From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 04:02:11 +0800
To: John Young <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: NYC Smartcards Die
In-Reply-To: <199811041618.LAA31005@camel7.mindspring.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19981104234624.008b6880@idiom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 11:09 AM 11/4/98 -0500, John Young wrote:
>Chase, Visa and Mastercard have closed down their
>smartcard trial on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, 
>the NYT reports today.
>It also says Mondex has closed its Swindon trial.

I don't know about Swindon's Mondex trial,
but Mondex in San Francisco was dumbly too annoying to use.
Wells Fargo was promoting it, Starbucks accepted it,
and both were around the corner from my office.
The _catch_ was that you couldn't just walk into a bank,
plunk down some dead presidents, and get a Mondex card.
Instead, you could walk into the bank, get a brochure,
use a phone there to call an 800 number, and they'll
mail it to you or something awkward like that.
It may be a mostly-bearer system instead of book entry,
but they're handling it like book-entry.  Lose, lose.


				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639