I'm pretty sure it will be closed-down pretty tightly. They've invested heavily and want to make some money.
This is a piece of infrastructure. Infrastructure must create opportunities to be successful. If it has the potential to do so, but is locked down so can't, the Bitcoincard will go the way of so many other cool technologies. Like BeOS.
Oh boy, I haven't heard BeOS mentioned for quite some time. I still remember back in the nineties when they wisited my university. They were ahead of their time and I think too small to pofilerate. IMO bitcoin is still small but right on time.
I remember trying it back in the 90's, after I'd already tried cutting my own Gentoo/Gnu linux on my own machine running BlackboxWM. Sorry, but I was watching Stargate SG-1 torrents on a 486-66 with that, and BeOS just didn't seem to stack up. Nothing ever did. To this day there are people I meet who doubt that I've compiled my own Gentoo, much less played AVI files on a 66 mhz machine with 64 meg of ram.
They probably don't believe you because the Bittorent protocol was invented in 2001, so watching SG-1 torrents on a 486 machine in the 1990's would require time-travel.
Ah, no. The bittorrent protocol was invented in 2001, and the SG-1 series ran until 2007. The 486-66 was old at the time, but it was all that I had until about 2003, when my sister gave me her P166, which was a huge improvement in both sync & framerate. And I was oversimplifying also. Running video files on the 66 required me to drop out of X-windows completely and run the video directly on the framebuffer svga driver, which didn't allow for pausing, fast-forwarding or rewinding. It was either play from the beginning or kill it. Even restarting a killed process didn't work right. So when I upgraded to the 166 w/128 megs (IIRC) I was then able to run the videos in X on BlackboxWM. So, technically, I was disingenuous; as I couldn't really run a video
in BlackboxWM until the 166. I did try BeOS in the late 90's, but it wasn't watching videos that was the killer, it was simply that I had old hardware and linux worked while BeOS (and any modern version of Windows) simply didn't in any functional manner.
These days I'm not so poor, so I'm doing this on a late model iMac because I can afford the extra costs in avoiding MicroSoft products.