[purephase]

Much easier to do in Canada with the number of banks involved. The US would be an entirely different story.

The lack of chip card support in Coin effectively makes it a US only product at this point as most of the card-heavy countries have moved past mag swipe (or, are in the process).

[danudey]

Nah, just have the major banks start issuing chip cards, and then providing chip terminals to merchants. Once the terminals are in-place and work, everyone else has a strong incentive to catch up (fraud prevention) and a lower cost of entry (since they don't have to push merchants to support their new tech).

Once a quarter of cards sport chips and a quarter of machines support chips, it's just a question of issuing new chip cards when old cards come due (or get lost/stolen).

[ecspike]

You can magstripe in much of mainland Europe still.

The Chip and Pin machines have a channel to swipe. There are very few places where you hand over a card. For example, in the train stations, the machine to swipe a card is on the same side of the glass as the customer. The agent never handles your card.

So they might be more accepting of Coin (given that they don't see that it is different) than American businesses.

[zmk_]

This is inaccurate. Whether you are required to hand over the card or not is governed by each member state's regulation. For instnace, in Netherlands or UK you can keep your card; in Poland you might still be asked to hand it over and sometimes for your ID with it. Also, good luck trying to swipe in the Netherlands -- most merchants taped the terminals so that locals do not get confused.

[sjwright]

In Australia, if you try to use a magnetic strip in situations where you could use the the chip (i.e. both the card and machine have chip support) it is refused, and the machine tells you to insert the chip.

It's entirely possible that Coin may still be useless outside the US if most machines will reject your card's strip.

[Mister_Snuggles]

Yeah, having fewer banks and heavier regulation definitely helps.

Also, as other people have pointed out, the US is moving to chip cards in a couple of years (2015). So this product already has a very short shelf-life.