(*)
The largest international payment systems Visa and Mastercard retrained the transactions from their customers' credit cards for the purchase of crypto currency, equating them to cash withdrawal through ATMs. As TechCrunch writes, the changes so far only concern the purchase of the Crypto currency at the Coinbase exchange using credit cards. In general, due to the re-qualification of transactions, the final costs of acquiring crypto currency can be significantly higher than usual; at best they will be five percent more.
The Coinbase Exchange traditionally takes commission for intermediation when making transactions with the crypto currency. In case of purchase, the commission is 4 percent. At the same time, you can make a purchase only with the help of a debit or credit card. After buying in an Internet bank, the transaction was still marked as "Purchase". Now, in Visa and Mastercard systems, after the purchase of crypto currency using credit cards, such transactions are labeled as "Cash withdrawal".
In the vast majority of banks that issue credit cards, withdrawing cash from ATMs is equivalent to issuing a loan for personal purposes in cash and is subject to an increased interest rate that can reach 30 percent per annum. As noted by TechCrunch, now after the requalification of transactions, the buyer of crypto-currencies will have to pay not only a four-percentage fee of Coinbase, but an additional percentage for "cash withdrawal."
On the Coinbase exchange, the requalification of transactions by Visa and Mastercard systems has already been confirmed. Mastercard also confirmed the change of transaction codes. For some reason, payment systems decided to re-qualify transactions for the purchase of crypto currency using credit cards, is still unknown.
Earlier it became known that some of the largest American banks - JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup - and the largest British banking group Lloyds Banking Group (which controls the banks Halifax, MBNA, Bank of Scotland and Lloyds) began blocking purchases of crypto-currencies, made by customers with the help of credit cards. The banks said that they went to this step to prevent financial losses - because of the depreciation of the crypto currency, customers can not repay loans.
The bitcoin rate grew from the middle of 2017 and by the middle of December exceeded the mark of 19 thousand dollars. Then the value of the crypto currency began to decline - at the time of writing the note, it dropped to 6,138 dollars. The bitcoin rate is subject to strong fluctuations, including because in the vast majority of cases, trades are conducted by crypto-enthusiasts, rather than by professional brokers. The collapse of the value of recent days can be associated with a panic among investors amid news about the blocking of transactions for the purchase of crypto currency using credit cards.