Before Apple Pay: Coin Totally Failed Me

Original author：My Techy Mess

Original source：https://www.youtube.com/embed/oSVyuQtmbcI

Today’s topic: the tragic, hilarious story of my $100 “digital credit card” that kind of sucked, but also reminded me why I still love tech. In this video, I walk through the full rise and fall of Coin, the all‑in‑one smart card that promised to replace your overstuffed wallet, and how it collided with the launch of Apple Pay. How Coin felt like the practical solution in a pre‑NFC world. How delays and hardware limitations doomed it, and why I’m still weirdly proud I backed it. What’s your biggest tech regret? What gadget did you hype to your friends that totally face‑planted? Social CHANNELS https://www.threads.com/@mytechymess http://tiktok.com/@mytechyness Chapters 0:00 – My $100 digital credit card mistake 0:24 – The McDonald’s fail and “buggy future” moment 1:07 – Why 2013–2014 felt ready for a digital wallet 1:50 – Coin’s crowdfunding pitch and why it was so seductive 2:26 – Overstuffed wallets, MoviePass, and real‑world card chaos 2:49 – Apple Pay arrives… but almost nobody has NFC 3:19 – Security, privacy, and how Coin actually worked 3:49 – Convenience factor: one slim card instead of a brick of plastic 4:18 – The harsh reality: delays, chip‑and‑PIN, and no EMV 4:48 – When Coin worked (and why it couldn’t be trusted) 5:18 – Apple Pay’s slow takeover and my credit union story 5:48 – Coin digitized the card, Apple Pay digitized the wallet 6:18 – Fitbit buys Coin’s tech and the product quietly dies 6:48 – Servers shut down, sealed batteries, and a bricked smart card 7:18 – Why Coin really died and what Fitbit actually wanted 7:48 – My biggest tech regret… that I’m still proud of 8:18 – Phones got boring, but weird gadgets and AI agents are back 8:32 – Why we still need dumb, ambitious tech experiments 8:33 – Tell me your biggest tech flop in the comments Soft Landing by Ketsa is licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International License. Broke For Free - Day Bird (Free Music Archive) and license type (CC BY) Disclosure and Ethics https://cjmellon.com/#ethics