Just at the beginning of the month, several crypto-payment providers announced that their cards, which support crypto money, were not active anymore. Bitwala’s, Bitpay’s and Tenx’s cards all of a sudden were disabled by Visa’s European subsidiary WaveCrest, which issued these cards. At that time, Visa’s official reason for such an act was the violation of its rules by the providers.
And just after a few weeks, in mid-January Visa CEO, Alfred Kelly told CNBC that the company would not process bitcoin-based transactions because BTC is not what Visa considers as real money.
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"I don't view it as payment system player," said Kelly.
Notwithstanding the fact that bitcoin and other cryptos are becoming more popular when used for buying goods and even commodities, especially in the US, Visa’s CEO emphasized:
"We at Visa won't process transactions that are cryptocurrency-based. We will only process fiat currency-based transactions."
In an interview with CNBC dated January 16, which took place in New York at the National Retail Federation conference, Kelly also added that according to his views, bitcoin is nothing else but goods, into which people want to pile. However, he stressed, bitcoin is speculative goods.
What Is ‘Real’ Money?
According to Coindesk, bitcoin is not emitted by any establishment or body, like public currencies. Instead, it is obtained when sledgehammer computers in various parts of the world rival each other to resolve a particular algorithm. This process is called ‘mining’. Then all these operations are recorded on the blockchain ledger; hence, anybody may get familiar with this info.
Meanwhile, public currencies are explicitly emitted by countries’ authorities, so it the American dollar. However, as Investopedia explains, no material goods support fiat money. So which among these two is the real money? Needless to say, but neither governments nor businesses are sure about it now.
