I would like to point out that our card is the ONLY card in the market that gets loaded INSTANTLY the moment you send your funds to our system, so you can withdraw at any ATM within minutes. This is possible because we have a master contract with the issuer, and do not simply resell cards.
I believe OkPay *might* be instant load as well since they are a registered financial institution so they probably have direct access to the MC network as well.
Roberto
Maybe your service does this, but here's what I'd like to see:
- A debit card loaded with BTC.
- When I swipe the card, the BTC is traded for USD, which is used to give the payment to the merchant.
- I can keep my balance in BTC, but it is converted to USD automatically on an as-needed basis.
So far, all I have seen is solutions that automatically convert the funds to USD as soon as they are received. Please tell me if yours is any different.
These suggestions are definitely interesting!
A debit card loaded with BTC.Right now, we only take vouchers as you pointed out, so no BTC. You have to sell your BTC at MtGox and/or Bitcoinica and then load to the card with a voucher. Loading straight from BTC should be possible very soon.
When I swipe the card, the BTC is traded for USD, which is used to give the payment to the merchant.This wouldn't be doable, unless you are literally a bank. MasterCard/Visa allows different levels of integration to different levels of Licensure, if that makes sense. Think of it this way: Those debit card programs out there that load your card in 24 hours have access I. Our company has access II (Can transfer balances automatically to the card). Banks have access III (can do pretty much anything, receive charges in real time, can issue refunds, etc. Does not need a pre-funded account to "send balances" out to card holders with the issuer, because they are the actual issuer). I am a customer of a level III. Level I are customers of a level II.
I can keep my balance in BTC, but it is converted to USD automatically on an as-needed basis.This is partially possible as follows: You would keep a BTC balance with us, and then "load" your card with the needed BTC as you see fit. No much use to this though since once we have direct BTC funding on our site, you will have the ability to load whenever you want.
The reason why we didn't implemented direct BTC funding right now is because you will most probably always get less bang from your BTC than if you trade your BTC directly at an exchanger, and use a voucher to load. The explanation to this is because if we take your BTC and give you USD (of course, picture large scale with our customer base) we will have to immediately sell the BTC for your USD in order to hedge properly. If we have to do that, we need to quote you less than what the exchanger is wiling to give us in order to hedge short time price fluctuations which are very real in the bitcoin world, so there you have it.
Once a mature market for futures and options emerge, we would probably able to hedge that way, and the fees should be less to load with BTC (in some cases, depending the options and futures our system is holding, it might be even cheaper than going through an exchanger).
Let me know your thoughts!
Roberto