Topic: bitcoincard.org - page 12. (Read 29276 times)

I agree perfectly but my understanding is that without mesh support that device would be more or less useless.

I'm sorry I miss how the mesh network in your home would be useful for you:

1) for being functional, the bitcoincard needs a POS that serves as a gateway between your cards (any of them) and the Internet: you can't use other ones because bitcoincard uses radio frequency and not wifi or other widely deployed technology

2) when you give the card to your daughter and she walks away from your home it become useless because the mesh network is not operable any more

Yes, but if the device is cheap enough, there are uses for the device that would drive adoption that does not necessarily depend upon a critical mass to support mesh networking.  That is my point, I have personal uses for a number of such devices that would encourage me to deliberately create a mesh network within my own family.  Get enough of those, and a critical mass is created regardless.

What I was trying to say is that the mesh networking, for working correctly and being useful, needs peers everywhere.
So, the meshing capabilities of the device will be unfunctional until this (wonderful) device will be widespread.

I disagree, the mesh texting feature makes such a device useful for me independently of whether or not it can transact in bitcoin.  Like I said, I want 6 right now for my wife & kids.  Way cheaper to give my kids each one of these to let them go play than give each of them a cell phone with service.  With android phones (and my ham radio privileges) I can give each of my kids a cell phone that uses APRS to tell me where they are, and I can call any one of them home at will.  My daughter can take my cell phone with her to her friends house, and I can track her progress with extreme accuracy.  But that means that 1) I can't use my cell phone in the meantime and 2) I have to pay for that data plan.  With a wallet card sized device, I could do some very similar things without the need of the costly data plan (granted, I'd be paying for one such plan anyway, but not six) or the expensive hardware (i.e. the android smartphone required to run the APRS app).  If my wallet card couldn't see her card because there wasn't yet enough such cards in my neighborhood to support a mesh, I'd still be able to get into my car and drive a couple of blocks to locate her signal without needing to actually see her.  I could get a seventh and pin it to my dog's collar, and find him the same way whenever he got out of the yard.

The project is awesome 

The only problem is that it's useful only if a lot of people already uses it otherwise it's pretty useless.
And admitting they have right the very difficult technical part it will be difficult to bootstrap it's use... or at least it should be very expensive...

I think it would be a long shot for this company to be successful.  It's basically a really small computer with a wireless radio…and there's a lot more that it can be used for than just bitcoin.  This is an obvious evolutionary direction and I'd expect many hardware manufacturers to be working in this direction.  Their best bet would be to attract investment from these hardware manufacturers (but if many of them already have internal projects working on it, they may not be interested).

What I meant is that it might be a pain to keep in wallets because they might not function correctly with a rfid blocking wallet

You mean this?

It's cool, thanks for the tip. I guess it's not something my mother would feel comfortable using yet, but it's definitely safe and probably not expensive.

yes, while it was in the blocking wallet; but most of those are for passive rfid formats like in passports.  These devices are active units with their own processors, and don't depend upon the security of the readers or trust that all readers are themselves trustworthy.

Don't most people use wallets that block rfid now, wouldn't that mess with it?

Not a joke, I was just avoiding saying dammit you lucky fuck, that place is beautiful in so many words. Oops, too late.

That'll be fun ^_^

LOL I've never been, was that a joke?

Im excited, Im gonna meetup with VirWox.com, Bitstamp.net, and the BTC-E.com while I'm in the region.

Alot of people are nervous if the above companies even exist, I will take pictures with everyone 

Austria, eh? Hmm, sounds like fun.

Can't wait! This could be huge

A bunch of us are flying out to Austria next month to see the product in action.

Will keep everyone updated

use the search function for the dedicated wallet printer

The device looks really cool and all, but a detail disappointed me.


Well, that means you cannot use it for storage, as backups are not possible. I find it a pity since this is the first dedicated device to store bitcoins. A dedicated device is the ultimate security one can have against malware. It could be the perfect place for everybody, included non-geeks, to store their coins.
But if no backup is possible, then, well, this card becomes another way to transfer bitcoins around, just like smartphones apps are doing, but "sexier". It is not a safe place to store any more coins than what you can afford to lose.

I hope they also consider making a dedicated device meant mainly for safe storage of bitcoins. That would require the ability to safely backup your coins (deterministic wallet seed generated by the device, encrypted in the device, and transfered to a computer, or directly to a backup service perhaps). Plausible deniability would be an important feature too, to protect against robbers capable of threatening you.
Such device doesn't need to be portable, as you don't really need to leave your house with all your coins. It could be as large as tablet for example, or even larger. It doesn't need to be "sexy" either (supposing that you can make it cheaper by dropping some of the "cool" features like touchscreen, color display etc), Actually, they could make such device also act as the gateway for the smaller bitcoincard, and sell both in a package.

I didn't understand how they want to track the carts and if it works with such a high accuracy i wouldn't use one.

I like the idea of a p2p text message network, the devices don't need a high range if many ppl use it and it could decrease fees by a lot i guess.

+1

But other than that... so cool!