Sorry, I do not understand this. Why is this better than a smartphone? A clumsy little card? Why?
you dont get a bill every month
you're anonymous when using it
...
Using bitcoin with a smartphone wouldn't cost any extra with internet usage included in your contract unless you were charged for extra usage and went over the usage limits. There is also wifi.
Not everyone uses smartphones, or ever will. My wife uses a cell phone that can make phone calls and text, and nothing more. I have a android. I've noticed myself that for the act of making actual voice phone calls, her's is superior even though my is three times the cost. Plus, there is the issue of security, your cell phone could
potentially get hacked or malwared. A simple standalone hardware device that uses a data protocol that doesn't permit arbitrary code to be loaded onto it from the radio is more secure by nature, thus better for the common user. Better even for the power user in many cases as well.
Could you implement some anonymity for smart-phones? Some way to hide the IP address if you every really had to for whatever reason. Is this something people really want?
Yes, some people will want it. No, you can't practially do this with a smartphone, because no matter what you do, your cell phone company knows who you are, where you are, and what packets cross their network.
It's smaller
It's cheaper
A lot of people already use smart-phones, especially people tech-savvy enough to be using bitcoin (I would guess the majority of bitcoin users would have smart-phones but I could be wrong). This would only be beneficial for those that do not have smart-phones and don't want them.
It would at that, and that is a market bitcoin needs to be able to penetrate with reasonable & inherent security. I own a smartphone, and I'd buy this card today (and a dongle for my home router) if it were available. I can think of no other method that is as secure from infultration, as portable and as convient. Sure, my cell can text just fine, but not anonymously and not if I'm out camping beyond my providers reach. If I had one of these cards for each of my kids, whether they had bitcoin or not, I could communicate with them even when they were hidden by the trees, so long as they were in radio range with me and/or their siblings.
It's more secure (presumably moreso than a smartphone)
Well if smart-phones are in risk of malware that could manipulate any bitcoin software. Do smartphones have many vulnerabilities? I seem to remember one smartphone had a vulnerability hackers were taking advantage off which was fixed. I forgot about that now so if anyone is more aware please tell me.
Smartphones are just computers. Android is a version of gnu/linux, as an example. Linux is fairly secure by nature, but it's not perfect. The problem is the shear complexity of the modern OS, which leaves open the possibility that a security hole was missed by the developers to be found by hackers in the future. There is also the problem of your cell provder, do you trust them enough to handle your money? Becuase from a practical perspective, they have acces to your unrooted cell phone; so somewhere there is a backdoor to the device. This is how they can update your phone's software over-the-air without your personal involvement. What happens if the next wallet stealing trogen is written by the former developer for Sprint?
