made in, and the history only goes back about 20 transactions. It does look like some people are making large purchases, which is jerky, but not totally unexpected.

Thanks, j

Re: Jonathan's Card

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jonathan here: Draining the card to the penny is not weird. If there is $10 on the card and your purchase is $11.50, $10 will be removed from the card and you have to pay the remaining $1.50 some other way. Expected behavior :) j

There is at least two cases that this doesnt explain. http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10034195955777536... http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10035604975584460... edit: now at least 5, see above

Jonathan here:

I see what you're saying, and of course it is possible that some jerk is buying gift cards with the card.

That said, it's worth pointing out that the tweet stream is not real time and it doesn't have every transaction. The card balance is scraped from the sbux site every minute and posted to Twitter if it has changed since the last tweet. When there are multiple transactions in the same minute, the changes get aggregated. This can result in some strange looking numbers.

What I think we're learning here is that if someone wants to reload the card, lots of little transactions over time is better than one big one. Or, perhaps the balance should not be tweeted.

Thoughts? j

Re: Jonathan's Card

#140
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Jonathan is around and is able to look up the transaction history on the starbucks website, and if that shows any information on where the money is spent/moved?

Jonathan here: The transaction info available on the Starbucks site and mobile app is pretty limited, but I can see that the transactions are listed as "In Store Purchase". For example: http://cl.ly/3H1j3g443X0y0O3j2M2L Unfortunately, there is no info about which stores the purchases were made in, and the history only goes back about 20 transactions. It does look like some people are making large purchases, which is…

Thanks for your reply. I noticed an autoreload button in the screenshot and an idea I had is maybe it is possible to utilise 2 cards and reload one with the other when the balance goes below a certain amount? This would stop a person taking a large amount in a single transaction.
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