Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Bitcoin smartcard Point of Sale terminal
by
Haplo
on 03/04/2012, 05:41:42 UTC
I was talking more about security from merchant overcharging, and for that matter, since BTC is spent by referring to previous txOuts, you'd have to load all the txOuts onto your card, or trust the merchant to construct a tx with the proper amounts that pays you the proper change. If the merchant is using a USB smart-card reader, they would have even more room for messing with clients since there are no software restrictions on a general computer as opposed to a specialized card payment unit.

That's exactly the point.  You can put multiple addresses on a smart card, verify the transaction amounts with a display, and create all the transactions right on the card.  There's absolutely zero need to trust merchants.

How do you get them on there? In order for a card to create tx it would have to have the relevant txIns, in which case it could also know its own balance, and could use a simple interface for "locking in" the settling price for a tx prior to pin input. Again, though, that requires having a computer and a card reader for loading and managing it, or else a bank which can do it for you.