The news this week is that several banks in the USA and the UK have banned the usage of credit cards to buy crypto currencies (CC’s). The stated reasons are impossible to believe – like wanting to curtail money laundering, gambling, and protecting the retail investor from excessive risk. Interestingly, the banks will allow bank card purchases, rendering it clear that the sole risks being protected are their own.
With a charge card you can gamble at a casino, buy guns, drugs, alcohol, pornography, everything and anything you desire, however many banks and charge card companies want to prohibit you from using their facilities to buy crypto currencies? There must be some believable reasons, and they’re NOT the reason why stated.
A very important factor that banks are frightened of is how difficult it would be to confiscate CC holdings once the charge card holder defaults on payment. It would become more difficult than re-possessing a home or perhaps a car. A crypto wallet’s private keys may be put on a memory stick or an item of paper and easily removed from the nation, with little or no trace of its whereabouts. There can be a high value in a few crypto wallets, and the charge card debt may never be repaid, resulting in a declaration of bankruptcy and a substantial loss for the bank. The wallet still offers the crypto currency, and the dog owner can later access the private keys and work with a local CC Exchange in a foreign country to convert and pocket the money. A nefarious scenario indeed.
We’re certainly not advocating this sort of unlawful behavior, but the banks are alert to the chance and a number of them want to shut it down. This can’t happen with debit cards as the banks are never out-of-pocket – the amount of money comes out of your account immediately, and only if you have enough of your money there to begin with. We struggle to get any honesty in the bank’s story about curtailing gambling and risk taking. It’s interesting that Canadian banks are not jumping with this bandwagon, perhaps realizing that the stated reasons for doing so are bogus. The fallout from these actions is that investors and people are now conscious that charge card companies and banks really do have the capability to restrict what you can buy with their credit card. This is simply not how they advertise their cards, and it is probable a surprise to most users, who’re quite used to deciding for themselves what they’ll purchase, especially from CC Exchanges and all of those other merchants who’ve established Merchant Agreements with these banks. The Exchanges have inked nothing wrong – neither perhaps you have – but fear and greed in the banking industry is causing strange what to happen. This further illustrates the amount to that your banking industry feels threatened by Crypto Currencies.
At this time there’s little cooperation, trust, or understanding involving the fiat money world and the CC world. The CC world does not have any central controlling body where regulations may be implemented across the board, and that leaves each country around the world trying to figure out things to do. China has decided to ban CC’s, Singapore and Japan embrace them, and a number of other countries continue to be scratching the token sale ir heads. What they have in common is that they want to collect taxes on CC investment profits. This is simply not too unlike the early days of digital music, with the internet facilitating the unfettered proliferation and distribution of unlicensed music. Digital music licensing schemes were eventually developed and accepted, as listeners were OK with paying a little something because of their music, as opposed to endless pirating, and the music industry (artists, producers, record companies) were OK with reasonable licensing fees as opposed to nothing. Can there be compromise in the ongoing future of fiat and digital currencies? As people around the world get more fed up with outrageous bank profits and bank overreach to their lives, there’s hope that consumers will soon be regarded with respect and not be forever saddled with high costs and unwarranted restrictions.