JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America & Citi bar people from buying bitcoin with a credit card

CNBC ^ | February 2, 2018 | Evelyn Cheng

[C19fan]

J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup said Friday they are no longer allowing customers to buy cryptocurrencies using credit cards. "At this time, we are not processing cryptocurrency purchases using credit cards, due to the volatility and risk involved," a J.P. Morgan Chase spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. "We will review the issue as the market evolves."

[Professional]

Trust me, the only clutter is you Bitcoin folk spewing your fantasy language and make believe mining jargon and declaring how much money people are making from thin air.

Get a job.

[Vermont Lt]

I never said it was stable. I never said it was a currency.

I said it was an asset, or asset class. Because that is what the IRS decided it was.

I never said it was a sound investment.

I said, you talk about bitcoin as if you know what it is, what the protocol does, or what potential applications for it are.

I said you were probably one of those “professional” advisors like we used to have at the bank I worked at. They were professional alright—they made money off putting you into commission based mutual funds. And they told you to set up an IRA.

Please do not twist or mis-represent my words. But you might want to spend 15-20 minutes understanding what it is you are bashing. Because the way you represent it is so far from the truth it really reinforces why NO ONE should go to a bank’s financial department for anything other than cashier’s checks when you close an account.

[Vermont Lt]

Just as an aside, do a search on “NSA finding Satoshi.”

It is a great article about how the NSA used their huge databases to identify people by their writing style. They scanned trillions of emails and texts that have been scooped off from the internet to try to find who the founder of bitcoin was.

It is not a bitcoin article. But it is a scary article about how the NSA CAN find out about people—even if they are diligent about securing their online identity.

Fascinating stuff.

[Professional]

What background in finance and or economics do you have.

[Vermont Lt]

I am stunned by the number of freepers that cannot fathom how the technology and protocol are going to change the world of finanace and, any other system that tracks ownership of assets.

For example, within 10 years the realestate title business will be obsolete. Anyone with access to the “blockchain” will be able to search for property titles for free. And that blockchain will be incorruptible and secure as any bank in the world. (Nothing is perfect—but it will be more secure than ANY existing security.)

Large transfers of money will move around the globe without the interference of the international banks. Consider that a large wire transfer from New York to Hong Kong is not instantaneous. There is usually a stop over in Europe for currency conversion. Every step of the way someone dips their hands in an takes a slice.

For goodness sake, look at the way banks rape merchants and vendors on debit card transactions. There are fees associated with every step in that transaction—and the customer never sees them. In a world with a true blockchain environment, those transactions would be at about 1/10th the cost, and immediate. If you’ve every run credit cards as a merchant, you know that is not free.

My point is that its not about the price of bitcoin. Its about the technology backing it...and how THAT is going to lead this revolution.

We could discuss that all day. But you are not interested in learning that.

Sure the price is going to drop. It went up something like 1,000% in a year. Nothing is going to keep moving like that. But don’t be surprised when you see it starting to creep back into the news in several months or years.

This bubble bust thing happens every other year or so, since 2011. And each time it survives. Because people do see a future with the tech.

It is very American to look at what is happening right in front of your nose, instead of looking back over a a few years—or forward a few years. Speculators are in and out in a month. Investors and early adopters are in the long, long haul.

[Vermont Lt]

Just to let you know that I am no banking neophyte...I was a corporate Senior VP in retail banking for a top 15 retail bank. At one point, Fortune ranked our management team as the best in the industry.

I know about banking. I know how to move money around. And I’ve worked with our “Finance Professionals” who were mostly recent college grads who did not want work with insurance companies.

I know that the real money is in private banking and trusts. I know that banks have struggled with fees since the advent of internet banking and the desire to move everything online.

Did you post your credentials? Or did I pretty much guess them.

[Vermont Lt]

Or...they got in so long ago that any sale would generate pretty sizeable tax implications.

I am not trying to be difficult or pedantic. But, this mania/crash cycle happens all of the time. Its really no different that the stock market in that way. Its just that the float is so much smaller, the movements are magnified.

I could not care less about whether or not anyone buys bitcoin here on FR. I try to educate about the technology and not the price. When something goes up $1,000 in 40 minutes, even the most die hard fan understands it will come crashing down. It is important to retain perspective—the price has crashed all the way back to November. Not November 2016...November 2017. I can remember back to that time! Ha Ha.

