9 ms·

Plastc Card

648 points by cktsai 12y ago

bravo22 12y ago
Reprogrammable stripes have been around for a while, and while this is a more attractive implementation the new EMV rollout (accelerated likely by the recent card breaches) will make this impractical. You can't reprogram an EMV.
skorecky 12y ago
Wow, this will certainly give Coin (https://onlycoin.com/ https://onlycoin.com/) a run for their money.
- lost_name 12y ago
  Important difference: Plastic supports Chip & Pin, Coin does not. Plastic: https://www.plastc.com/card#tech-specs https://www.plastc.com/card#tech-specs Coin: https://onlycoin.com/support/faq/#security https://onlycoin.com/support/faq/#security
  - guan 12y ago
    How they will support chip and PIN? Will they need cooperation from the issuer? If not, then they need to clone the cryptographic keys inside the chip, and I thought those were supposed to be tamper resistant.
  - seanmccann 12y ago
    Which is increasingly important because that "far date in the future" of October 1, 2015 in less than 12 months away. On October 1, 2015 "Liability will shift to acquirers for domestic and cross-border counterfeit fraud card-present POS transactions if the merchant does not have an EMV-enabled POS device." Over the next year nearly all merchants will switch over.
  - robbiet480 12y ago
    Plastc also supports NFC
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - bravo22 12y ago
      I'm calling shenanigans after reading their specs. Here are my reasons: NFC + EMV secure elements are issued by banks and can't be reprogrammed. You can't switch between them on the fly. You can only house "multiple" EMVs if you can by some grace of god magic convince the different banks, and Amex to take your card to their facility and program it with their secure info and then give it back to you. E-ink displays are WAY thicker than they can fit in there. They are also made on GLASS substrate, much more fragile than something you want to put in your pocket. If you looks closely at the video the e-ink screen is faked by CGI. It doesn't perfectly register in the same location on every frame. There is a shake. Driving an e-ink display requires high bias voltage, ~+/-20V. Often done via charge pumps with chips such as TI's TPS65180 (http://www.ti.com/product/tps65180 http://www.ti.com/product/tps65180). The chip alone (minus PCB) is thicker than a credit card and therefore a credit card slot. The switching capacitors you'd need to generate the voltage would also be too big to fit within that footprint.
      - jrockway 12y ago
        There are several variants on the NFC protocol. Some contain secure elements (with a CVV3, which is a cryptographically-signed incrementing number), but I believe they can also just dumbly-send the normal card data over the air. I've also seen credit cards made from glass. I think they're NFC-only, though, because of the thickness, but I could be mistaken.
        bravo22 12y ago
        You are correct in that the NFC is just a protocol but for it to be used without a signature you need a secure element. In their "mock-up" they show a smart car interface on the front and in the FAQ they claim EMV. It is very puzzling.
        objclxt 12y ago
        > I believe they can also just dumbly-send the normal card data over the air. Only while the US still is supporting that. Once the liability shift occurs next year it'll be EMV or nothing.
  - jrockway 12y ago
    I doubt that it actually supports Chip & Pin; it probably supports the kind where your card number can be read via those contacts, but still requires your signature to complete the transaction. Another option is just proxying your card; their card has a valid chip & pin and credit card number, and when they process the charge, they pay for it by charging your actual card. If I recall correctly, the credit card companies don't particularly like this, but maybe things have changed recently.
- sbenario 12y ago
  I think the real question is who is more likely to ship an actual product.
  - poonjahb 12y ago
    My question is whether these are the same people that came up with coin and this is simply another ploy to get people's money for a product that will never make it to market. Both domains are private registrations from GoDaddy. If either was a genuine corporate entity you would think they would have real information in their domain registration.
- brentm 12y ago
  I can't help to think this and Coin are each a solution in search of a problem. Do you know many people that use more than 3 cards regularly? If the norm was to have so many cards they barely fit in your wallet this would be perfect.
  - slantyyz 12y ago
    >> Do you know many people that use more than 3 cards regularly? It's not so much about use as it is about carry. I may use only 3 cards regularly, but I carry 13 in my wallet. Most of the lesser used cards are ID I have little choice but to carry or loyalty cards for places where I shop. _IF_ the claims about chip and pin capability are true, I'd be able to pull out at least half of the cards in my wallet, which would be a significant amount of bulk.
  - kerkeslager 12y ago
    If it were just credit/debit cards, I'd agree with you, but this purports to support gift cards. I've had too many gift cards to carry around, and ended up not using them because when I was actually in the store they were at home. So I do think it does solve a problem. That said, the problem this solves isn't important enough to justify the price tag (for me).
  - kstrauser 12y ago
    It claims to support RFID, so I wouldn't have to carry my work door card. I'd strongly consider that.
    - slyhacked 12y ago
      Would your work let you put your details in a phone to be synced to a device like this? Plus most door cards are 125Khz and NFC/credit cards etc use 13.5Mhz so I wouldn't expect it to be compatible.
  - atourgates 12y ago
    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 wasn't annoyed by a thick wallet are: * A Costco AMEX that gives me extra cashback at Costco. * A couple store-specific Visa cards that give me nice benefits at stores where I shop at least semi-regularly. * A work credit card for my work. I'm a bit of a miles/cashback junkie, but I'll bet many people have at least a few cards they'd like to consolodate. The average American family has 8. Like I said in another comment, I'd be thrilled if I could replace all those with one card, and I'd be happy to pay what Plastc is asking if it worked. But the most likely scenario I see for that happening is mobile payments a'la ApplePay.
theuri 12y ago
Looks interesting. Was thinking of waiting until a v2 just to let them work through security issues. Seems like the website itself has some front-end glitches - like the "About" page for example (this code visible: <?php if( extension_loaded(‘newrelic’) ) { echo newrelic_get_browser_timing_header(); } ?>)
- sleepycal 12y ago
  Sorry yeah my bad, was in the middle of re-writing git history when this got pushed, took a few minutes to revert :) No security problems on frontend, in fact it was the parser protections which kicked in, preventing <?php from parsing etc.
  - theuri 12y ago
    Cool thanks - like the website and glad to hear you fixed it so quickly.
seanmccann 12y ago
Really cool, but I can't help but think this is too little too late. With Apple Pay set to launch this month, this feels lackluster.
johlindenbaum 12y ago
With chip & pin (and the October 2015 deadline for the US to switch to chip & pin) this is awesome, and might actually make it up to Canada, where we've moved onto NFC and chip & pin. I have a sneaky feeling that Coin's long radio silence and pushed ship dates are them re-engineering to have chip & pin at launch.
pervycreeper 12y ago
1) The process of selecting a card and paying appears to have many more steps compared to merely selecting the appropriate physical card and using that. Is the sell here something to do with security (not displaying the card number all the time)? Does this support temporary/ burner numbers? 2) I would like to know what target demographic, if any, that that ad was not intended to irritate.
- kenferry 12y ago
  The prospect of getting away without a wallet is exciting to me! If I could get down to just driver's license, this, and billfold, that'd be pretty cool.
  - atourgates 12y ago
    I would pay 2x what they're asking if it worked like it's supposed to, and I could leave everything else behind. But realistically, I think mobile payment systems are much more likely to succeed. Plus, I already have my phone with me anyway, and it doesn't seem too far fetched that it could provide all the info on my driver's license. So with that and widespread adoption of ApplePay (or whatever ends up succeeding in that space) I'm down to just leaving the house with my phone and whatever cash I want to carry.
    - pervycreeper 12y ago
      > I think mobile payment systems are much more likely to succeed It's not either/or. Something like this or Coin are essentially interfaces for what will be legacy devices. If it were either/or, then mobile payments would certainly be the better solution.
      - atourgates 12y ago
        That's true, though I think once major retailers, gas stations, grocery stores and ATMs are accepting mobile payments, you'd be able to get by without any "legacy" forms of payment pretty easily.
nodesocket 12y ago
I really like the idea, but at $155 this is a luxury item for people who have disposable income. Also, with the release of Apple Pay, I truly think eventually all brick and mortar businesses will support paying with your phone.
- smeyer 12y ago
  >eventually all brick and mortar businesses will support paying with your phone There are brick and mortar businesses that don't even support credit cards. It could be a long time before all brick and mortar businesses support phone payments.
  - Bud 12y ago
    Very few. If 90-95% support this, and they will, very soon, that's plenty.
- lclarkmichalek 12y ago
  s/phone/iphone/?
  - livingparadox 12y ago
    ApplePay is NFC, I believe. So if merchants add the infrastructure to support ApplePay, it should also support Google Waller (also NFC).
natrius 12y ago
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 useless once the chip-and-PIN switch happens in a year or so.
- richbradshaw 12y ago
  That's exactly what I came here to say - if this can do chip and PIN, then can't we assume chip and PIN is broken? Cloning a mag stripe is trivial, cloning chip and PIN should be as close to impossible as is feasible.
  - Barfo 12y ago
    Smart cards (and NFC) are designed to make it nearly impossible to extract the private key/encryption keys.
    - ZoF 12y ago
      Yep, that's his point.
    - mholmes680 12y ago
      famous last words....
      - Nursie 12y ago
        EMV has been out in the wild since the late 90s. So far all the attacks I've read about (and some of them are very serious attacks!) are to do with the protocol between card, terminal and acquirer. None that I'm aware of has yet exposed a private key, with the possible exception of one that required an electron microscope. They are famous last words, but in this case they seem justified.
  - 12y ago
pbnjay 12y ago
How in the world would remote wiping a lost card work? It only supports bluetooth from what I can find, so you'd have to be nearby?
- xur17 12y ago
  I'm guessing it pairs with your phone, and automatically wipes once it disconnects (maybe after some timeout).
  - joshstrange 12y ago
    I would assume the same thing, the problem is if I leave my wallet upstairs and take my phone downstairs (breaking the BTLE tether) will it also wipe? If so does it automatically re-load when I get back in range? If it doesn't auto-reload then it sounds like a PITA and if it does auto-reload it sounds like a security nightmare (Clone the BTLE MAC and get the victims phones to unknowingly push all their charge cards to your sniffer).
