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.<p>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.<p>Really small companies don't have that kind of luxury, of course.<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_Inc._v._MercExchange,_L.L.C" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_Inc._v._MercExchange,_L.L....</a>.
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.<p>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.
Coin is a hack, it's a neat solution to an annoying problem which is going to disappear for other reasons, and it <i>shouldn't</i> even work.<p>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.<p>But even this isn't the interesting part... both of these systems will be destroyed by models like Square.