Hey thanks for posting this! I'm the author of the article. I really hope if enough people become aware of this it will pressure LendingClub to change their practices.
I've posted this a couple other places, over the weekend, and things have taken an amusing twist. The internet and bitcoin community, whom I designed this presentation for, doesn't seem very interested in these ideas. On the other hand, the big companies in the mobile phone space, whom I was afraid would think the presentation silly and unprofessional, are taking it very seriously. Go figure!
trogdoro, I love this idea, but I'd suggest choosing dot combinations that visually approximate the shape of letters where possible, For instance:
- lower case L (l) would be a long vertical bar
- i would be the lower two dots filled and with a dot in the second highest position
You could then make some other common letters look like a vertical cross section:
- o could be the bottom dot and the middle dot
- s could be the top, middle, and bottom dots
- m could just be the bottom dot
- w could just be the top dot
More complex letters could represent crossing lines as gaps. For instance:
- t could be a vertical bar with the second highest dot empty
- k could be a vertical bar with the middle dot empty
You could add a sixth dot underneath the normal line for letters which commonly drop down below. For instance:
- j could be an i with an extra dot underneath
- p could be an o with an extra dot underneath
- g could be an un-dotted j
- y could be a v with an extra dot underneath
You could take advantage of certain letters which are the inverse of each other by inverting the dots (white dots become black, and black dots become white. For instance:
- z could be the inverse of s
- q could be the inverse of p (but with the lower dot still filled in)
For letters which are upside down versions of each other, just make the symbol upside down
- w would be an upside down m (as already shown above)
- n would be an upside down u
You could also add an extra dot above the normal line of reading to denote capitalization (kinda like a representation of the shift key). Doing this would make for 7 dots total.
I'm sure that not every letter would be representable using rules like this, but the less common letters could get the less obvious patterns.
The nice thing about doing it this way is that some words will kind of look like the shapes we have already memorized for those words. Kind of. If you squint.
This is a fun experiment, and I commend you for trying it. I look forward to seeing vs 2.0 :)
If you want to buy some bitcoins, I recommend http://www.TradeHill.com, which has lower fees and than MtGox, and seems more professional to me. I have a code that will get you 10% off your fees there if anybody wants to buy or sell bitcoins on TradeHill.com: TH-R1168