Crypto app BitPay adds Apple Pay support to its prepaid MasterCard
BitPay, a cryptocurrency payment service provider, has announced that its prepaid card now supports Apple Pay for in-store, in-app, and online payments.
Credit: BitPay
Users of the service can now add the BitPay Prepaid Mastercard to their Apple Pay wallets. The card allows users to convert cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin into spendable fiat currency, and then load it onto the prepaid card for payments.
The BitPay wallet app itself lets users buy, store, and pay various cryptocurrencies. It currently supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether, and four stablecoins.
"We have thousands of BitPay Wallet app customers using the BitPay Card who are always looking for new places and ways to spend their crypto. Adding Apple Pay and soon Google and Samsung Pay makes it easy and convenient to use the BitPay Card in more places from day-to-day items to luxury purchases," said BitPay CEO Stephen Pair.
To add a BitPay card to Apple Wallet, users will need to download the most recent version of the app from the App Store.
Credit: BitPay
Users of the service can now add the BitPay Prepaid Mastercard to their Apple Pay wallets. The card allows users to convert cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin into spendable fiat currency, and then load it onto the prepaid card for payments.
The BitPay wallet app itself lets users buy, store, and pay various cryptocurrencies. It currently supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether, and four stablecoins.
"We have thousands of BitPay Wallet app customers using the BitPay Card who are always looking for new places and ways to spend their crypto. Adding Apple Pay and soon Google and Samsung Pay makes it easy and convenient to use the BitPay Card in more places from day-to-day items to luxury purchases," said BitPay CEO Stephen Pair.
To add a BitPay card to Apple Wallet, users will need to download the most recent version of the app from the App Store.
Comments
Fiat Money or currency, therefore, is money that has been created by arbitrary government order or decree, but has no intrinsic value in and of itself - i.e. it is not pegged to or backed any thing of real value such as silver, gold, camels, cows or even land. This is what allows governments to simply print as much money as they want or need, because they do not need to back it with something real, like silver or gold.
We, as citizens, accept the value of Fiat Money we are told by the government for as long as we have confidence that it will remain exchangeable with other citizens for something of close to that value over a given period of time. Once that confidence starts to waver for enough citizens in the population, citizens being asked to accept and hold Fiat Money for a period of time in exchange for something of real value at the present time (such as a car, milk, land, etc.), start to hedge their bets, by asking for a little bit more to cover their perceived risk of loss of value at some point in the future (i.e. they start devaluing the value of the Fiat Money). The opposite happens when enough citizens start to worry that there may be a future shortage or limited ability to access more Fiat Money or that it may get harder in future to convince people of the value of the items they are selling (e.g. car, horse, etc.) than it is today.
This century Ponzi scheme...
A Bitcoin can be split into 100 million fractions so the total available currency is 100 million x 21 million coins = 2.1 quadrillion units of currency.
https://zycrypto.com/a-supply-of-2-1-quadrillion-satoshis-disqualifies-bitcoin-as-a-scarce-resource-says-peter-schiff/
It needs to be able to do this to be useful, otherwise there wouldn't be enough currency for everyone to use. This is the same problem with gold. You can't have a growing population with a fixed money supply or there's not enough currency to match the goods and services being traded. You can't feasibly split a unit of gold into 100 million parts.
There are also thousands of cryptocurrencies so even if a single currency had an artificially limited supply, you can make another one (unlike gold), you can even make your own currency very easily. The stablecoin variety has an unlimited supply as they just create a coin when someone gives them $1. This kind of crypto is much more useful and accessible but also much easier to abuse. None of it is regulated so there's nothing stopping them creating more coins than the fiat currency they get, they only have to create enough to cover the transaction volume like what the banks do (fractional reserve banking). Crypto creators can make themselves millionaires/billionaires very quickly by creating more coins than the transaction volume, leaving a hole in the reserves that nobody will ever see. They have allegedly been doing this to inflate the value of Bitcoin by buying it at a higher value with fake money and that convinces people to invest fiat currency in Bitcoin.
Stablecoins also make it clear that every cryptocurrency is backed by fiat currency. When mining is no longer viable, the only way to buy crypto is with fiat currency (or trade valuable assets, which few people will do). For crypto to work as a currency, it requires people to permanently relinquish billions if not trillions in fiat currency, which goes somewhere. It usually goes into the offshore bank accounts of the currency creators.
There's inherent value in being able to move money around quickly and efficiently but this crypto asset creation is like counterfeit currency. There's no regulation over the supply. Fiat currency supply is governed by monetary policy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy_of_the_United_States
That's also open to abuse but it can be corrected by governments who are elected by majority. This pandemic has shown how fake every economy in the world is. Governments are sending out trillions to pay people for salaries while they don't work. This money will go back when they collect taxes. It just circles around. The whole point of currency is just to get person A to do something of value so person B will do something of value for them. When the supply is unregulated and abused it devalues everyone's assets, that's why developing countries have currencies where you have to pay millions of units for a potato.
What crypto tries to do is take away control of the money supply away from regulated authorities to random people who aren't regulated and major companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon should be very cautious about helping it go mainstream because they are opening themselves and users up to a world of fraudulent activity.
The BitPay CEO even says most companies using their services don't settle in crypto. ~94% settle transactions in fiat currency because businesses don't want crypto on their balance sheets and that hasn't changed in nearly a decade. People don't trust cryptocurrency and won't as long as the wild swings in value continue (which they will forever because of injections of new currency and the desire of people to get rich in fiat and live a comfortable life):
They said that one useful aspect of crypto is for international supply chain. A US company can pay a company in China in crypto for parts and not have to worry so much about currency exchange. That may be some of Tesla's interest in crypto. This type of transaction has no value for most people and it can easily be handled more quickly and safely by a regulated service.