    - pbnjay 12y ago
      My thoughts exactly.
  - aestra 12y ago
    I turn my phone off in unfamiliar cities to save battery for GPS. I turn my phone off at movie theaters and airplanes. I rarely keep bluetooth on to save battery (I don't really use it save for once in a while) and I also quite often turn mobile data off unless I take my phone out to use it. Sometimes it runs out of battery. Quite often I keep my phone in a different room of my house than I am in, especially when it is charging. Sometimes your phone breaks or malfunctions (hopefully not often). Sometimes I just plain forget it.
rsync 12y ago
Product description describes remotely wiping from your mobile phone ... How do they propose doing that ?
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  It appears that your data is stored on your phone. So I think that the sentence "Completely wipe your card data from your phone." doesn't mean that you will remotely delete data from your lost card using your phone but delete data from your lost phone using some other device. But yeah, it is very ambiguous.
  - throwaway234 12y ago
    From reading the front page and only blog post, I gathered it is paired with bluetooth to your phone, and you set a timeout before self-destruct. So if you set an hour, if your card hasn't been paired with your phone in over an hour it can erase itself. The phone probably rewrites the data as soon as it identifies the card again and the pin is entered.
Mandatum 12y ago
How does Chip and Pin work? Do they cut your existing card's out? I very much doubt they can clone the Chip..
Tomdarkness 12y ago
It claims to support Chip & PIN (EMV) but I don't see how this works. EMV is designed so that you can't clone a card and in practice is it impractical to attempt to clone a card that uses EMV. The only way I could imagine it would work is if you have the support of the bank that issued the card. However, I doubt any bank would agree to a scheme to allow a 3rd party to generate a clone of an EMV card.
- joshstrange 12y ago
  Agreed, if they did it would seem that this is a card cloner's wet dream. Maybe I'm missing something but I just don't see how it is possible to support Chip and Pin without proving the system is broken.
- ahomescu1 12y ago
  > The only way I could imagine it would work is if you have the support of the bank that issued the card. At the end of https://www.plastc.com/wallet https://www.plastc.com/wallet there's a list of participating banks, so I assume that's exactly how they do it.
freehunter 12y ago
Wow I can't wait for the "scroll to make the picture change" form of user interaction to go away.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- sleepycal 12y ago
  1000000% agree, I don't know why that's the "in thing" at the moment
joshstrange 12y ago
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 (uneducated on this matter) mind it seems like the ability to do this undermines a large security consideration with chip-and-pin. What's to stop a crook from swiping my card on his reader? Does this not just make it all the easier to clone cards? Also the battery life is an annoyance. Not one that I couldn't live with (I look at my Pebble and Pulse battery levels every few days to determine if I need to plug it up at night) but Coin's approach to this problem seems cleaner. Coin was a reach for me, this is way out of what I would spend to "fix" this problem. Also as other's have said with Apple Pay entering the fray Coin is rapidly losing its appeal as neither Coin nor this card offer the consumer protection that Apple Pay does (like not giving them your real CC number).
- nathanm412 12y ago
  Coin doesn't handle the chip and pin problem at all for the moment. Even they say that the next version of the card will work with chip and pin. As far as the battery is concerned, Coin will just stop working after two years. At least with this card, it will be rechargeable, even if I have to do it monthly. My biggest concern would be pre-ordering anything like this for the time being. I was left pretty jaded with Coin promising for a year that they were running on time with shipping. Summer 2014 came and went and they finally admitted just two weeks after the previous update that they wouldn't be able to make it for at least another 6 months. Now this product is advertising a more advanced feature set to be released at around the same time. I wouldn't bet on it.
  - joshstrange 12y ago
    I too am jaded by Coin's delays (though after a year of Soylent delays, each one promising delivery "next month", I guess I should know better). As for the battery life I really don't expect to still be using the same Coin in 2 years. I imagine I will have an upgraded Chip & Pin version or just be using Apple Pay by then. I fear that all of these card-replacement solutions will be downed out by things like Apple Pay (I assume other companies will introduce competing services, and no Google Wallet is not a competing service IMHO). I might be able to get a Coin refund but I'm not a huge fan of pulling funding from them (even if it's only $50) and I still think it's a nifty idea. I'm still very much so looking forward to getting my Coin sometime in December (supposed to ship by the end of November), that is of course if they stick to that timetable.
forthefuture 12y ago
How could anyone trust a company to do this after Coin sold their "preorders" without producing a single working unit?
- jkestner 12y ago
  You've just described the bigger startup/crowdfunding scene, my friend. Technology is religion these days - most people aren't able to penetrate the mysteries, and instead have faith in a positive outcome.
talltofu 12y ago
I am leery of pre-ordering unproven but fancy looking items given the history of many kickstarter projects. I would love to buy one if they actually make one.
untog 12y ago
A credit card that requires charging? Haha, no.
- jackmaney 12y ago
  Oh gods, that sounds like a horrible idea (the site is unavailable at the moment, so I can't see the list of features). Only slightly worse than the idiotic start-up idea that made the rounds two years ago, whereby all of one's cards could be combined into one (Oh goodie, if I lose one card, I lose EVERYTHING!).
  - sleepycal 12y ago
    r.e. outage - Sorry about the blip, auto scaling was a bit slow to respond, tweaked and should be fine now :)
  - lifeformed 12y ago
    Well, you generally lose everything either way anyways. I would imagine most people lose their entire wallet, instead of just a single card.
- acadien 12y ago
  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.
jMyles 12y ago
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 http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheZenOfProgramming
- mattmaroon 12y ago
  I have a lot of cards. Between gift cards, loyalty cards, and credit cards, I have at least 20-30 that I'd like to carry on me. I end up leaving cards I don't use every day in my car (and am always paranoid about the valet as a result). I use a KeyRing app for loyalty cards, but it's a pain and requires me often typing numbers into things. I often find myself in a Starbucks, realizing I left the Starbucks gift card in my car. Etc. This would let me get away with a much slimmer wallet and is therefore quite convenient. If it works.
  - JTon 12y ago
    For loyalty cards, why not use passbook or equivalent?
    - IanCal 12y ago
      To pick a single example, in the UK Boots points cards have a pin in and need to be inserted into a reader.
    - saryant 12y ago
      Good luck getting Lufthansa to accept a Passbook version of a United premier card.
    - Karunamon 12y ago
      I've got 12 cards in my wallet right now. Passbook accepts one of them. I'm unaware of any equivalents that would work with even a majority of them.
    - syncsynchalt 12y ago
niix 12y ago
I do agree that the process of selecting a card on the device is a bit more tedious than just pulling one of my 3 cards out. But the idea of having less bulk in my wallet - or - not caring one at all is pretty exciting.
mcmancini 12y ago
The problem I have with this product, as well as Coin, is that seems to be far less convenient than pulling a card out of my wallet. Maybe George Costanza would get some use out of one of these, but I'm usually choosing between an ATM card or one or two credit cards. Plus, I don't need to worry about having my phone, charging batteries, electrical gremlins, &c. All I'm seeing is an expensive ($155?!) solution to a non-existent problem.
- Tloewald 12y ago
  Also, credit cards are simple, cheap, and robust. Most of them become pretty thrashed with a year or two of frequent use -- this thing would theoretically be used more than any single card; how robust will it be? (And you'll still want a backup card in case it fritzes.)
eqdw 12y ago
So.... this is just Coin, but with e-ink?
- polymath21 12y ago
  Coin already uses e-ink
- seanflyon 12y ago
  This is Coin with a larger e-ink display, NFC and "Chip and PIN"
- labmixz 12y ago
  Well, I briefly scanned through some of the comments here, one thing I didn't see mentioned was the fact Coin is not rechargeable, once it's dead, you are required to buy a new Coin. Apparently according to plastic, it is rechargeable, therefore once you buy it, you never have to buy another. Another interesting point was it's wireless rechargeable from the video, which is interesting.
mjg59 12y ago
From the fraud perspective: One of the costs associated with fraudulent card use is turning a set of number into a physical object. Several retailers will avoid the "Just write the number onto an existing card" approach by verifying that the last four digits on the card match the number on the magstripe, which increases the cost per cloned card by a reasonable margin. Using Plastc instead would break that assumption. It'll be interesting to see how merchants react. But, more problematically, this answer: > What happens if one of the cards stored on my Plastc Card is declined? > The acceptance of any transaction has nothing to do with your Plastc Card. In this event, we recommend you contact your bank. seems like a problem if the auth failure that comes back is one that requests that the merchant retain the card…
- andrewguenther 12y ago
  If I were a merchant, I would not accept one of these. Fraud claims always side with the cardholder, what do you say as a merchant? "Yeah, some guy came in with this black piece of plastic and a screen on it and I just swiped it."
yincrash 12y ago
The ridiculous number of features on this card makes it really hard to believe that an unknown startup has the resources to pull it off in the form factor as thin as a credit card. Coin still hasn't gotten there yet (they claim it works at 85% of the locations they visited). Adding more features including wireless charging coils and unknown method for duplicating chip and pin makes me really skeptical that this will ever make it to market.
- 3327 12y ago
  Great point... Honestly it looks great but the feature set is out of this world. Wireless charging, NFC, proximity. I mean WOW. If they deliver on all of them and are hitting it all those targets lets get them to work on the manned mission to Mars.
- bradfa 12y ago
