Things are beginning to recover as BTC is now around $8,300 from its almost $5,900 fall. It’s not the complete $19,000 recovery we want, but I’ll take it. It’s enough to revitalize some alts. Some news agencies are speculating that yesterday’s positive ruling on the SEC hearing over BTC futures played a huge role in the price rise. (If you were watching it live and had your portfolio ready to trade, you could’ve bought BTC before it pumped.)
The stock market, in general, has also seen a bit of a recovery too. I guess these are positive signs for my assertion that crypto should recover by Chinese New Year.
But I found something concerning while surfing the news during the past few days’ super BTC dump. It looked like the more BTC dumped, the more credit card companies started banning buying bitcoin. So far, Virgin Money, Lloyds, Bank of America, Chase (J.P Morgan), Citi, Discover, and Capital One have all banned buying bitcoin with their credit cards.
Only a short time ago, buying BTC with credit cards was suddenly changed to be treated as cash advances (which have daily accruing interest rather than the usual monthly interest applied if you didn’t pay off your due balance). But not even two weeks later, they’ve suddenly banned buying bitcoin altogether?!
There are two ways to look at this, and both are concerning:
1) The first is that they’re overreacting to the bitcoin crash. They’re afraid that people won’t be able to pay back their cash advances on a rapidly declining asset. Crypto is still new and unregulated, which means they’re allowed to pull this kind of thing. (I’m not sure they could get away with randomly banning the purchase of shoes, for example.) But this is concerning because this just unfairly adds to the FUD and causes more panic and BTC price decline.
2) The second is that they orchestrated some crypto price manipulation. There were rumors that the banks had planned to pump BTC’s price before BTC futures started trading so that they could short it and crash it and profit while also destroying bitcoin’s credibility and desirability over the general masses who don’t know any better. Crypto being unregulated, there are no laws to stop this kind of behavior (but there are for mainstream stocks). These credit card giants could’ve intentionally set in seemingly increasing FUD when they first made BTC purchases cash advances, then a few days later banned them altogether in an effort to sully both crypto’s price and reputation.
The good news is that you can still buy crypto with debit cards. For lower fees, you can also buy crypto with a checking and savings accounts, but they’re not instantaneous purchases.
