The news headlines this week is that several banks in the USA and the UK have banned the use of bank cards to purchase crypto currencies (CC’s). The stated reasons are impossible to think – like wanting to curtail money laundering, gambling, and protecting the retail investor from excessive risk. Interestingly, the banks allows bank card purchases, making it clear that the sole risks being protected are their own.

With a credit card you can gamble at a casino, buy guns, drugs, alcohol, pornography, everything and anything you need, however many banks and charge card companies desire to prohibit you from employing their facilities to purchase crypto currencies? There must be some believable reasons, and they are NOT the causes stated.

A very important factor that banks are afraid of is how difficult it should be to confiscate CC holdings once the charge card holder defaults on payment. It’d be more difficult than re-possessing a residence or even a car. A crypto wallet’s private keys could be put on a memory stick or a piece of paper and easily taken from the nation, with little or no trace of its whereabouts. There could 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 significant loss for the bank. The wallet still offers the crypto currency, and the dog owner can later access the private keys and make use of 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, however the banks are aware of the likelihood and many of them desire to shut it down. This can’t happen with debit cards while the banks are never out-of-pocket – the money comes from 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 aren’t jumping on this bandwagon, perhaps realizing that the stated reasons for doing so might be bogus. The fallout from these actions is that investors and consumers are now aware that charge card companies and banks really do have the ability to restrict what you can get making use of their credit card. This is not how they advertise their cards, and it is probable a shock to most users, who’re quite used to deciding for themselves what they will purchase, especially from CC Exchanges and all the other merchants who’ve established Merchant Agreements with your banks. The Exchanges did nothing wrong – neither maybe you have – but fear and greed in the banking industry is causing strange items to happen. This further illustrates the degree to that your banking industry feels threatened by Crypto Currencies.

At this point 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 could be impleme IEO Launchpad nted across the board, and that leaves each country around the world trying to figure out what to do. China has chose to ban CC’s, Singapore and Japan embrace them, and a number of other countries remain scratching their heads. What they’ve in accordance is that they would like to collect taxes on CC investment profits. This is not too unlike the early days of digital music, with the web 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 for his or her 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 frustrated with outrageous bank profits and bank overreach within their lives, there’s hope that consumers is going to be regarded with respect and not be forever saddled with high costs and unwarranted restrictions.