  The microcontroller, smart card interface, eInk screen, bluetooth capability (including antenna), NFC (including antenna), and touch screen all seem reasonable and there isn't anything earth shattering tech wise (but probably a customized asic using off the shelf bits). Connecting this all together on some fiberglass or plastic substrate is hard, and expensive to tool for (I'd expect), but definitely possible. The interesting bit is how they're fitting the battery and getting anything remotely like reasonable life. Even down in the single digit micro-Amp consumption range (typical for low power microcontrollers plus some resistive touch), a battery small enough to fit inside a credit card will likely only have a few mAh, at best. This will lead to needing to recharge quite often if the bluetooth turns on or eInk screen updates more than once in a blue-moon.
  - JTon 12y ago
    In the tech specs they claim a 30-day charge. No other details. I wonder if that's the equivalent of a cellphone "standby" spec.
    - mrkickling 12y ago
      Well, E-ink uses very little battery. The e-reader I use has to be charged only every other month or every month if I read more often. But then again this little card couldn't have a very powerful battery in it.
sdegutis 12y ago
Am I the only person here who still prefers to carry a wallet and pay with cash?
- jkestner 12y ago
  Nope. I prefer my merchants keep more of the money, and the banks less. Also, I have a better grasp of the money running through my fingers, literally.
- wahern 12y ago
  I prefer paying with cash. But I don't keep the cash in my wallet--I hate wallets. But for my ATM card, various credit cards (used for large purposes), and driver's license, I'd go without a wallet. The one I currently use is a small one anyhow, intended as a business card holder. Pick pockets aren't as common as they once were, at least in the U.S., but I never use my back pockets for anything. Even disregarding pick pockets, it's much easier to lose stuff that way, like when getting on and off a bus. So pocket space is at a premium for me, especially after I relented and bought a cell phone, which keep getting bigger and bigger. (And I would never keep my financial data on a cellphone, even if they promised it was safely embedded on a crypto chip... I just wouldn't trust them to have done it properly.) Frankly, I think Plastc seems quite useful, at least superficially. The devil is in the details.
- chrisseaton 12y ago
  I hate cash and can't wait until it's gone forever. I hate wasting time getting it out of the bank, I hate having to make sure I have enough at all times, I hate the crappy little coins I get back in change, I hate not being able to track where my money went easily.
grinich 12y ago
This is a faster horse, not an automobile.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Automobiles don't get invented every day, or indeed every year. In a world where the horse is king, a faster horse is a good thing.
  - callum85 12y ago
    But this is $155. It needs to be an automobile :)
    - mikeash 12y ago
      You make an excellent point.
  - kristianp 12y ago
    Except the Automobile has already been invented in this case. NFC, Apple Pay, mobile payments. Mobile phone payment technologies will quickly make cards obsolete. In places like Bangladesh (bkash) and Kenya (m-Pesa) mobile has bypassed the need for cards.
zshprompt 12y ago
I love it, if they steal this card they stole all my cards, even the ones not in my wallet. Yey. Now I get to cancel them ALL.
raesene4 12y ago
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 you keep your credentials secure, they'll pay back if you get defrauded (I know it's not quite as simple as that but for the purposes of this comment I think that'll do) so the problem with this kind of product is that you're adding another company (plastc) to the trusted list, you're going to have to provide them with all the card details. So unless the banks agree to this not affecting your fraud guarantee, you'd be taking a real risk by using this solution. For the banks to agree that there would need to be something in the deal for them, to compensate for the loss of branding on their cards and the additional fraud risk.
- seanflyon 12y ago
  > 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.
  - raesene4 12y ago
    Possibly although the attack surface of this kind of solution is quite a bit bigger than that of a traditional card. Introducing complications like smartphone apps and increased complexity of programming on the card itself, has quite a bit higher potential for exploitable bugs compared to a traditional Chip & PIN card.
- cones688 12y ago
  It will end up being a similar situation as money dashboard, where using it voids your banks fraud protection.
alex_doom 12y ago
I still prefer American cash. Besides, half the places in SF are cash only.
bradfa 12y ago
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.
- wahern 12y ago
  Yes. Keep all your financial information on a general purpose consumer computer accessible over the network, and never worry about the safety of your financial data ever again ;)
  - tadfisher 12y ago
    Or keep it in plain sight, embossed on a card and in a magnetic stripe for which readers are ubiquitous and inexpensive ;)
  - bradfa 12y ago
    I already do this. Amazon knows my credit card info, so do many other merchants. If I'm doing any kind of mobile payments thing then my phone has access to my bank somehow, too. My concept is basically just "mobile payments" but enabling it for locations where merchants don't have the infrastructure yet. The added benefit is every transaction has a different card number, so merchants who store card numbers and get hacked provides no benefits to the thieves. Granted, any of the mobile payments things should be doing this kind of security thru obscurity, but I have no idea if they are. This is not novel.
sneak 12y ago
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...
eridius 12y ago
This looks kind of neat, but the mere idea of needing to charge my credit card seems kind of ludicrous.
sagarpatil 12y ago
Looks pretty rad!
shanselman 12y ago
All this money being spent on magstripes. Let's just move to chip and pin (coming Oct 2015) and move on.
kvgr 12y ago
Lot of comments here is how Apple pay will rule. But not everybody can or want to buy iPhone. Or even expensive Android with NFC... That is why I think Coin and Plastc - if little cheaper may be succesfull. I usually have 2-3 debt cards, one credit card and I have few bonus cards for different stores - that I do not take with me, because I like small wallet. This solves my problem.
- npizzolato 12y ago
  > But not everybody can or want to buy iPhone. Or even expensive Android with NFC... You can't afford an expensive phone, but you can afford to spend $155 for the convenience of not carrying around 3-4 additional cards?
- paradite 12y ago
  > But not everybody can or want to buy iPhone. Or even expensive Android with NFC... An Android phone with NFC is not as expensive as you think, and it will be cheaper by summer 2105. And by summer 2105, payments by phones/smart watches/wrist bands would be ready as well.
kolev 12y ago
Am I do only one having a huge (yet still growing) list of preordered and backed projects and waiting for their delivery? If I sum up the pending ones up, it's thousands of dollars. If I put all that money in the stock market and buy the products after they are on the market, and read the reviews, I'm sure I'll be saving money and not be worried that I'm getting schemed all the time.
- iaw 12y ago
  I'd supplant savings account with stock market. The stock market is a little frothy as of late and a pull-back has been in the works for a while.
  - jrockway 12y ago
    The money in your savings account decreases in value with inflation, so that's not a risk-free strategy either. Maybe inflation-indexed treasuries are what you want, but those are also not risk-free!
    - iaw 12y ago
      Valid point. How could I forget inflation?
  - kolev 12y ago
    Backing is also a high-risk "investment". :)
sdegutis 12y ago
Where's the "i" in plas--- oooh, I get it.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Hmm, I thought this might be what Coin turned into but I see that onlycoin.com is still taking pre-orders for their all-in-one card. I get the consumer appeal but find the appeal for the banks less strong. I would love a one time credit card app where every time you swiped it, it changed numbers. And it seems making the card 'smart' like this could enable that sort of thing.
- spokenn 12y ago
  Has anyone received their Coin? I ordered in December and still have yet to receive it.
  - teej 12y ago
    They are rolling it out very slowly. You should've received details in your email about the rollout. I have a friend who has received his already.
- fuzz_junket 12y ago
  Is Coin not even on the market yet? Hah, fancy — they started taking pre-orders almost a year ago. Would anyone pay $155 for a Plastic Card if they knew they wouldn't get it until October 2015?
- andrewdietrich 12y ago
  This is what we've wanted for a while, and exactly the product I'm working on right now. It's called Final. We can deliver one-time use numbers via our mobile app, and pay via NFC or our standard EMV card.
- guimarin 12y ago
  I met with one of the Coin founders and he had something really interesting to say on this topic. If apple-pay is successful it will disintermediate the banks from the money process/transaction. They are clearly not wanting this to happen and so are happy with things like plstc and coin.
mgrpowers 12y ago
I don't think I want to charge my card every night. That seems to render the added convenience invalid. Also, not a viable option for traveling.
gearoidoc 12y ago
Sweet Jesus that was an annoying promo video.
kolev 12y ago
Totally unrelated, but the model from the Facial Authentication video has beautiful oceans for eyes making everyone want to drown in them...
lziz 12y ago
The moment they said "you recharge it" I closed the video
- apetresc 12y ago
  What were you expecting?
billyhoffman 12y ago
The websites for both Plastc Card and Coin do the "animate images and diagrams as users scroll" pattern. I want to punch the designer in the face who ever thought this was a good idea.
- dbecks 12y ago
  That feeling, that you're feeling is actually delight.
- suyash 12y ago
  What you don't like about that, would a video have been better?
- sleepycal 12y ago
  Strongly agree. But I'll lose my commit privileges if I remove it... worth it? Maybe :P
  - angry_dan 12y ago
    Hey, if I had my way, everything would have been star wipe. Scroll -> star wipe to next page. Scroll -> star wipe! Scroll -> star wipe! It could have been AMAZING.
    - sleepycal 12y ago
      Do it. Lets throw in a <marquee/> too.. I'll even "git filter-branch" your commit afterwards. No one will ever know. :D
      - angry_dan 12y ago
        Don't tempt me.
Animats 12y ago
The problem is doing this without compromising security. There are at least the following problems: - Remote RF-based attacks on the card. - Attacks on the phone app. - Leaks at the point credentials are transferred into the card. It turns out that most chip and pin cards do not use a public key/private key pair, with the private key inside the card. Visa actually recommends against this. (http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/bulletin-chip-recommended-practices.pdf http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/bulletin-chip-recomme...) So getting the credentials off a chip and pin card is possible. - Leaks from the servers at "Plastc". - Customer liability beyond US law limits for bank credit and debit cards. (What if it's Plastc's fault? The bank blames Plastc, and Plastc dumps the liability on the customer, citing their "it's never our fault" EULA). - The device is a great tool for "carders". Previously, "carders" using stolen credit card info had to make sure nobody saw them putting a white card in the ATM. Using a stolen credit card required access to convincing-looking blank cards and an embossing machine. Now, with Plastc, anybody with a list of stolen card numbers can easily create fake cards. At least if businesses are willing to accept Plastc cards.
