[Ads-l] Physical Wallet, Hardware Wallet - PLAIN TEXT THIS TIME

[Brian Hitchcock]

[please accept my] Apologies for the gobbledygook yesterday.
I hope the quote marks  and URLs in today's epistle are OK.
_____________________________________________
From: Brian Hitchcock 
Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2015 4:28 PM
To: 'American Dialect Society'
Subject: Physical Wallet, Hardware Wallet
 
There needs to be a retronym for a traditional (e.g. leather) wallet that you can store actual credit cards in. 
This retronym is necessitated by the existence of software-based digital wallets a.k.a. virtual wallets (Google Wallet, ApplePay, etc.). 

There is a term hardware wallet, *(apparently not a retronym) which refers not to a traditional wallet, but to a folder (sometimes made of paper) that is intended to store thin payment-oriented hardware devices. For example, in one place, Bitcoin describes their Hardware Wallet as:  a Secure USB smart card based wallet for crypto-currencies (sic).  Apparently this means a wallet to hold smart-card-based USB devices supporting cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.  
Elsewhere (on their own Wiki) https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardware_wallet 
Bitcoin defines Hardware Wallet as a device that stores a part of a user's wallet securely in mostly-offline hardware. So the hardware wallet is both the physical folder and the electronic device it holds! (note that Bitcoin uses 'wallet' by itself to refer their software/digital/virtual wallet -- bwh) 

Wikipedia uses the term physical wallet in its article on BitCoin, to refer to something (made of any material) that can 'store the credentials necessary to spend bitcoins offline'.  However, Wikipedia does not show Physical Wallet in their list of retronyms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_retronyms . They list no retronyms starting with "physical", nor do they list Physical as a Retronymic Adjective.

It seems to me that physical wallet should be applied to any traditional wallet, but maybe we'll have to start calling them traditional wallets. Anyway, I don't believe either Physical Wallet or Hardware Wallet are in dictionaries yet. I'm not sure whether they have cropped up outside of techie or banking circles. 
-->   Is anybody interested in tracking down E.D.U. for physical wallet and/or  hardware wallet, and possibly submitting them to the powers that be (however that might be done) for consideration as new terms?  

* There is also now a variety of hardware wallet called HD Wallet (the HD stands for Hierarchical Deterministic), but that flavor of technology might be too ephemeral to join the vernacular.



------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org