Visa, Mastercard Pause Crypto Push in Wake of Industry Meltdown (reuters.com) 33
U.S. payment giants Visa and Mastercard are slamming the brakes on plans to forge new partnerships with crypto firms after a string of high-profile collapses shook faith in the industry, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Both Visa and Mastercard have decided to push back the launch of certain products and services related to crypto until market conditions and the regulatory environment improve, said the people, who asked not to be named as talks were confidential.
Unsurprising (Score:5, Insightful)
As has been well-established here on Slashdot, these cryptocurrencies were all scams to begin with. The technology is neat but the "unregulated finance" angle had crime as its primary purpose, with all the specious arguments about "economic equality" and "escaping the tyranny of the financial industry" being nothing more than grift.
Now that everything is crashing, even people who fell for the grift before are realizing their mistake, so everyone is backing out.
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Governments regulate the use of money, and these cryptocoins try to get around such regulations...
Re: Governments (Score:2)
One aspect of this new tech area is the potential to fill some of those globalized economic roles, or at least be an enabler of them.
Is this a bit of a threat to the totalitarian aspects of national government sovereignties? Absolutely. As it rightly should be.
We don't want everything done/decided with globalize
Visa, Mcard turn tail due to vague social angst (Score:2)
These bad news stories are pretty much all about particular companies (a small but famous subset) that exist as secondary players in the overall blockchain technology landscape.
Meanwhile, the fundamentals of the core tech is incrementally improving and addressing issues over the years.
Humans are flighty, and, like flocks of pigeons, so are the established financial corporations.
They thought there were some breadcrumbs to be had there, but got spooked again.
Bette
But I was surprised it was called an "industry" (Score:2)
The Title of the story deserves a Funny mod. The notion that ANYONE would describe cryptocurrency as an "industry" is a giant red flag that something is totally broken in that economic system. But Visa and Mastercard are basically in the same boat of toiling not, at least not in any field that makes an honest difference for the better for the average person on the average street. If cash wasn't broke, whey did they fix it? (Answer: Because it's part of the scam that keep stock prices so inflated. An even mo
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But Visa and Mastercard are basically in the same boat of toiling not, at least not in any field that makes an honest difference for the better for the average person on the average street. If cash wasn't broke, whey did they fix it?
Count yourself very lucky if you've never had to do a chargeback, then. Credit card companies provide a valuable line of defense against scams, and merchants with abysmal customer service.
Don't get me wrong. Actually using a credit card as a means of long-term financing your everyday purchases is a bad financial decision, and credit card companies do make it easy to fall into that trap. It really only makes sense to charge what you can afford to pay off every month, unless you're making a purchase which
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You're making a rather different argument there. Now I live in a place where I can use cash because I don't have to worry that any person on the street might be hiding a gun and ready to poke it in my face for my cash. I don't need the "insurance" the credit card provided when I lived somewhere else...
I do have a credit card and a debit card. I have to use the credit card once in a while to avoid an annual fee. I have used both cards for Internet payments, but mostly I've regretted those uses and I really w
Ponzi Scheme (Score:2)
Cui bono? (Re:Unsurprising) (Score:2)
Because only people with things to hide would want to hide things, right? This perception is so wide-spread, though, one might even suspect, the "regulated finance" — or even the regulators themselves — have helped creating it...
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No, because the current creditcard system hides things good enough*
*Maybe not in USA, but in most of the rest of the world.
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From the police — maybe. But not from the financial institution...
Which institution may then offer a perfectly innocent person's [bostonherald.com] transaction-history to the police [nypost.com] — simply because they don't like his politics.
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Well no, I was thinking more in terms of defrauding investors, rug-pulls, Ponzi schemes, keeping wallets insecure so employees of the crypto exchange could steal from them, facilitating cons or other forms of theft due to the lack of regulation (though some exchanges did attempt to reverse transactions and recover pilfered property in some cases, causing cries of "hey wait that's regulation!"), enabling kidnappings by facilitating untraceable ransom payments, working around account freezes that would be par
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My favorite part!!
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You mean vendors aren't jumping at the chance to work with 22,000+ [coinmarketcap.com] shitcoins? Who knew! /s
Bitcoin's back down below $20k (Score:1)
There's every indication that a handful of Whales are manipulating the price. [businessinsider.com].
You set a floor price buy buying at that price consistently, this draws in speculators who think they've found a safe asset because of the "floor" you set, their purchases drive up the price, you dump your Bitcoin for a profit, lather, rinse, repeat.
It's probably illegal, but there's so much illegal activity going on with
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That's one hell of a stable "currency" ya got there.
I wish it was mine, sadly I chose not to buy any.
Anyway both of them will collapse as the SEC continues to regulate. Cryptocurrency cannot survive even the most basic regulations.
Perhaps not, it could get kicked off public exchanges in countries like the US. That won’t mean it’s gone though, just less useful.
The floor of cryptocurrency is based entirely around Ponzi schemes and money laundering.
I’ve always thought this a reliable and sound if unethical business case for it myself.
Over the next couple of years the SEC is going to crack down on that more and more. Right now they're going after a small fish to build legal precedence. Once they have that they'll start going after bigger and bigger fish and you'll see more and more people exiting the market.
It really depends. If the GOP take over there will be a complete reversal as it’s an excellent way to strip people of wealth.
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ftfy
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No it isn't (Score:2)
The lowest price BTC hit over the past 24H on Coinbase was $23,109.06. It seems to be the case lately that there's some "the cryptocurrency sky is falling!" story on here, then I check the current price and it has barely moved. My guess is that the people propping up cryptocurrency these days are mostly true believers who ignore the news.
As long as some legitimate companies [theverge.com] think it's still worth "investing" in this crap, and criminals keep using it to move their funds, we're stuck with it.
Weird (Score:1)
Also an 8% drop following a 20%+ hike in the course of a few months isn't exactly something I want in my financial system. Do you want your 401k holding
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Mostly I'm just saying the pump/FUD news cycle doesn't affect the price like it used to in the earlier days. Even Tesla managed to dump a significant portion of their holdings at one point, without crashing the market. This isn't to imply that it's a good investment, just that it's probably got more staying power than you're giving it credit for. It certainly could drop to $10k and you'd be pretty unhappy that you bought it at $23k, but it'll still be around.
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My guess is that the people propping up cryptocurrency these days are mostly true believers who ignore the news.
At risk of invoking a "no true Scotsman" here, it seems to me that a "true believer" wouldn't feel the need to "prop up" the value. If you're holding Bitcoin because you see it as the value exchange mechanism of the future, what's your motivation to try and peg it to an arbitrary fiat exchange rate?
Wow (Score:1)
They finally noticed?
Shook faith? (Score:2)
Not A Meltdown (Score:2)
Cancel your cards if they launch crypto (Score:1)
Do crypto creditcards pay in crypto? (Score:1)
I don't think they do. If you go to a retailer, and pay with a crypto card, the retailer gets regular currency, not cryptocurrency.
The card company simply takes money from your crypto accounts, and converts it to regular currency, at whatever the exchange rate is.
In any case, once you use Visa or Mastercard, you leave a money trail. So crypto would not be really fulfilling it's promise.