nchuhoai 12y ago
Am I the only one who thinks their use of the e-ink display is super friggin' cool? I'm personally not aware of may other use cases beyond e-readers.
- fudged71 12y ago
  Google "smartphone e-ink case", there seem to be a few of these. Very cool.
archagon 12y ago
I hate to be so cynical, but product names nowadays are bordering on parody. And what's with the poor special effects in the background video? The e-ink display doesn't even line up with the card when it moves! You'd think they'd put just a little more work into that, since it's the first thing people see.
n0rm 12y ago
smells fishy
abalone 12y ago
I think most people in the market for something next-generation are going to be looking for more than just "how do I consolidate onto 1 physical card". They're going to want to fundamentally improve the payment system with a completely cardless, PIN-less (save for unlocking it once in the morning), wrist-based device. Plastc is $155 and you still have to: 1. pull something out of your wallet 2. select a virtual card 3. enter a PIN to unlock it 4. share your real card number with the merchant with all the fraud potential that carries 5. sign the receipt or enter your card's PIN (another PIN!) Apple Watch is going to leapfrog all that so hard. - it lives on your wrist - it stays unlocked as long as it's on your body - you just tap, no signing or card PINs - it uses tokenization so you never have to worry about stolen card numbers - it does craptons more stuff than payments too One advantage Plastc has is it will work everywhere right away while Apple Pay needs NFC terminals. But those upgrades are happening thanks to chip-and-PIN.
- spb 12y ago
  Forget a "wrist-based device", I'm waiting for PluseWallet, that completely device-free payment system that works by scanning the circulatory layout of your hand: http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/7/5281692/pulsewallet-pay-with-your-veins-fujitsu-palmsecure http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/7/5281692/pulsewallet-pay-wit...
  - abalone 12y ago
    Non starter. Requires merchants to install palm scanners. Apple Watch works with standard NFC terminals.
abalone 12y ago
Faked video. I downloaded it and went frame-by-frame and you can see the card display contents move around with changing margins. It's all CGI. Not that it's inherently wrong to do simulations, but this is notable because they don't include a "this is a simulation" disclaimer (AFAICS).
- prawn 12y ago
  Sometimes it's necessary to make sure screen contents are legible in a video. You can see someone doing it for the app demo video here: https://medium.com/@djfumberger/lets-make-a-promo-d32e15d574b7 https://medium.com/@djfumberger/lets-make-a-promo-d32e15d574...
  - abalone 12y ago
    That explains how to screencap a real functioning app and composite it on top of real hardware that's otherwise running exactly the same thing. That is not what is going on here. According to TNW "Plastc didn’t have a prototype for me to see during a meeting" and what they showed was a UI inside of a fake card. http://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/10/07/plastc-one-payment-card/ http://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/10/07/plastc-one-payment-car...
  - duiker101 12y ago
    I think the parent's comment still has a valid point. In the app demo it is more a presentation of something that we are presented how it is, the app. When we will download the app we will get what we see in the video, it is pretty and gives a realistic idea of the functionality makes the app pretty, but the app is still the same. On the other hand, the video in op's website is simply a fake as in it's not a real representation of anything concrete. It's a promise, a nice one, but still not concrete or real and we all know that the end product might end up highly different from the promise.
  - baddox 12y ago
    But it also makes it tempting to make the interface appear much better than it actually is. If you're faking it to "make it legible," heck, why not just make it looks really nice as well? Companies like Apple have gotten in trouble for faking their interfaces in advertisements.
scald 12y ago
Seems like most people who will opt for "payments 2.0" will just wait for Apple Pay and Google Wallet to be more mainstream. Especially with wearables in the mix.
api 12y ago
Cool at first glance but I do have skeptical questions: (1) Durability was my biggest question -- how much flex and bend can this thing survive? How about being chewed on by a toddler, put through the washer and dryer (high heat), taken into a hot tub by mistake, dropped and stepped on with hard-sole shoes, etc. (2) Ditto the other skeptical questions re: chip and pin. (3) How big is the niche for this? I mean, I only have one debit card I use routinely and one credit card I use rarely. Carrying two plastic cards is not that big of a deal. I wouldn't pay $155 just to merge them into one card that can run out of battery power. (4) Speaking of recharge... now there's another device I need to plug in or otherwise mate with some kind of charger? No thanks.
vonnik 12y ago
Plastc is using an open-source checkout: https://github.com/airbrite/diy-checkout https://github.com/airbrite/diy-checkout
beggi 12y ago
This is a either a future vaporware from naïve people or a straight up scam. Either way, I'm betting that before the tech will be good enough for this kind of product the Apple Pay and similar products will be ubiquitous - this is simply a faster horse.
iamleppert 12y ago
Does anyone else get the idea this is just a turbo-charged horse and buggy? Have they actually done market research beyond "oh that's cool" to "I actually have pain pulling out a separate card?" It seems like they are making an age-old start-up mistake. Swift death to the founders so they can move on to something far more interesting than a re-imagined credit card.
dmritard96 12y ago
so, my main question is where would I source the ble chip that is this thin? I know its probably just a rendering to test the market but it would be nice to be able to source some of the supposed parts in this thing.
ck2 12y ago
I had to check if it was april fools. No way you could make something as thin as a real credit card do all this in 2015 and have a battery, etc. Maybe by 2020, but not yet.
duckman12 12y ago
How is this bs even legal?... I'm going to render a spaceship and put it up for pre-orders. Do not give these people your money, nor the other tech companies that pull this kinda shit when so many real innovations are in the market.
tluyben2 12y ago
Unlike the scammers of Coin, these guys might have thought a bit further. Unfortunately this looks too ambitious. We have been making these kind of cards for years (for other companies) and know what kind of things you can cannot do currently; you can actually do this technically, but you'll be in a lot of pain getting this mass-produced. Let alone the things like patents, certification and adding 3rd party cards to it (oh the hell...); all politics & money. Good luck anyway.
lennel 12y ago
As someone who frequently travels all over Africa, I would want a secure password on this. If this card gets stolen without such a password it would mean the thieves can empty out several of my cc accounts.
- alexhawdon 12y ago
  If they don't mess up the implementation then it would appear to be more secure than traditional cards. Especially in places like Africa (I assume) and the US where Chip and Pin has yet to be rolled out. I appreciate the point you're making in that stealing this one card is equivalent to stealing a whole wallet-full. But isn't it usually the case that you lose the whole wallet in one go?
  - lennel 12y ago
    The difference is when I travel I don't take all my cards out with me, I would leave at least 2 backups in the hotel safe and another at home which can get sent to me in an emergency. Realistically imitating this behaviour on such a device probably won't happen.
  - porsupah 12y ago
    Actually, according to this worldwide map of card and terminal EMV deployment, Africa/ME had chip & pin tech, as of Q4 2013, in 38.9% of cards and 86.3% of terminals. http://www.emvco.com/images/EMVCo_WorldMap-9-2014.png http://www.emvco.com/images/EMVCo_WorldMap-9-2014.png The other regions are: (Region/percentage of cards/percentage of terminals) Americas (excluding USA): 54.2 84.7 Europe: 81.6 99.9 Australasia: 17.4 71.7 Russia: 24.4 91.2
    - alexhawdon 12y ago
      That's fantastic! Thanks for the information and apologies for making assumptions (dangerous things!).
gknoy 12y ago
If your bank allows generation of one-time-use temporary CC numbers, you could load this up with a bunch of them, and have any fraud be limited to the number you have left unused. Cool!
tschellenbach 12y ago
I really doubt the future of replacing cards is a smarter card :)
GeorgeMac 12y ago
Check out the privacy policy: https://www.plastc.com/legal https://www.plastc.com/legal These guys expect to own every part of your information. Yet they still charge through the nose for the tech. Have your cake and eat it why don't you.
leni536 12y ago
I think something like this should replace credit cards used today (or at least having it as an option seeing the price). Authentication on the card could be extremely useful and secure. They should ditch the magnetic stripe tho, it's completely insecure, use only the chip. Situations: 1) someone steals your pin code (there are overlay devices for ATMs, could happen), after that they steal your card (they can't clone it since it does not have a magnetic stripe). They can't use it since it has locked itself (default state being locked, unlock before transactions). 2) Buy something online, specify that you buy with plastc, it guides you to a challenge response authentication page. Type the challenge in the card, type back the response to the page. They hack the site, get every credit card info and your money on your bank account remains safe.
jarlwolfganger 12y ago
bah you have to charge your this? Who in their right mind wants to add another device to their charging mix. epic fail.
jarlwolfganger 12y ago
it's craptastic!
mpg33 12y ago
I feel this product would just be a short stopover until mobile payments start to gain traction.
reledi 12y ago
I find the promotional video incredibly well made. Anyone know who made it?
themoonbus 12y ago
These all-in-one cards are expensive, and in an awkward space between traditional plastic cards and technologies like Apple Pay and Google Wallet. I really can't see these things taking off.
nkg 12y ago
Put my credit card on charge ? Really ? No, I'm out.
fataliss 12y ago
Like a lot of my fellow news hacker I preordered coin and was still waiting for it until today. Today I asked a refund. Between Apple Pay, Bitcoins and all the other payments technologies coming up I'm less and less convinced that my problem is to carry 2 cards in my wallet. I realized that my problem is to have to carry a wallet. I might end up buying the Coin or this fancy Plastc, but really I don't need it at all.
songgao 12y ago
A little bit off-topic: Would it make sense to use something like this for GPG? It feels safer than fingerprint to me and it's definitely better than those smart card readers that with keypads.
wil421 12y ago
What is the difference between plastc and Coin? And why would I use this over Apple pay? Will retails at the mall accept these cards? Usually the bigger chains are picky about credit/debt cards.
chadrs 12y ago
Look, everyone! Cool tech in need of an actual problem to solve.
godly 12y ago
To good to be true.

