from Hacker News

Could a Pending Amazon Patent Doom Coin’s All-in-One Payment Card?

by trey_swann on 1/28/14, 6:19 AM with 6 comments

• by WildUtah on 1/28/14, 7:40 AM

  Coin is infringing tens of thousands of US patents (you are, too) and quite a few companies are likely to soon have patents that attack Coin's core product in the next few years.

  Big companies with plenty of cash don't usually die from patent wars anymore, though. Ever since the eBay [0] case (Thanks, eBay! Thanks, Supreme Court!) it's really hard to get an injunction against a company that can afford to spend a million dollars or so on lawyers. Now it's more common to wait and see if an idea prospers and then extort some reasonable amount of cash if it does.

  Really small companies don't have that kind of luxury, of course.

  [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_Inc._v._MercExchange,_L.L.....

• by jwarkentin on 1/28/14, 8:23 AM

  This is an example of something that shouldn't be patented. I had this idea about half a year ago and thought it was unique until I saw coin. Then I got excited that someone actually made it and I bought one.

  If everyone's coming up with this idea now (it's the obvious solution to an obvious problem) then it isn't even evolutionary enough to deserve a patent.

• by furyg3 on 1/28/14, 1:24 PM

  Coin is a hack, it's a neat solution to an annoying problem which is going to disappear for other reasons, and it shouldn't even work.

  It shouldn't work because US credit cards should have some second form of authentication on the card (chip+pin) like is in place in Europe. I'm sure this is coming, and it will (and should!) break Coin.

  But even this isn't the interesting part... both of these systems will be destroyed by models like Square.