UPDATED 13:31 EDT / JUNE 08 2012

NEWS

Bitcoincard Puts Cryptocurrency in Your Wallet with a Mycelium Smartcard

The technological event horizon to make digital-currency possible (or at least digital-wallet transactions low impact) is coming up fast; we’re seeing it with the push for NFC and other technologies that enable secure transactions between mobile devices. However, there’s also a push for miniaturization of user interfaces, screens, and even communication devices so small that they’re the size of credit cards—or at least in this case add the functionality of a credit card while being that size.

The website Bitcoincard.org presents a product that uses a technology called Mycelium which integrated a very small (credit card sized) radio, user interface, e-paper device that will also enable Bitcoin transactions. Because bitcoins are cryptographically generated numbers that verify transactions via a network of bitcoin clients and the Bitcoincards form their own vast ad hoc network (which I expect will reach into the Internet) they should be able to transfer and verify transactions.

From the website, it looks like the product—only a showroom brochure concept at the moment—may be exactly what mobile vendors and point-of-sale retail outfits are looking for:

The Bitcoincard moves bitcoin economic interaction offline, which significantly expands both turnover and the target audience. But, most importantly, it makes the clustered local growth of a new free economy possible. Everything starts from the small and mundane, from the things that we encounter on the street everyday. All we need to do is to try to live while using each others’ services directly, without the participation of outside agents such as the dollar, and everything will be smooth sailing.

No doubt, being able to commit secure transactions between two devices—in this case Bitcoincards—that are thin as and small as credit cards would help place a cryptocurrency easily into the palm of the hand.

“The reliability of the Bitcoin system is assured primarily by encryption. The system’s main vulnerability is the Bitcoin wallet, created as a file on the computer,” notes a product description on the website. “If a hacker (or a computer virus) gains access to the computer and can read this file, he (it) will be able to transfer all the money to his (its) anonymous account where it will be nearly impossible to find. It will also be impossible to prove to anyone that you did not voluntarily transfer the money to your own anonymous account.”

There’s promise here and if a review of this product hits the wild, SiliconANGLE will be sure to publish it.


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