648 points by cktsai 12y ago

Reprogrammable stripes have been around for a while, and while this is a more attractive implementation the new EMV rollout (accelerated likely by the recent card breaches) will make this impractical. You can't reprogram an EMV.

skorecky 12y ago

Wow, this will certainly give Coin (https://onlycoin.com/ https://onlycoin.com/) a run for their money.

lost_name 12y ago
Important difference: Plastic supports Chip & Pin, Coin does not. Plastic: https://www.plastc.com/card#tech-specs https://www.plastc.com/card#tech-specs Coin: https://onlycoin.com/support/faq/#security https://onlycoin.com/support/faq/#security
- guan 12y ago
  How they will support chip and PIN? Will they need cooperation from the issuer? If not, then they need to clone the cryptographic keys inside the chip, and I thought those were supposed to be tamper resistant.
- seanmccann 12y ago
  Which is increasingly important because that "far date in the future" of October 1, 2015 in less than 12 months away. On October 1, 2015 "Liability will shift to acquirers for domestic and cross-border counterfeit fraud card-present POS transactions if the merchant does not have an EMV-enabled POS device." Over the next year nearly all merchants will switch over.
- robbiet480 12y ago
  Plastc also supports NFC
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - bravo22 12y ago
    I'm calling shenanigans after reading their specs. Here are my reasons: NFC + EMV secure elements are issued by banks and can't be reprogrammed. You can't switch between them on the fly. You can only house "multiple" EMVs if you can by some grace of god magic convince the different banks, and Amex to take your card to their facility and program it with their secure info and then give it back to you. E-ink displays are WAY thicker than they can fit in there. They are also made on GLASS substrate, much more fragile than something you want to put in your pocket. If you looks closely at the video the e-ink screen is faked by CGI. It doesn't perfectly register in the same location on every frame. There is a shake. Driving an e-ink display requires high bias voltage, ~+/-20V. Often done via charge pumps with chips such as TI's TPS65180 (http://www.ti.com/product/tps65180 http://www.ti.com/product/tps65180). The chip alone (minus PCB) is thicker than a credit card and therefore a credit card slot. The switching capacitors you'd need to generate the voltage would also be too big to fit within that footprint.
    - jrockway 12y ago
      There are several variants on the NFC protocol. Some contain secure elements (with a CVV3, which is a cryptographically-signed incrementing number), but I believe they can also just dumbly-send the normal card data over the air. I've also seen credit cards made from glass. I think they're NFC-only, though, because of the thickness, but I could be mistaken.
      - bravo22 12y ago
        You are correct in that the NFC is just a protocol but for it to be used without a signature you need a secure element. In their "mock-up" they show a smart car interface on the front and in the FAQ they claim EMV. It is very puzzling.
      - objclxt 12y ago
        > I believe they can also just dumbly-send the normal card data over the air. Only while the US still is supporting that. Once the liability shift occurs next year it'll be EMV or nothing.
- jrockway 12y ago
  I doubt that it actually supports Chip & Pin; it probably supports the kind where your card number can be read via those contacts, but still requires your signature to complete the transaction. Another option is just proxying your card; their card has a valid chip & pin and credit card number, and when they process the charge, they pay for it by charging your actual card. If I recall correctly, the credit card companies don't particularly like this, but maybe things have changed recently.
sbenario 12y ago
I think the real question is who is more likely to ship an actual product.
- poonjahb 12y ago
  My question is whether these are the same people that came up with coin and this is simply another ploy to get people's money for a product that will never make it to market. Both domains are private registrations from GoDaddy. If either was a genuine corporate entity you would think they would have real information in their domain registration.
brentm 12y ago
I can't help to think this and Coin are each a solution in search of a problem. Do you know many people that use more than 3 cards regularly? If the norm was to have so many cards they barely fit in your wallet this would be perfect.
- slantyyz 12y ago
  >> Do you know many people that use more than 3 cards regularly? It's not so much about use as it is about carry. I may use only 3 cards regularly, but I carry 13 in my wallet. Most of the lesser used cards are ID I have little choice but to carry or loyalty cards for places where I shop. _IF_ the claims about chip and pin capability are true, I'd be able to pull out at least half of the cards in my wallet, which would be a significant amount of bulk.
- kerkeslager 12y ago
  If it were just credit/debit cards, I'd agree with you, but this purports to support gift cards. I've had too many gift cards to carry around, and ended up not using them because when I was actually in the store they were at home. So I do think it does solve a problem. That said, the problem this solves isn't important enough to justify the price tag (for me).
- kstrauser 12y ago
  It claims to support RFID, so I wouldn't have to carry my work door card. I'd strongly consider that.
  - slyhacked 12y ago
    Would your work let you put your details in a phone to be synced to a device like this? Plus most door cards are 125Khz and NFC/credit cards etc use 13.5Mhz so I wouldn't expect it to be compatible.
- atourgates 12y ago
  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 wasn't annoyed by a thick wallet are: * A Costco AMEX that gives me extra cashback at Costco. * A couple store-specific Visa cards that give me nice benefits at stores where I shop at least semi-regularly. * A work credit card for my work. I'm a bit of a miles/cashback junkie, but I'll bet many people have at least a few cards they'd like to consolodate. The average American family has 8. Like I said in another comment, I'd be thrilled if I could replace all those with one card, and I'd be happy to pay what Plastc is asking if it worked. But the most likely scenario I see for that happening is mobile payments a'la ApplePay.

theuri 12y ago

Looks interesting. Was thinking of waiting until a v2 just to let them work through security issues. Seems like the website itself has some front-end glitches - like the "About" page for example (this code visible: <?php if( extension_loaded(‘newrelic’) ) { echo newrelic_get_browser_timing_header(); } ?>)

sleepycal 12y ago
Sorry yeah my bad, was in the middle of re-writing git history when this got pushed, took a few minutes to revert :) No security problems on frontend, in fact it was the parser protections which kicked in, preventing <?php from parsing etc.
- theuri 12y ago
  Cool thanks - like the website and glad to hear you fixed it so quickly.

seanmccann 12y ago

Really cool, but I can't help but think this is too little too late. With Apple Pay set to launch this month, this feels lackluster.

johlindenbaum 12y ago

With chip & pin (and the October 2015 deadline for the US to switch to chip & pin) this is awesome, and might actually make it up to Canada, where we've moved onto NFC and chip & pin. I have a sneaky feeling that Coin's long radio silence and pushed ship dates are them re-engineering to have chip & pin at launch.

pervycreeper 12y ago

1) The process of selecting a card and paying appears to have many more steps compared to merely selecting the appropriate physical card and using that. Is the sell here something to do with security (not displaying the card number all the time)? Does this support temporary/ burner numbers? 2) I would like to know what target demographic, if any, that that ad was not intended to irritate.

kenferry 12y ago
The prospect of getting away without a wallet is exciting to me! If I could get down to just driver's license, this, and billfold, that'd be pretty cool.
- atourgates 12y ago
  I would pay 2x what they're asking if it worked like it's supposed to, and I could leave everything else behind. But realistically, I think mobile payment systems are much more likely to succeed. Plus, I already have my phone with me anyway, and it doesn't seem too far fetched that it could provide all the info on my driver's license. So with that and widespread adoption of ApplePay (or whatever ends up succeeding in that space) I'm down to just leaving the house with my phone and whatever cash I want to carry.
  - pervycreeper 12y ago
    > I think mobile payment systems are much more likely to succeed It's not either/or. Something like this or Coin are essentially interfaces for what will be legacy devices. If it were either/or, then mobile payments would certainly be the better solution.
    - atourgates 12y ago
      That's true, though I think once major retailers, gas stations, grocery stores and ATMs are accepting mobile payments, you'd be able to get by without any "legacy" forms of payment pretty easily.

nodesocket 12y ago

I really like the idea, but at $155 this is a luxury item for people who have disposable income. Also, with the release of Apple Pay, I truly think eventually all brick and mortar businesses will support paying with your phone.

smeyer 12y ago
>eventually all brick and mortar businesses will support paying with your phone There are brick and mortar businesses that don't even support credit cards. It could be a long time before all brick and mortar businesses support phone payments.
- Bud 12y ago
  Very few. If 90-95% support this, and they will, very soon, that's plenty.
lclarkmichalek 12y ago
s/phone/iphone/?
- livingparadox 12y ago
  ApplePay is NFC, I believe. So if merchants add the infrastructure to support ApplePay, it should also support Google Waller (also NFC).

natrius 12y ago

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 useless once the chip-and-PIN switch happens in a year or so.

richbradshaw 12y ago
That's exactly what I came here to say - if this can do chip and PIN, then can't we assume chip and PIN is broken? Cloning a mag stripe is trivial, cloning chip and PIN should be as close to impossible as is feasible.
- Barfo 12y ago
  Smart cards (and NFC) are designed to make it nearly impossible to extract the private key/encryption keys.
  - ZoF 12y ago
    Yep, that's his point.
  - mholmes680 12y ago
    famous last words....
    - Nursie 12y ago
      EMV has been out in the wild since the late 90s. So far all the attacks I've read about (and some of them are very serious attacks!) are to do with the protocol between card, terminal and acquirer. None that I'm aware of has yet exposed a private key, with the possible exception of one that required an electron microscope. They are famous last words, but in this case they seem justified.
- 12y ago

pbnjay 12y ago

How in the world would remote wiping a lost card work? It only supports bluetooth from what I can find, so you'd have to be nearby?

xur17 12y ago
I'm guessing it pairs with your phone, and automatically wipes once it disconnects (maybe after some timeout).
- joshstrange 12y ago
  I would assume the same thing, the problem is if I leave my wallet upstairs and take my phone downstairs (breaking the BTLE tether) will it also wipe? If so does it automatically re-load when I get back in range? If it doesn't auto-reload then it sounds like a PITA and if it does auto-reload it sounds like a security nightmare (Clone the BTLE MAC and get the victims phones to unknowingly push all their charge cards to your sniffer).
  - pbnjay 12y ago
    My thoughts exactly.
- aestra 12y ago
  I turn my phone off in unfamiliar cities to save battery for GPS. I turn my phone off at movie theaters and airplanes. I rarely keep bluetooth on to save battery (I don't really use it save for once in a while) and I also quite often turn mobile data off unless I take my phone out to use it. Sometimes it runs out of battery. Quite often I keep my phone in a different room of my house than I am in, especially when it is charging. Sometimes your phone breaks or malfunctions (hopefully not often). Sometimes I just plain forget it.

rsync 12y ago

Product description describes remotely wiping from your mobile phone ... How do they propose doing that ?

adamnemecek 12y ago
It appears that your data is stored on your phone. So I think that the sentence "Completely wipe your card data from your phone." doesn't mean that you will remotely delete data from your lost card using your phone but delete data from your lost phone using some other device. But yeah, it is very ambiguous.
- throwaway234 12y ago
  From reading the front page and only blog post, I gathered it is paired with bluetooth to your phone, and you set a timeout before self-destruct. So if you set an hour, if your card hasn't been paired with your phone in over an hour it can erase itself. The phone probably rewrites the data as soon as it identifies the card again and the pin is entered.

