Bitpay Bans Gambling Merchants
The popular digital asset service provider Bitpay, based in Atlanta, Georgia, announced in recent weeks it will be banning merchants engaged in gambling, adult entertainment and cloud-mining.
Bitcoin.com News suggested this was a slap in the face to the cryptocurrency community as a whole.
Bitcoin was originally created to free people’s money from the control and censorship of regulators, banks and governments. Companies in the ecosystem are supposed to be infused with this ethos, but as they strive to become more mainstream some, like Bitpay apparently, adopt the more prevailing standards in the business world.
Additional “prohibited activities” include the sales of narcotics, research chemicals or any controlled substances; cash or cash equivalents, and virtual currencies; items that infringe or violate any intellectual property rights; ammunition, firearms, explosives (including fireworks) or weapons; transactions that show the personal information of third parties; transactions that support pyramid, Ponzi, or other “get rich quick” schemes; transactions that are related to cloud-mining; credit repair or debt settlement services; any services which compete with Bitpay; and the sales of Kratom or Nootropics.
Their policy reads:
“Due to a recent update in our Terms of Use, we will soon no longer be processing payments for merchants which provide sexually explicit content. We understand that switching payments processors can be a costly change for any business. You will have two months to find an alternative payments provider before your Bitpay accounts is disabled. Your account will be disabled on April 25,2018.”
- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
