Re:Coin
by danudey on Friday November 15, 2013 @03:32PM
(#6741958)
As another Canadian:
1. Chip cards do make this almost completely irrelevant
2. Supporting EMV is going to be tricky, because cloning those cards is also tricky (skimmers have spent hundreds of thousands on it and haven't figured it out).
3. Most membership cards, even ones that have magnetic stripes on them, actually use the barcodes on the card. Safeway, CostCo, Shoppers, etc. all have mag stripes, but they all use the barcodes. The Coin won't help you with a single one of them.
4. If, as a cashier, someone handed me a Coin and said 'It's okay, it's a Visa', I would say 'no'. No signature, no card number, no anything. There's no difference from my perspective between a person putting their Visa onto the Coin and a person putting someone else's Visa onto the coin, and I'm not going to start accepting obviously cloned cards regardless of who's holding it.
1. Chip cards do make this almost completely irrelevant
2. Supporting EMV is going to be tricky, because cloning those cards is also tricky (skimmers have spent hundreds of thousands on it and haven't figured it out).
3. Most membership cards, even ones that have magnetic stripes on them, actually use the barcodes on the card. Safeway, CostCo, Shoppers, etc. all have mag stripes, but they all use the barcodes. The Coin won't help you with a single one of them.
4. If, as a cashier, someone handed me a Coin and said 'It's okay, it's a Visa', I would say 'no'. No signature, no card number, no anything. There's no difference from my perspective between a person putting their Visa onto the Coin and a person putting someone else's Visa onto the coin, and I'm not going to start accepting obviously cloned cards regardless of who's holding it.