Mandatum 12y ago

How does Chip and Pin work? Do they cut your existing card's out? I very much doubt they can clone the Chip..

Tomdarkness 12y ago

It claims to support Chip & PIN (EMV) but I don't see how this works. EMV is designed so that you can't clone a card and in practice is it impractical to attempt to clone a card that uses EMV. The only way I could imagine it would work is if you have the support of the bank that issued the card. However, I doubt any bank would agree to a scheme to allow a 3rd party to generate a clone of an EMV card.

joshstrange 12y ago
Agreed, if they did it would seem that this is a card cloner's wet dream. Maybe I'm missing something but I just don't see how it is possible to support Chip and Pin without proving the system is broken.
ahomescu1 12y ago
> The only way I could imagine it would work is if you have the support of the bank that issued the card. At the end of https://www.plastc.com/wallet https://www.plastc.com/wallet there's a list of participating banks, so I assume that's exactly how they do it.

freehunter 12y ago

Wow I can't wait for the "scroll to make the picture change" form of user interaction to go away.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
sleepycal 12y ago
1000000% agree, I don't know why that's the "in thing" at the moment

joshstrange 12y ago

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 (uneducated on this matter) mind it seems like the ability to do this undermines a large security consideration with chip-and-pin. What's to stop a crook from swiping my card on his reader? Does this not just make it all the easier to clone cards? Also the battery life is an annoyance. Not one that I couldn't live with (I look at my Pebble and Pulse battery levels every few days to determine if I need to plug it up at night) but Coin's approach to this problem seems cleaner. Coin was a reach for me, this is way out of what I would spend to "fix" this problem. Also as other's have said with Apple Pay entering the fray Coin is rapidly losing its appeal as neither Coin nor this card offer the consumer protection that Apple Pay does (like not giving them your real CC number).

nathanm412 12y ago
Coin doesn't handle the chip and pin problem at all for the moment. Even they say that the next version of the card will work with chip and pin. As far as the battery is concerned, Coin will just stop working after two years. At least with this card, it will be rechargeable, even if I have to do it monthly. My biggest concern would be pre-ordering anything like this for the time being. I was left pretty jaded with Coin promising for a year that they were running on time with shipping. Summer 2014 came and went and they finally admitted just two weeks after the previous update that they wouldn't be able to make it for at least another 6 months. Now this product is advertising a more advanced feature set to be released at around the same time. I wouldn't bet on it.
- joshstrange 12y ago
  I too am jaded by Coin's delays (though after a year of Soylent delays, each one promising delivery "next month", I guess I should know better). As for the battery life I really don't expect to still be using the same Coin in 2 years. I imagine I will have an upgraded Chip & Pin version or just be using Apple Pay by then. I fear that all of these card-replacement solutions will be downed out by things like Apple Pay (I assume other companies will introduce competing services, and no Google Wallet is not a competing service IMHO). I might be able to get a Coin refund but I'm not a huge fan of pulling funding from them (even if it's only $50) and I still think it's a nifty idea. I'm still very much so looking forward to getting my Coin sometime in December (supposed to ship by the end of November), that is of course if they stick to that timetable.

forthefuture 12y ago

How could anyone trust a company to do this after Coin sold their "preorders" without producing a single working unit?

jkestner 12y ago
You've just described the bigger startup/crowdfunding scene, my friend. Technology is religion these days - most people aren't able to penetrate the mysteries, and instead have faith in a positive outcome.

talltofu 12y ago

I am leery of pre-ordering unproven but fancy looking items given the history of many kickstarter projects. I would love to buy one if they actually make one.

untog 12y ago

A credit card that requires charging? Haha, no.

jackmaney 12y ago
Oh gods, that sounds like a horrible idea (the site is unavailable at the moment, so I can't see the list of features). Only slightly worse than the idiotic start-up idea that made the rounds two years ago, whereby all of one's cards could be combined into one (Oh goodie, if I lose one card, I lose EVERYTHING!).
- sleepycal 12y ago
  r.e. outage - Sorry about the blip, auto scaling was a bit slow to respond, tweaked and should be fine now :)
- lifeformed 12y ago
  Well, you generally lose everything either way anyways. I would imagine most people lose their entire wallet, instead of just a single card.
acadien 12y ago
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.

jMyles 12y ago

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 http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheZenOfProgramming

mattmaroon 12y ago
I have a lot of cards. Between gift cards, loyalty cards, and credit cards, I have at least 20-30 that I'd like to carry on me. I end up leaving cards I don't use every day in my car (and am always paranoid about the valet as a result). I use a KeyRing app for loyalty cards, but it's a pain and requires me often typing numbers into things. I often find myself in a Starbucks, realizing I left the Starbucks gift card in my car. Etc. This would let me get away with a much slimmer wallet and is therefore quite convenient. If it works.
- JTon 12y ago
  For loyalty cards, why not use passbook or equivalent?
  - IanCal 12y ago
    To pick a single example, in the UK Boots points cards have a pin in and need to be inserted into a reader.
  - saryant 12y ago
    Good luck getting Lufthansa to accept a Passbook version of a United premier card.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    I've got 12 cards in my wallet right now. Passbook accepts one of them. I'm unaware of any equivalents that would work with even a majority of them.
  - syncsynchalt 12y ago

niix 12y ago

I do agree that the process of selecting a card on the device is a bit more tedious than just pulling one of my 3 cards out. But the idea of having less bulk in my wallet - or - not caring one at all is pretty exciting.

mcmancini 12y ago

The problem I have with this product, as well as Coin, is that seems to be far less convenient than pulling a card out of my wallet. Maybe George Costanza would get some use out of one of these, but I'm usually choosing between an ATM card or one or two credit cards. Plus, I don't need to worry about having my phone, charging batteries, electrical gremlins, &c. All I'm seeing is an expensive ($155?!) solution to a non-existent problem.

Tloewald 12y ago
Also, credit cards are simple, cheap, and robust. Most of them become pretty thrashed with a year or two of frequent use -- this thing would theoretically be used more than any single card; how robust will it be? (And you'll still want a backup card in case it fritzes.)

eqdw 12y ago

So.... this is just Coin, but with e-ink?

polymath21 12y ago
Coin already uses e-ink
seanflyon 12y ago
This is Coin with a larger e-ink display, NFC and "Chip and PIN"
labmixz 12y ago
Well, I briefly scanned through some of the comments here, one thing I didn't see mentioned was the fact Coin is not rechargeable, once it's dead, you are required to buy a new Coin. Apparently according to plastic, it is rechargeable, therefore once you buy it, you never have to buy another. Another interesting point was it's wireless rechargeable from the video, which is interesting.

mjg59 12y ago

From the fraud perspective: One of the costs associated with fraudulent card use is turning a set of number into a physical object. Several retailers will avoid the "Just write the number onto an existing card" approach by verifying that the last four digits on the card match the number on the magstripe, which increases the cost per cloned card by a reasonable margin. Using Plastc instead would break that assumption. It'll be interesting to see how merchants react. But, more problematically, this answer: > What happens if one of the cards stored on my Plastc Card is declined? > The acceptance of any transaction has nothing to do with your Plastc Card. In this event, we recommend you contact your bank. seems like a problem if the auth failure that comes back is one that requests that the merchant retain the card…

andrewguenther 12y ago
If I were a merchant, I would not accept one of these. Fraud claims always side with the cardholder, what do you say as a merchant? "Yeah, some guy came in with this black piece of plastic and a screen on it and I just swiped it."

yincrash 12y ago

The ridiculous number of features on this card makes it really hard to believe that an unknown startup has the resources to pull it off in the form factor as thin as a credit card. Coin still hasn't gotten there yet (they claim it works at 85% of the locations they visited). Adding more features including wireless charging coils and unknown method for duplicating chip and pin makes me really skeptical that this will ever make it to market.

