Thats not true I talked to a few card issuers, as I deal in credit card transactions all the time. The real problem is, you need at least 100k to just print the cards... Most company's will print a card for anyone if you buy all of the cards up front. The lowest I found was 50 cards @ 30 dollars a piece min 1900$ dollars all the cards are blank no design.
The biggest problem would be to convert BTC>USD to cover the purchase.
Lets say you went to the grocery store and bought a bag chips for 3 dollars, the card would have to call to a program to convert BTC at the current USD rate.
The software I use allows for POS and Credit card integration, its banking software. I am going to ask my programmer to write a script that will reflect the BTC balance into the USD account at the current exchange rate and see if I can get a working solution.
The problem I see with this is price fluxes you may or may not have enough to cover the purchase.
I seem to recall the company I worked for ordered up a bunch of printed cards back in the late 90s. Front and back design, whatever you wanted on the stripe & front. I want to say we got 100 (I had to generate the file with the stripe & emboss data) at about £2.50 a pop (they were promotional). I wouldn't be surprised if you could get them cheaper these days. Either way, $1900 would be nothing for a venture like this.
Though it's not really clear how it works. Is it purely bitcoin or does it involve a native currency to bitcoin conversion? If there's conversion involved, I don't really think it adds much in value to the bitcoin ecosystem, native cards are not hard to come by.
