This is a traduction from my original article (in French) : https://steemit.com/fr/@dreamdev/le-reve-d-une-carte-de-paiement-sans-banque-vacille

The dream of a world without banks

I am the proud owner of a TenX payment card, which just announced a few days ago the arrival of ETH in addition to the BTC.
And who was to announce in the coming weeks the support of DASH.
When I ordered my TenX card for me, the idea was clear: banks are bringing less and less relevant services into the world today, and especially dishonestly doing so.
To me, circumventing them was a matter of course, especially since blockchain technology could really meet all the needs: fast and secure transfers, a tamper-proof account book, trusted third parties, and so on.

TenX Choice

Bitcoin bank cards are not new, but I had been seduced by TenX, which tries to go further than BTC alone by including in their roadmap the support of ETH (and all ERC20 tokens), DASH and later on other crypto-currencies.
The partnership with VISA was also perfect as it is a widely used solution in Europe and accepted by almost all retailers and e-merchants.
The BC contract was fine with me, everything was perfect for me.

My use of the TenX credit card

I received my card two months ago, in the midst of a continuous BTC increase:

The BTC is expensive and its transaction costs are extremely high. It's a fact and TenX can't help it. I only used my card twice, and the only time I wanted to pay a merchant with it was not accepting CBs at all.
In spite of everything I believed in it for the future, and I accumulated the BTC on the wallet of my card.

VISA withdrawing

It was yesterday morning that I received this email:

As you can see, VISA has withdrawn from WAVE CREST the possibility of offering its services to all prepaid encrypted-currency-based bank cards.
TenX is not the only one concerned, CryptoPay, Bitwala and the others are too.

So I now have in my wallet a nice piece of plastic that no longer has its basic function...

And now ?

TenX seems to say that they are already working on alternative solutions, but if the partnership with VISA were really broken and they no longer wanted to work in the cryptocurrency world, it would make it difficult to shop at merchants all over the world, unless they found a blockchain company that could create a network of partnerships as important as VISA or MASTERCARD. I think we're a long way off.
At the risk of making people scream, maybe Ripple could be a solution?

Anyway, for my part I keep the card because I really hope to arrive one day in a world where the centralized banks will only be a bad memory.

Did you have a BTC payment card? Or were you considering having one?