3327 12y ago
Great point... Honestly it looks great but the feature set is out of this world. Wireless charging, NFC, proximity. I mean WOW. If they deliver on all of them and are hitting it all those targets lets get them to work on the manned mission to Mars.
bradfa 12y ago
The microcontroller, smart card interface, eInk screen, bluetooth capability (including antenna), NFC (including antenna), and touch screen all seem reasonable and there isn't anything earth shattering tech wise (but probably a customized asic using off the shelf bits). Connecting this all together on some fiberglass or plastic substrate is hard, and expensive to tool for (I'd expect), but definitely possible. The interesting bit is how they're fitting the battery and getting anything remotely like reasonable life. Even down in the single digit micro-Amp consumption range (typical for low power microcontrollers plus some resistive touch), a battery small enough to fit inside a credit card will likely only have a few mAh, at best. This will lead to needing to recharge quite often if the bluetooth turns on or eInk screen updates more than once in a blue-moon.
- JTon 12y ago
  In the tech specs they claim a 30-day charge. No other details. I wonder if that's the equivalent of a cellphone "standby" spec.
  - mrkickling 12y ago
    Well, E-ink uses very little battery. The e-reader I use has to be charged only every other month or every month if I read more often. But then again this little card couldn't have a very powerful battery in it.

sdegutis 12y ago

Am I the only person here who still prefers to carry a wallet and pay with cash?

jkestner 12y ago
Nope. I prefer my merchants keep more of the money, and the banks less. Also, I have a better grasp of the money running through my fingers, literally.
wahern 12y ago
I prefer paying with cash. But I don't keep the cash in my wallet--I hate wallets. But for my ATM card, various credit cards (used for large purposes), and driver's license, I'd go without a wallet. The one I currently use is a small one anyhow, intended as a business card holder. Pick pockets aren't as common as they once were, at least in the U.S., but I never use my back pockets for anything. Even disregarding pick pockets, it's much easier to lose stuff that way, like when getting on and off a bus. So pocket space is at a premium for me, especially after I relented and bought a cell phone, which keep getting bigger and bigger. (And I would never keep my financial data on a cellphone, even if they promised it was safely embedded on a crypto chip... I just wouldn't trust them to have done it properly.) Frankly, I think Plastc seems quite useful, at least superficially. The devil is in the details.
chrisseaton 12y ago
I hate cash and can't wait until it's gone forever. I hate wasting time getting it out of the bank, I hate having to make sure I have enough at all times, I hate the crappy little coins I get back in change, I hate not being able to track where my money went easily.

grinich 12y ago

This is a faster horse, not an automobile.

mikeash 12y ago
Automobiles don't get invented every day, or indeed every year. In a world where the horse is king, a faster horse is a good thing.
- callum85 12y ago
  But this is $155. It needs to be an automobile :)
  - mikeash 12y ago
    You make an excellent point.
- kristianp 12y ago
  Except the Automobile has already been invented in this case. NFC, Apple Pay, mobile payments. Mobile phone payment technologies will quickly make cards obsolete. In places like Bangladesh (bkash) and Kenya (m-Pesa) mobile has bypassed the need for cards.

zshprompt 12y ago

I love it, if they steal this card they stole all my cards, even the ones not in my wallet. Yey. Now I get to cancel them ALL.

raesene4 12y ago

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 you keep your credentials secure, they'll pay back if you get defrauded (I know it's not quite as simple as that but for the purposes of this comment I think that'll do) so the problem with this kind of product is that you're adding another company (plastc) to the trusted list, you're going to have to provide them with all the card details. So unless the banks agree to this not affecting your fraud guarantee, you'd be taking a real risk by using this solution. For the banks to agree that there would need to be something in the deal for them, to compensate for the loss of branding on their cards and the additional fraud risk.

seanflyon 12y ago
> 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.
- raesene4 12y ago
  Possibly although the attack surface of this kind of solution is quite a bit bigger than that of a traditional card. Introducing complications like smartphone apps and increased complexity of programming on the card itself, has quite a bit higher potential for exploitable bugs compared to a traditional Chip & PIN card.
cones688 12y ago
It will end up being a similar situation as money dashboard, where using it voids your banks fraud protection.

alex_doom 12y ago

I still prefer American cash. Besides, half the places in SF are cash only.

bradfa 12y ago

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.

wahern 12y ago
Yes. Keep all your financial information on a general purpose consumer computer accessible over the network, and never worry about the safety of your financial data ever again ;)
- tadfisher 12y ago
  Or keep it in plain sight, embossed on a card and in a magnetic stripe for which readers are ubiquitous and inexpensive ;)
- bradfa 12y ago
  I already do this. Amazon knows my credit card info, so do many other merchants. If I'm doing any kind of mobile payments thing then my phone has access to my bank somehow, too. My concept is basically just "mobile payments" but enabling it for locations where merchants don't have the infrastructure yet. The added benefit is every transaction has a different card number, so merchants who store card numbers and get hacked provides no benefits to the thieves. Granted, any of the mobile payments things should be doing this kind of security thru obscurity, but I have no idea if they are. This is not novel.

sneak 12y ago

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...

eridius 12y ago

This looks kind of neat, but the mere idea of needing to charge my credit card seems kind of ludicrous.

sagarpatil 12y ago

Looks pretty rad!

shanselman 12y ago

All this money being spent on magstripes. Let's just move to chip and pin (coming Oct 2015) and move on.

kvgr 12y ago

Lot of comments here is how Apple pay will rule. But not everybody can or want to buy iPhone. Or even expensive Android with NFC... That is why I think Coin and Plastc - if little cheaper may be succesfull. I usually have 2-3 debt cards, one credit card and I have few bonus cards for different stores - that I do not take with me, because I like small wallet. This solves my problem.

npizzolato 12y ago
> But not everybody can or want to buy iPhone. Or even expensive Android with NFC... You can't afford an expensive phone, but you can afford to spend $155 for the convenience of not carrying around 3-4 additional cards?
paradite 12y ago
> But not everybody can or want to buy iPhone. Or even expensive Android with NFC... An Android phone with NFC is not as expensive as you think, and it will be cheaper by summer 2105. And by summer 2105, payments by phones/smart watches/wrist bands would be ready as well.

kolev 12y ago

Am I do only one having a huge (yet still growing) list of preordered and backed projects and waiting for their delivery? If I sum up the pending ones up, it's thousands of dollars. If I put all that money in the stock market and buy the products after they are on the market, and read the reviews, I'm sure I'll be saving money and not be worried that I'm getting schemed all the time.

iaw 12y ago
I'd supplant savings account with stock market. The stock market is a little frothy as of late and a pull-back has been in the works for a while.
- jrockway 12y ago
  The money in your savings account decreases in value with inflation, so that's not a risk-free strategy either. Maybe inflation-indexed treasuries are what you want, but those are also not risk-free!
  - iaw 12y ago
    Valid point. How could I forget inflation?
- kolev 12y ago
  Backing is also a high-risk "investment". :)

sdegutis 12y ago

Where's the "i" in plas--- oooh, I get it.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Hmm, I thought this might be what Coin turned into but I see that onlycoin.com is still taking pre-orders for their all-in-one card. I get the consumer appeal but find the appeal for the banks less strong. I would love a one time credit card app where every time you swiped it, it changed numbers. And it seems making the card 'smart' like this could enable that sort of thing.

spokenn 12y ago
Has anyone received their Coin? I ordered in December and still have yet to receive it.
- teej 12y ago
  They are rolling it out very slowly. You should've received details in your email about the rollout. I have a friend who has received his already.
fuzz_junket 12y ago
Is Coin not even on the market yet? Hah, fancy — they started taking pre-orders almost a year ago. Would anyone pay $155 for a Plastic Card if they knew they wouldn't get it until October 2015?
andrewdietrich 12y ago
This is what we've wanted for a while, and exactly the product I'm working on right now. It's called Final. We can deliver one-time use numbers via our mobile app, and pay via NFC or our standard EMV card.
guimarin 12y ago
I met with one of the Coin founders and he had something really interesting to say on this topic. If apple-pay is successful it will disintermediate the banks from the money process/transaction. They are clearly not wanting this to happen and so are happy with things like plstc and coin.

mgrpowers 12y ago

I don't think I want to charge my card every night. That seems to render the added convenience invalid. Also, not a viable option for traveling.

gearoidoc 12y ago

Sweet Jesus that was an annoying promo video.

kolev 12y ago

Totally unrelated, but the model from the Facial Authentication video has beautiful oceans for eyes making everyone want to drown in them...

lziz 12y ago

The moment they said "you recharge it" I closed the video

apetresc 12y ago
What were you expecting?

billyhoffman 12y ago

The websites for both Plastc Card and Coin do the "animate images and diagrams as users scroll" pattern. I want to punch the designer in the face who ever thought this was a good idea.

dbecks 12y ago
That feeling, that you're feeling is actually delight.
suyash 12y ago
What you don't like about that, would a video have been better?
sleepycal 12y ago
Strongly agree. But I'll lose my commit privileges if I remove it... worth it? Maybe :P
- angry_dan 12y ago
  Hey, if I had my way, everything would have been star wipe. Scroll -> star wipe to next page. Scroll -> star wipe! Scroll -> star wipe! It could have been AMAZING.
  - sleepycal 12y ago
    Do it. Lets throw in a <marquee/> too.. I'll even "git filter-branch" your commit afterwards. No one will ever know. :D
    - angry_dan 12y ago
      Don't tempt me.