[Professional]

I’m a 26 year Registered Investment Advisor. I have managed thousands of client relations and portfolios of 9 figures. I currently own a private brokerage firm that caters to HNW investors.

My former, and last major “employer” was full of “banking vps” that were jealous of what we made in earnings. There are NO reputable banks, SLs, or CU that will employee a fresh out of college newb.... so stop that silliness.

And yes, like any profession, advisors make money. The average in our industry is about 85 bps per year, hardly a scam.

The decent advisors with tenure in this country are 85% conservative, are a big part of our free market capitalism, and ensure that retired Americans have diversified investment portfolios that generate income for them to live off of.

Yes, those nefarious investment advisors huh?

Ok, so my asset allocation to Bitcoin and crypto nonsense is exactly ZERO.
It has no dividend, no earnings, has no equity, no collector/precious metal value.. Enron was far more of a company and an investment than Bitcoin...

[narses]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/technology/virtual-currency-regulation.html

SAN FRANCISCO — You did not have to be a technophobe to worry that the virtual-currency boom of the past year papered over plenty of problems.

The scale of those problems is starting to become clear as digital tokens have slid more than 50 percent in value from their peaks in early January, with steep drops on Monday pushing the value of Bitcoin specifically below $7,000.

Hackers draining funds from online exchanges. Ponzi schemes. Government regulators unable to keep up with the rise of so-called cryptocurrencies. Signs of trouble have appeared at nearly every level of the industry, from the biggest exchanges to the news sites and chat rooms where the investment frenzy has been discussed......

[palmer]

Two years ago the MSM declared bitcoin "dead" and I bought mine. Yet it went up and up and I am still way up and don't care in the least if it drops to a couple hundred bucks what I paid, or below. Nice while it lasted. CC is great without the $ value although it requires some to be useful. I have worked the same PKI algorithms for different purposes for almost 20 years. The disstributed consensus algorithms are somewhat new to me, but those are working nearly flawlessly despite constant attacks.

It's been said bitcoin is a multi-billion dollar bug bounty, unclaimed. The keys are trivial to protect and it's getting easier all the time. It's easy to tell a scam, just look at the ridicule on CC forums. That NYT article ignores all that and focuses on losses and scams. But like the bitcoin investor and advocate said at the end, those will go away with a big enough correction. I have no doubt the CC ecosystem will bounce back with new ideas. Ultimately that's what it is, new ideas to create, exchange, and store value.

[palmer]

no collector/precious metal value

The rest of what you said is correct. But people collect crypto. It's not particularly easy because you need to prove that the private key under some sort of tamper-proof seal does indeed correspond with the public key or address printed on the outside. Also you have to prove that the person printing the private key and placing the seal didn't record them in any way, and that nobody clandestinely recorded them. Finally that no collector was able to x-ray or otherwise determine the private key or remove and replace the seal.

Those are impossible to prove 100% but there were and are issuers who are trusted enough to make a market of 100k units at least and thousands of collectors.

[narses]

“Ultimately that’s what it is, new ideas to create, exchange, and store value.”

Again I ask, what “value”?

[palmer]

Same as gold. I was pleasantly surprised when mine reached the gold price. I told some fellow gold bugs (who had no interest in bitcoin) that I thought it would hold the gold price.

But price is fleeting as we can see in real time. Real value will have to come from more uses like BTC synchronizing other chains and those other chains used to store immutable records. There are many other business use cases that I am not up-to-date on, but they mainly revolve around record keeping in the blockchain which can't be effective without the critical mass and incentives of bitcoin miners.

BTC will grow into more digital purchase uses. Right now there are mainly transactions for other CC, but there will be more transactions for digital goods like digital art where the public key is embedded in the art and the owner owns the private key. Other people can make digital copies but there can only be one owner. The owner with the private key can demonstrate ownership by owning some bitcoin with the corresponding address.

As I mentioned to Professional, there are collectors for generic unspent addresses where they personally own the private key but don't know what it is because it is under a tamper-proof seal. There are can also be specific unspent addresses that have more value, e.g. people placing small amounts of Bible verse or whatever else they want in the bitcoin blockchain for posterity. Those are all collectable or aesthetic value.