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Startup Touts All-in-One Digital Credit Card

Posted by timothy on from the fewer-pieces-to-steal dept.

First time accepted submitter NoImNotNineVolt writes "Coin, a Y Combinator-backed startup, has started accepting pre-orders for a device as slim as a standard piece of payment plastic that can hold eight credit, debit, and gift cards in its dynamic magnetic stripe. Paired with the Coin smartphone app via Bluetooth low energy, card details can easily be swapped in and out of the device. A minimalist user interface on the device itself allows the owner to toggle between the loaded cards and then swipe just as they would their ordinary card. All card details are encrypted (both on the device and in the smartphone app), and the device's on-board battery is expected to last for two years of typical usage. No support for chip&pin (EMV) yet, so this may have limited utility outside of the USA. They expect to start shipping in summer of 2014."

6 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Great for CC scammers by hsmith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now an all in one solution to skim and use credit cards.

    But, I don't see this catching on. Tapping to pay with your device is "new" so people don't think much of it. Paying with an "all in one" credit card isn't something most will be used to. Plus, I'd expect pushback from Visa/AMEX on this.

    1. Re:Great for CC scammers by cheater512 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Quick little dive in to the code with a debugger and watch those limitations vanish in front of your eyes......

    2. Re:Great for CC scammers by Amouth · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't think the issue is so much with having a skimmer. Right now if i show up with a card that doesn't look like an actual CC the person at the counter will think something is up. But if this gets going and has blessings of the CC makers, and looks official the teller will just say "hey he has that neat new card" and not care that you are no infact using a skimmer.

      --
      '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
    3. Re:Great for CC scammers by adolf · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Meh. It's his signature, and he can draw it any way he wants to.

      --
      Kid-proof tablet..
  2. Cute; but why? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Cramming a UI and the electromagnetics required to spoof a mag stripe into something small enough to make it through a card reader is pretty impressive; but I just don't see the point.

    I need another intermediary in my payment system like I need a hole in the head(and I certainly don't need any credit card details stashed in yet another OMGTOTALLY SECURE!!! server or app), and I'd need a hell of a lot of plastic infesting my wallet before a $100 piece of hardware, and BTLE-compatible smartphone become the lower-hassle alternative.

    Along with a card reader, it'd probably be great fun as a tool for duplicating low security cards(eg. copier stored value cards, which commonly actually store their value in the stripe, rather than just encoding an ID that gets looked up by the payment processor), and generally fucking around with mag stripe readers; but for actual real-world financial transactions? How many credit cards do you carry on a daily basis?

  3. To bad it's way less secure than chip and PIN by seifried · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To bad it's way less secure than chip and PIN. Mag stripes can be trivially copied and then used. In Canada a lot of the payment terminals are configured to not allow mag stripe usage if the card has a chip (I disabled the chip on one of my cards to see what happens, only place that would let me swipe is Home Depot, and even then the machine wouldn't accept it, they had to pull out an old physical ka-chunker machine and do it manually, haven't seen those in ages).