Animats 12y ago

The problem is doing this without compromising security. There are at least the following problems: - Remote RF-based attacks on the card. - Attacks on the phone app. - Leaks at the point credentials are transferred into the card. It turns out that most chip and pin cards do not use a public key/private key pair, with the private key inside the card. Visa actually recommends against this. (http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/bulletin-chip-recommended-practices.pdf http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/bulletin-chip-recomme...) So getting the credentials off a chip and pin card is possible. - Leaks from the servers at "Plastc". - Customer liability beyond US law limits for bank credit and debit cards. (What if it's Plastc's fault? The bank blames Plastc, and Plastc dumps the liability on the customer, citing their "it's never our fault" EULA). - The device is a great tool for "carders". Previously, "carders" using stolen credit card info had to make sure nobody saw them putting a white card in the ATM. Using a stolen credit card required access to convincing-looking blank cards and an embossing machine. Now, with Plastc, anybody with a list of stolen card numbers can easily create fake cards. At least if businesses are willing to accept Plastc cards.

nchuhoai 12y ago

Am I the only one who thinks their use of the e-ink display is super friggin' cool? I'm personally not aware of may other use cases beyond e-readers.

fudged71 12y ago
Google "smartphone e-ink case", there seem to be a few of these. Very cool.

archagon 12y ago

I hate to be so cynical, but product names nowadays are bordering on parody. And what's with the poor special effects in the background video? The e-ink display doesn't even line up with the card when it moves! You'd think they'd put just a little more work into that, since it's the first thing people see.

n0rm 12y ago

smells fishy

abalone 12y ago

I think most people in the market for something next-generation are going to be looking for more than just "how do I consolidate onto 1 physical card". They're going to want to fundamentally improve the payment system with a completely cardless, PIN-less (save for unlocking it once in the morning), wrist-based device. Plastc is $155 and you still have to: 1. pull something out of your wallet 2. select a virtual card 3. enter a PIN to unlock it 4. share your real card number with the merchant with all the fraud potential that carries 5. sign the receipt or enter your card's PIN (another PIN!) Apple Watch is going to leapfrog all that so hard. - it lives on your wrist - it stays unlocked as long as it's on your body - you just tap, no signing or card PINs - it uses tokenization so you never have to worry about stolen card numbers - it does craptons more stuff than payments too One advantage Plastc has is it will work everywhere right away while Apple Pay needs NFC terminals. But those upgrades are happening thanks to chip-and-PIN.

spb 12y ago
Forget a "wrist-based device", I'm waiting for PluseWallet, that completely device-free payment system that works by scanning the circulatory layout of your hand: http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/7/5281692/pulsewallet-pay-with-your-veins-fujitsu-palmsecure http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/7/5281692/pulsewallet-pay-wit...
- abalone 12y ago
  Non starter. Requires merchants to install palm scanners. Apple Watch works with standard NFC terminals.

abalone 12y ago

Faked video. I downloaded it and went frame-by-frame and you can see the card display contents move around with changing margins. It's all CGI. Not that it's inherently wrong to do simulations, but this is notable because they don't include a "this is a simulation" disclaimer (AFAICS).

prawn 12y ago
Sometimes it's necessary to make sure screen contents are legible in a video. You can see someone doing it for the app demo video here: https://medium.com/@djfumberger/lets-make-a-promo-d32e15d574b7 https://medium.com/@djfumberger/lets-make-a-promo-d32e15d574...
- abalone 12y ago
  That explains how to screencap a real functioning app and composite it on top of real hardware that's otherwise running exactly the same thing. That is not what is going on here. According to TNW "Plastc didn’t have a prototype for me to see during a meeting" and what they showed was a UI inside of a fake card. http://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/10/07/plastc-one-payment-card/ http://thenextweb.com/apps/2014/10/07/plastc-one-payment-car...
- duiker101 12y ago
  I think the parent's comment still has a valid point. In the app demo it is more a presentation of something that we are presented how it is, the app. When we will download the app we will get what we see in the video, it is pretty and gives a realistic idea of the functionality makes the app pretty, but the app is still the same. On the other hand, the video in op's website is simply a fake as in it's not a real representation of anything concrete. It's a promise, a nice one, but still not concrete or real and we all know that the end product might end up highly different from the promise.
- baddox 12y ago
  But it also makes it tempting to make the interface appear much better than it actually is. If you're faking it to "make it legible," heck, why not just make it looks really nice as well? Companies like Apple have gotten in trouble for faking their interfaces in advertisements.

scald 12y ago

Seems like most people who will opt for "payments 2.0" will just wait for Apple Pay and Google Wallet to be more mainstream. Especially with wearables in the mix.

api 12y ago

Cool at first glance but I do have skeptical questions: (1) Durability was my biggest question -- how much flex and bend can this thing survive? How about being chewed on by a toddler, put through the washer and dryer (high heat), taken into a hot tub by mistake, dropped and stepped on with hard-sole shoes, etc. (2) Ditto the other skeptical questions re: chip and pin. (3) How big is the niche for this? I mean, I only have one debit card I use routinely and one credit card I use rarely. Carrying two plastic cards is not that big of a deal. I wouldn't pay $155 just to merge them into one card that can run out of battery power. (4) Speaking of recharge... now there's another device I need to plug in or otherwise mate with some kind of charger? No thanks.

vonnik 12y ago

Plastc is using an open-source checkout: https://github.com/airbrite/diy-checkout https://github.com/airbrite/diy-checkout

beggi 12y ago

This is a either a future vaporware from naïve people or a straight up scam. Either way, I'm betting that before the tech will be good enough for this kind of product the Apple Pay and similar products will be ubiquitous - this is simply a faster horse.

iamleppert 12y ago

Does anyone else get the idea this is just a turbo-charged horse and buggy? Have they actually done market research beyond "oh that's cool" to "I actually have pain pulling out a separate card?" It seems like they are making an age-old start-up mistake. Swift death to the founders so they can move on to something far more interesting than a re-imagined credit card.

dmritard96 12y ago

so, my main question is where would I source the ble chip that is this thin? I know its probably just a rendering to test the market but it would be nice to be able to source some of the supposed parts in this thing.

ck2 12y ago

I had to check if it was april fools. No way you could make something as thin as a real credit card do all this in 2015 and have a battery, etc. Maybe by 2020, but not yet.

duckman12 12y ago

How is this bs even legal?... I'm going to render a spaceship and put it up for pre-orders. Do not give these people your money, nor the other tech companies that pull this kinda shit when so many real innovations are in the market.

tluyben2 12y ago

Unlike the scammers of Coin, these guys might have thought a bit further. Unfortunately this looks too ambitious. We have been making these kind of cards for years (for other companies) and know what kind of things you can cannot do currently; you can actually do this technically, but you'll be in a lot of pain getting this mass-produced. Let alone the things like patents, certification and adding 3rd party cards to it (oh the hell...); all politics & money. Good luck anyway.

lennel 12y ago

As someone who frequently travels all over Africa, I would want a secure password on this. If this card gets stolen without such a password it would mean the thieves can empty out several of my cc accounts.

alexhawdon 12y ago
If they don't mess up the implementation then it would appear to be more secure than traditional cards. Especially in places like Africa (I assume) and the US where Chip and Pin has yet to be rolled out. I appreciate the point you're making in that stealing this one card is equivalent to stealing a whole wallet-full. But isn't it usually the case that you lose the whole wallet in one go?
- lennel 12y ago
  The difference is when I travel I don't take all my cards out with me, I would leave at least 2 backups in the hotel safe and another at home which can get sent to me in an emergency. Realistically imitating this behaviour on such a device probably won't happen.
- porsupah 12y ago
  Actually, according to this worldwide map of card and terminal EMV deployment, Africa/ME had chip & pin tech, as of Q4 2013, in 38.9% of cards and 86.3% of terminals. http://www.emvco.com/images/EMVCo_WorldMap-9-2014.png http://www.emvco.com/images/EMVCo_WorldMap-9-2014.png The other regions are: (Region/percentage of cards/percentage of terminals) Americas (excluding USA): 54.2 84.7 Europe: 81.6 99.9 Australasia: 17.4 71.7 Russia: 24.4 91.2
  - alexhawdon 12y ago
    That's fantastic! Thanks for the information and apologies for making assumptions (dangerous things!).

gknoy 12y ago

If your bank allows generation of one-time-use temporary CC numbers, you could load this up with a bunch of them, and have any fraud be limited to the number you have left unused. Cool!

tschellenbach 12y ago

I really doubt the future of replacing cards is a smarter card :)

GeorgeMac 12y ago

Check out the privacy policy: https://www.plastc.com/legal https://www.plastc.com/legal These guys expect to own every part of your information. Yet they still charge through the nose for the tech. Have your cake and eat it why don't you.

leni536 12y ago

I think something like this should replace credit cards used today (or at least having it as an option seeing the price). Authentication on the card could be extremely useful and secure. They should ditch the magnetic stripe tho, it's completely insecure, use only the chip. Situations: 1) someone steals your pin code (there are overlay devices for ATMs, could happen), after that they steal your card (they can't clone it since it does not have a magnetic stripe). They can't use it since it has locked itself (default state being locked, unlock before transactions). 2) Buy something online, specify that you buy with plastc, it guides you to a challenge response authentication page. Type the challenge in the card, type back the response to the page. They hack the site, get every credit card info and your money on your bank account remains safe.

jarlwolfganger 12y ago

bah you have to charge your this? Who in their right mind wants to add another device to their charging mix. epic fail.

jarlwolfganger 12y ago

it's craptastic!

mpg33 12y ago

I feel this product would just be a short stopover until mobile payments start to gain traction.

reledi 12y ago

I find the promotional video incredibly well made. Anyone know who made it?

themoonbus 12y ago

These all-in-one cards are expensive, and in an awkward space between traditional plastic cards and technologies like Apple Pay and Google Wallet. I really can't see these things taking off.

nkg 12y ago

Put my credit card on charge ? Really ? No, I'm out.

fataliss 12y ago

Like a lot of my fellow news hacker I preordered coin and was still waiting for it until today. Today I asked a refund. Between Apple Pay, Bitcoins and all the other payments technologies coming up I'm less and less convinced that my problem is to carry 2 cards in my wallet. I realized that my problem is to have to carry a wallet. I might end up buying the Coin or this fancy Plastc, but really I don't need it at all.

songgao 12y ago

A little bit off-topic: Would it make sense to use something like this for GPG? It feels safer than fingerprint to me and it's definitely better than those smart card readers that with keypads.

wil421 12y ago

What is the difference between plastc and Coin? And why would I use this over Apple pay? Will retails at the mall accept these cards? Usually the bigger chains are picky about credit/debt cards.

chadrs 12y ago

Look, everyone! Cool tech in need of an actual problem to solve.

godly 12y ago

To good to be true.