Is there any future for smartcards?

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Sun Sep 11 06:47:58 EDT 2005


Pat Farrell <pfarrell at pfarrell.com> writes:

>Is there a real problem that they uniquely solve, sufficient to drive the
>building of the needed infrastructure? I don't see it, and I'd love to be
>made smarter.

Smart cards were cool in the 1970s because back then it was almost science-
fiction technology - imagine a standard plastic card with a built-in computer!
So the initial effort wasn't "What can we do with them" but "Can we even
create them".  Then once they were created, it became "OK, now we've got them
what do we do with them?".

There were some things that they're inherently very good for (stored-value
micropayments, phone cards, fare payment, photocopying, that sort of thing)
and as portable embedded CPUs (SIM cards), and a whole pile of other solution-
in-search-of-a-problem things that they're awful at.

The main downside in expanding out of the basic stored-value micropayments
field is that the thing that made the cards so cool in 1975 - the fact that
they're in the same form-factor as a credit card - makes them almost useless
for any other application.  No onboard clock, no onboard power, no display, no
keypad, no network connectivity, and no ability to ever add any of them
because of the form factor limits, that's a serious killer for usability and
functionality.

Much like Java rings ("Look what I've got, a Java processor in a ring!  Isn't
it cool!" - "So what's it good for?" - "No, you don't understand, it's a Java
processor in a ring!"), the thing that made them take off in the first place
is also what's locking them into a particular niche market.

Peter.

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