Live data from Hacker News

Plastc Card

plastc.com

91–100 of 356 posts

Re: Plastc Card

#91
post #35

What need does this address? Are cards taking up too much room in people's lives? This solution doesn't reduce the height or width of the encumbrance at all, and reduces the depth only by n*.76mm, where n is the number of cards that will be replaced. I don't get it. Also, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheZenOfProgramming

It serves the company's need to insert itself into the financial data stream. You know the story: "It's a $2 trillion industry - imagine if we just captured a fraction of that! Step 3: profit."

For users, this must be some retro fad jumping the gun. Given the value of the transaction data going through this thing, it should be free at worst.

Re: Plastc Card

#92

I pre-ordered Coin and have signed up for the beta and while this card seems to be much cooler (and 3x more expensive) I feel like Coin has a better chance of making it to market. Their idea and product just seems more "do-able" than this. It's easy to throw up a list of tech specs on a website, it's a lot harder to actually ship those features. I'm highly skeptical of their support for chip-and-pin. In my (uneducate…

Just to clarify, Coin is 100$ not 50$. Not sure where you're getting the 3x factor from.

Re: Plastc Card

#93
What would actually be slightly lower in cost and leverage existing infrastructure better would be this Plastc card but remove the bluetooth, the touch interface, chip-n-pin, and the internal battery. Just have an app on your NFC phone and have it send the card data over NFC to the card when you want to use it. In this way you could just have an app on your phone which can work with the bank over the Net to generate throw-away numbers for every transaction.

Having any credit card number which you've ever used only usable for one single purchase would make fraud have to change to adapt. But you could probably sell such a thing easily today with all the recent loss of credit card number news. Granted, the vendor of such a card has to partner with a bank to enable this feature set, and then only a small number of people will want such a card as it imposes a new workflow for paying for things.

Re: Plastc Card

#94
If the card presented by the customer can show the picture and signature for authentication, my hacked plastc will show my picture and signature along with my fraudulent magstripe.

It's security theater...

Re: Plastc Card

#95
post #34

A credit card that requires charging? Haha, no.

It could be handy if when it runs out of battery it remains as the last selected card. Not sure if the re-programmable strips require a charge to hold their pattern.

Re: Plastc Card

#96
post #68
post #35

What need does this address? Are cards taking up too much room in people's lives? This solution doesn't reduce the height or width of the encumbrance at all, and reduces the depth only by n*.76mm, where n is the number of cards that will be replaced. I don't get it. Also, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheZenOfProgramming

Say you have 10k stolen cards...now its easy to carry them all.

"Flash Memory (up to 20 cards)"

Good luck with that.

Re: Plastc Card

#97
post #16

They say this supports chip-and-PIN, but I don't believe them until they explain how. If I have a chip-and-PIN card from my bank, the chip has an unreadable secret used to generate one-time cryptograms to verify the authenticity of the card. There's no way to get that secret onto my Plastc card. You'd need partnerships with banks to get a new secret the way Apple Pay does. Without those, this sounds like it'll be use…

They could be doing something else funny, like providing their own credit card info to the merchant via the chip and then just billing your credit card in the background, like how Google Wallet works...

Re: Plastc Card

#98

Whilst I wouldn't go as far as to say "never going to happen", I am fairly cynical about this and similar products like coin. Not for any particular technical reason (although I'd be very interested to hear how they plan to make this work with Chip & PIN) but from a risk/liability perspective. At the moment most banks that I'm aware of provide an online fraud guarantee and a credit card fraud guarantee, so as long as…

> loss of branding on their cards and the additional fraud risk

Loss of branding is a fair point, but I think this would reduce fraud risk. Automatically deactivating itself when lost or stolen more than makes up for the risk of trusting Plastc.

Re: Plastc Card

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well - I carry 3, and would carry 7 if I wasn't trying to slim down my wallet. Those 3 are: * An personal AMEX cashback card, that gives me a very nice 5% back in certain categories, and 1% back on everything else. * A Visa Airline miles card, for places that don't take AMEX or travel spending where I earn 2x or more miles. * A business Visa credit card for the business my wife owns. The other cards I'd carry if I wa…

I'm not a junkie, but I still have three cards: One I use for everything, until their idiotic fraud department is confused as to how I'm spending money in Chicago after taking a flight to Chicago I bought with that card. Another I use as a backup, for this situation. Debit card, for extracting paper money from ATM machines.

Oh yeah - I totally forgot about my debit card. So I guess I carry 4 and would carry at least 8 without space constraints.

Re: Plastc Card

#100
post #92

I pre-ordered Coin and have signed up for the beta and while this card seems to be much cooler (and 3x more expensive) I feel like Coin has a better chance of making it to market. Their idea and product just seems more "do-able" than this. It's easy to throw up a list of tech specs on a website, it's a lot harder to actually ship those features. I'm highly skeptical of their support for chip-and-pin. In my (uneducate…

Just to clarify, Coin is 100$ not 50$. Not sure where you're getting the 3x factor from.

Coin is $100 now but it's original pre-orders were $50. I didn't know they raised the price after I bought it.
Post reply on HN