And I'm pretty sure it's always been "technically not allowed" to buy another currency with credit cards (or it's technically allowed, but treated as a "cash advance")
The baseline for most credit cards is 120 days for the cardholder to dispute a charge in the US, or 180 days internationally. Some specific dispute categories for some credit cards have a shorter limit, and some effectively have longer limits because the starting point is some date after the transaction.
On top of that, there may be consumer protection laws in some areas that affect this. For example, in California it is one year for certain types of dispute [1].
Note that the above is how long for the cardholder to dispute the charge. Add to that however long it takes the card company to process things before the merchant sees the chargeback.
I've seen one that arrived at the merchant over a year after the transaction, although I think that is rare.
[1] https://oag.ca.gov/consumers/general/credit-cards-dispute-ch...
but you could always buy gold/silver and other extremely liquid and fungible goods, which is as good as money.
They can't whitelist what you can buy with a credit card, so instead they blacklist things when they become big enough to matter.
The IRS decided that that's the category they fall into for certain tax purposes. Not sure why that would have any bearing on the application of credit card issuer policies that are not tied to the particular definitions in the tax code, though.
What parent is saying that unlike other purchases with credit cards, you can't really do much about cryptocurrencies.
For instance if you purchased a physical product, in case of a problem (like fraud or something), at least you can go to the place where the delivery of the physical product happened and find it.
Similarly in case of a digital good (like ebook or pdf, since it's mostly copied from one destination to the other) if the product wasn't delivered, then it can be redelivered with no cost to the producer.
It's the first time we are encountering a digital good with non-duplicability of physical world goods with hard tracability of cash.
And these are not currencies under the law.
The incentive for most people to buy concert tickets is to see the concert or scalp the tickets; chargebacks that occur in this context are on an individual basis and the banks will ban customers that abuse this chargeback process. In some cases, the merchant may be at fault, perhaps selling tickets to a show that does not transpire as described and the concert-goers may issue chargebacks en masse in response, but in this case the banks identify the source of the problem was not _the individuals_ (who will probably have relatively few if any chargebacks in their account history) and will actually penalize the merchant, sometimes banning them altogether if they cannot reasonably explain the chargeback behavior or if chargebacks become a pattern for that merchant.
With blockchain tokens there is no incentive except profit, so if the blockchain token markets create a panic among buyers, it can cause mass chargebacks at _any_ time within the chargeback window, this is clearly a completely different risk model than concert tickets. At the end of the day, all that's really happening here is the credit card companies are banning transactions from merchants with high chargeback history, a totally common practice.
Chargebacks can be initiated at any time within the chargeback window, regardless of what is purchased.
Further, chargebacks hurt the MERCHANT. MERCHANTS are the ones banned and blacklisted (there is a blacklist file shared among all VISA issuers) for bad behavior.
IF merchants had high chargebacks, they would state that - there is no NDA preventing the card issuers from stating it.
And even if there were, there are higher-risk tiers for such merchants (like merchants that sell online porn).
How much experience do you have dealing with VISA etc. ...?
Yes, but as I already explained, the incentive to chargeback is NOT the same regardless of what is purchased. Chargebacks are relatively rare because most people only chargeback if there is a dispute with the merchant, but outside of fraudsters, its not that common for people to chargeback on a product months later. Even with high risk products like porn, there are predictable chargeback rates that can be factored into the overall profitability of the product category, but with blockchain tokens a sudden shift in price (like the one we're seeing now) can cause a large and abrupt spike in chargebacks all from the same product category. Wild shifts in the price of a digital commodity is a unique quality of blockchain tokens that totally changes the chargeback risk profile.
> How much experience do you have dealing with VISA etc
How much experience do you have in the lending business? This has nothing to do with VISA, this is about banks that have to make a decision about lending money. Companies that lend money are valued in large part based on the quality of the loans on their books; when the books are loaded up with crap accounts made up of gambling debt from blockchain enthusiasts who could go bankrupt overnight, it does not inspire confidence.
I have actual experience as a credit card merchant for 10+ years. You have shown yourself to have no real-world knowledge of the situation.