Bitcoin Forum

Beautifully written by Erik Voorhees along with a few pictures.

http://blog.bitinstant.com/blog/2012/6/19/our-discovery-in-vienna-the-bitcoin-card.html

Enjoy

Charlie

WANT. NOW. The future awaits....

Edit: is there any dev site for this currently?

Cheers, It's looked so cool

get rid of the colors.  just black and white like an ipod.

otherwise, nice option.

Sounds very exciting. Here is my question: Can the keys be backed up to a computer / server under the user's control? 

i suspect the user interface is still "beta" and for developer interaction.

Wow, I didn't even have to click through a dozen reddit links to actually see the content! This is great!

hahaha...I know what your referring to!

My wife like the colors. Told me that looks "japanese".

Photo 400 pixels wide and 2.82 Mb in size ? Sorry, but you are doing it wrong :)

The rest of the article looks cool.

Very impressed with the details. Definitely want one.

Hehehe true, but you can open the image in a new window for the full high res version so it's not a total waste of precious bandwidth :)

If you can't back it up yourself, it's a weakness. It should be able to display the private keys or a seed on the screen so you could take a picture of it.

It should also have some kind of robust security feature, like a thumb print scanner or at least a password, so that if you lose it someone else can't spend your coins.

It does in a way.  I'm sure that different designs will be popular in different regions.  After all, an image of Karl Marx is popular on credit cards in Germany.  Could be because the users like to rub his face in it, literally.  Could be because they used to have his face on the 100 Mark note.

+1

I like the design and colors but at this point its such a minor detail. Nice blog font on those bullet points is a little small. Market range of $10-25 sounds great. Backing up the private key is nice but who really cares? This is a replacement for cash/debit cards. We should be happy with any extra security, with just there online back up this is already safer then cash/debit. I want my solar panels! 60% chance they wont be there. If it requires movement or flexing to use then we can tape them to objects/trees around our neighbor hood to expand the network.

Do they have a website set up for there company Megion Technologies GmBH?

Great post, but I still have questions....


Can you tell me if the mesh network uses any existing tech, such as Dash7?


Excellent, this is the practical minimum of an urban mesh network, in my opinion.


I doubt this statement.  As a ham myself, I've seen some pretty wicked tech that is hard to find in any commercial marketplace; but that doesn't mean that it couldn't in a hurry.


This feature concerns me.  I'd rather have a device that was not replicateable at all than one that permits the company to do it via a distant server.  Even if the device asks for user permission, that does not mean that it must.


Which would make it no different than a regular wallet.


Not as cheap as I had hoped, but not unreasonable.

An unaddressed question.  In the video it mentions the capacity to send arbitrary text from card to card (text messaging), did you see evidence that this feature is real?

Cuuurious. I like the local nature of it. But I'm left wondering - what does it do, other than generate its own power, that I couldn't do with my phone?

That's a genuwine question, because I do like the sound of the device. To answer myself a little, I like that it makes sending btc very easy, i.e. hides the idea of an "address" and replaces it with a device. Could a smartphone do something similar via Bluetooth/Google Maps/etc though?

Well, it's cheap which could aid user penetration into areas/demographics that cannot afford smart phones.  That's just off the top of my head.

I'm curious how they plan on reaching any sort of "critical mass" of users to make the thing work. "Here, buy this thing and hold on to it! It might work...eventually" doesn't sound like a promising business plan. :(

I like this device. It's critical for this type of a device to be credit card sized. It just can't be bigger than that. The price is also excellent and the fact that it requires little electricity and can basically recharge itself. I do see this working out if Bitcoin gets bigger. Most Bitcoin projects are basically dependent on Bitcoin getting bigger, if Bitcoin fails then they fail. This is one of those that could be potentially huge if Bitcoin succeeds in general.

And another thing... if this device also acted like a Yubikey, then it could replace the Bitinstant, MtGox and other yubikeys. So they could put a nice looking logo on it and sell it as a yubikey/wallet. I'd definitely get one for 10 to 20 USD then.

These might be ideal "Green Address" cards which can be issued by a government, tracked, and controlled. That is not necessarily a bad thing.

You mention that you will see an alias of the local users on the network and be able to scroll through and pay the right one.


Imagine I am at Joe's Pizza Place and he has his alias set up as JoesPizzaPlace.


Punk ass kid at the restaurant changes his alias to JoesPizzaPIace, or Joe'sPizzaPlace or J0ESPIZZAPLACE.

What is to prevent people from sending BTC to the wrong alias?

A big signs at Joe's saying "DON'T PAY THAT DUDE WITH THE FAKE NAME"?

EDIT: Upon rereading the aforementioned bullet: it says that each device has a unique name, not that everyone gets to choose their own name.  If it does turn out that users get to choose their own name, maybe there will be an option that you can still check the bitcoin address in the event that two name appear similiar.

that is actually a good question.

The hell.... One of the main points of Bitcoin is that its not controlled by any governing system....

There is a better idea then Green Address about how to accept 0-conf txn: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=88442.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=88442.0), but some centralization from major pools still required though.

+1

To me that is a plus because I can pay once for it instead of spending gobs of money every month on a smartphone contract. This would be huge for the developing world.

http://www.bitcoincard.org/ (http://www.bitcoincard.org/)
http://vimeo.com/40711689 (http://vimeo.com/40711689)

Yes, it's a must. At least.
Of course interfacing with PC would be even better.

Bitcoin enthusiasts may not like backup centralization, BTW.

I think this was never discussed - at least not in the explanations i was given. How the private keys are handled is still open to discussion. but a "cloud" backup was not suggested.
exactly.

How do you prevent someone from polling all nearby wallets for balances? Like if you walk into a casino or some futuristic/hacker/mugger?

I'm not sure that I understand the question.  You can't poll a bitcoin client for it's balance.  None that I know of even allow that as an optional feature with user approval.  The only thing that you could do is capture a card's bitcoin address during an over-the-air transaction, and then scan the blockchain.  But what good would it do you?  Help you find a mark to mug?  A couple of these events and users will be demanding an off (or radio silence) switch and a pin code to use the device at all.  Actually, neither is a bad idea, per se.  If someone mugs you for your wallet, you give it up and are just thankful you didn't get hurt.  If you have a backed up bitcoincard with a pin locked wallet, all they get is a worthless piece of plastic and a small solar cell.  If you didn't back it up, you don't recover your money, but neither do they.  Even guessing a four or five digit pin over and over again is going to take quite a bit of effort and time, and there is no way a mugger could know that you didn't have a backup and will move those funds in the next 1o minutes.

I also wonder the same thing. Why is their server involvement necessary for the backup process? Can anybody tell?

If the server holds the btc private keys, that's awful. But that would go against what's said in the same post:


So, why is the server necessary? Does the server hold a specific key in which the device trust, and the device would both require the signing of challenge by that key as well as physical intervention (pressing buttons) before releasing the private key for backup?
Although that would considerably decrease the danger of the server having its key hacked, as the key alone wouldn't do much, I just don't see the point in such architecture...

Btw, will the device be able to use deterministic wallets?

It isn't. I don't know where the information with the servers came from, but afaik, its not true. The details of the way the bitcoincard will be handling private keys is not finalized but storing them on central servers was never an option.

Thanks apetersson for the clarification.

This looks very promising.