In a very surprising move, Visa has just shut down all Visa cards issued by WaveCrest, which is the card issuer for almost all of the current Bitcoin Visa cards on the market, including Xapo, Bitwala, TenX, Wirex and Cryptopay (which I'm using). Monaco is as far as I have read (so I cannot personally confirm it) the only card that works right now, since they did not use WaveCrest and instead work directly with Visa.
Update: As @freedomcoin has said in the comments, Bitpay cards seems to still work, so this might not affect card dealers in the US, they probably don't use WaveCrest which is a European card issuer I believe.
Dr. Julian Hosp from TenX has said in this video that they were told only 12 hours before the cards where shut down. If you believe the people on Twitter, there are now some people who cannot buy food thanks to Visa's unannounced shutdown with zero grace period.
At the moment it looks like Bitcoin card dealers will try to switch to other card issuers, so new Bitcoin cards should be available from them at some point, but that could take a while.
I don't know exactly who is at fault here, Visa or WaveCrest, this should become more clear as more information about this comes out.
You can find more discussion and information about this on Hacker News and r/Bitcoin
I have a Bitpay card (visa) and just bought something. Went through without issue.
Good to know, thanks for commenting, might be that this only effects European card issuers. Bitpay is US only I think. Wirex and CryptoPay, two of the effected card dealers, are the biggest in Europe as far as I know.
Ah yes that is correct, I am in the US.
BTW try making your coffee with unrefined coconut oil, non-salted butter and blend it sometime. Its an good alternative to milk if your interested.
Thanks for the tip :) I do plan to look into coconut oil in general, it seems to have some really cool properties. Apparently, if you cook rice in it, the rice only has half of the calories left. Only downside is that you need to cook it twice so it takes more time.
wow! I did not know that the fat from the coconut oil does that to the rice. I just read about it: https://blog.bulletproof.com/low-carb-carbs-hack-your-rice-with-coconut-oil-recipe/
Im going to try that.
Haha, what the. How did the conversation turned out this way haha
Nice, have to try that as well.
You learn new things all the time on steemit.. hah!!!
Found this via asksteem
Dear freedomcoin,
Sounds good haha
Yours truly,
Gandalf The White
I'm screwed! I finished work only 3 weeks ago to live off my crypto and my wirex is the only way i can access it......heeeeellllllpppppppp!
Wow, that sounds bad. Why are you not prepared for such a situation? /:
Should have payed out a bit of your gains.
Good luck bro!
Lack of foresight. My life is madness and this is the cherry on top!
That sucks, hope you can figure something out. Thankfully I only had €4 left on my CryptoPay card so this doesn't affect me that much, had to scratch all money together I had left because my car shut down unexpectedly and according to Kia, you cannot replace a fuse in their cars, you can only replace the whole fuse box, so it's a whopping €1000. The new year is off to a great start.
Note to self, never buy a Kia.
It's probably going to be that way in all cars (and electronics in general) at some point. Had the same happen with a refrigerator couple of years ago. The technician said they cannot replace any one part of the electric components, only this one big box which would have cost €500, so I ended up buying a new one instead of doing the repair.
Haha, do not be mean bro.
Dear crypticwyrm,
Yeah hopefully he figured something out. And your story sounds a bit like quite lucky under the circumstances or the other way around. Hopefully you are doing better now.
Yours truly,
Gandalf The White
Thanks :) I'm fine, I'm an optimistic pessimist. And I'm guessing people on Steem are generally quite happy right now since the price skyrocketed over the last few weeks. It's of course down again a lot due to Bitcoin's crash, but still worth a lot more than before, got some extra cash again now too :)
Great! Haha, I am a realist - at least trying to be. Not me, I mean, I am happy, of course, but I am invested in so many coins that this does not excite me a lot haha
Btw. a frew days ago was a buy option concerning steem -probably still is. Idk, I just post buyoptions and stuff (my trading plan in general to help other people make money). (;
Yeah btc is very dangerous right now. Wait til the futures ended/expired. Btc will probably drop, but I will post bout that anyway.
Lit! Cash is nearly always good haha
This is huge news! Im interested to see how the market reacts to this.
Me too. This sounds very strange - I hope they fix it as soon as possible.
Those coins probably will go bearish (at least on short term).
But I will keep holding pay - I believe in Julian Hosp. TenX will own that. ;D
It shouldn't react too badly, since the card dealers are already switching to other card issuers so this is only a temporary issue. From what I've heard it'll take a few weeks (plus shipping) then we have Bitcoin cards again. So this is really only bad for the people who rely on the cards since until this is solved and they've received new cards, they're screwed.
Word! Really want my new card haha
Yeah me too, I paid Netflix using that card, got one more week then I need to figure out another way to pay for it. I'd use PayPal but my account doesn't work anymore since I removed the card there, messed something up with recurring payments even though they worked fine before with just my bank account, and I hate dealing with PayPal's support, they always want you to send them scanned documents and all that so I haven't done it yet.
Haha, totally feel you bro. This security stuff is important but annoying af. ._.
Thanks crypticwyrm for sharing this crazy news with us! (:
I find it odd that this information cannot be found anywhere on the Wavecrest website. I would love to know the real reason Visa shut Wavecrest down. Is it crypto-related or something else altogether?
I just joined the telegram chat group for wirex. they are putting info out on there and say they will hold a web chat on the group today. Reading this mornings posts it looks like no solution will be offered untill at least next week.
Do you know anything new?
Dear cgrave,
Yeah, that was weird. Julian Hosp said that Visa is not against crypto or anything like it. Wavecrest just was not careful enough and did some stupid stuff. But I am not a 100% sure what they did exactly - do not want to spread rumours.
Yours truly,
Gandalf The White
Indeed. Was there ever any real answer? As we all know, official answers are often just so much misdirection and has absolutely nothing to do with the truth. Especially since Visa has come right out all say they have no plans to accept bitcoin directly.
https://www.ccn.com/visa-ceo-we-wont-accept-bitcoin-directly/
Uhm... I do not know right now. But will check on that.
And yeah, I share your statement. Too much liers out there haha