You hit on something though; in the U.S. there are tens of thousands of ATM machines all over. They all accept PIN numbers, and I "believe" magnetic-strip as well (not sure if they're doing fancy stuff too with built-in chips or not). It's the standard that everyone uses; debit card and credit cards alike.
To change that to support different tech, you'd have to upgrade all of the ATM machines, all of the credit cards, and all of the backend tech. That's a lot of coordination between banks/credit-card companies. On top of that you have POS systems in stores which are all magnetic-strip based as well, accepting PINs and/or signatures.
Any sort of switch would have to be phased-in over years and require a lot of buy-in. Unless retailers, banks, ATM providers, and credit card companies have a good business case to do so, they probably won't.
I'd imagine it would be easier for some other type of technology which displaces cards entirely, like phone-based payments, would eventually replace all of this. An idea like Coin augments the current "archaic" system and has the potential to take off. But outside of the U.S. it sounds like it won't work without modification.
And it is coming to the US too, in some form or other: Pretty much all the major banks have committed to introduce it (though in some cases chip + signature) by mid 2015.
I'm not saying the US isn't behind the times, but where else has a singular rollout of tech like this been done on a US scale?
Of course you can. Countries outside the US did it city by city, bank by bank.
In fact, the US is in the process of a gradual rollout of EMV cards now - a mix of chip+pin and chip+signature cards. The aim for when to complete the transition varies by state, bank, and type of merchants, but most aim to be complete by mid 2015.
There was no big bang switchover anywhere that has already made the transition to my knowledge.
The banks did rolling releases of chip and pin cards as people were issued new cards over a period of years before the switch was complete. When the first people got chip and pin cards there were no locations where they could use the pin.
And in the UK at least, it took a couple of years before you had to use the pin even when faced with a chip+pin terminal - you could keep opting to sign for a long time.
Doing a singular rollout of tech like this is stupid and unnecessary.
I think it took at least 5 years.
So yeah, non-trivial. And if (as it sounds like) the banks in the US have managed to offload most of their fraud problems to everyone else involved in the transaction, then there's probably little incentive.
"Chip and PIN was trialled in Northampton, England from May 2003, and as a result was rolled out nationwide in the United Kingdom in 2004 with advertisements in the press and national television touting the "Safety in Numbers" slogan. During the first stages of deployment, if a fraudulent magnetic swipe card transaction was deemed to have occurred, the retailer was refunded by the issuing bank, as was the case prior to the introduction of Chip and PIN. On January 1, 2005, the liability for such transactions was shifted to the retailer;"
Also note this bbc article[1] suggesting a Feb 2006 deadline for not accepting signatures from cards that were chip and pin enabled.
I would guess the banks had been rolling out EMV capable ATMs well before 2003. Retail level EMV may have taken two years from trial to liability swith. Infrastructure changes would have pre-dated that by years.
I know EMV cards had been distributed to customers since the late 90s because I used to use mine for testing while I developed the software I wrote that ran several of the retailer systems in that Northampton trial :)
From a consumer perspective, it was virtually painless. The biggest change is that credit card transactions now require a PIN (assuming a chip card and chip-enabled POS).
The lack of chip card support in Coin effectively makes it a US only product at this point as most of the card-heavy countries have moved past mag swipe (or, are in the process).
Once a quarter of cards sport chips and a quarter of machines support chips, it's just a question of issuing new chip cards when old cards come due (or get lost/stolen).
The Chip and Pin machines have a channel to swipe. There are very few places where you hand over a card. For example, in the train stations, the machine to swipe a card is on the same side of the glass as the customer. The agent never handles your card.
So they might be more accepting of Coin (given that they don't see that it is different) than American businesses.
It's entirely possible that Coin may still be useless outside the US if most machines will reject your card's strip.
Also, as other people have pointed out, the US is moving to chip cards in a couple of years (2015). So this product already has a very short shelf-life.
"Swipe" cards have been phased out years ago - you'd have to try hard to find a bank which will still issue one.
Specifically because you can no longer find ATMs which rely solely on the magstripe. Some banks have biometric fingerprint readers (where you put in your hand and it reads multiple fingerprints at the same time) in addition to the PIN code of the debit/credit card, and sometimes additional passwords.
My bank does not rely on biometrics, but in order to do any transactions, I have to enter a code generated by the bank which consists of three strings, which are prompted one at a time, displayed on screen mixed with other random and unrelated strings, so that someone peeking over my shoulder would not be able to match the button with what's on screen and finally, before the transaction is complete, the account's password. And that's with a chip.
The portable readers you can find everywhere still have magstripe readers in addition to the chip reader and will refuse to read the magnetic strip if the card contains a chip.
Those portable readers use either a 3g connection or standard dialup.
As for the physical "imprints", this is something that 30-somethings like me can barely remember.
Also related: there are no bills which can't be paid online. All banks accept them, unless specified otherwise (usually there are restriction after the expiry date). If you get a bill by mail (instead of email), you can just type the barcode. Or scan it, if you have a reader or a mobile phone with the bank's app.
The concept of getting bills by mail, and then mailing back cheques, as found in the US, is completely alien.