Alfred Kelly, CEO of Visa.
In an interview with CNBC, Alfred Kelly, the CEO of credit card giant Visa, revealed that he believes that Bitcoin - the world's largest cryptocurrency - is not really money and Visa won't touch it.
During the interview, which was recorded at the National Retail Federation conference in New York City, Kelly said, "I don't view it as payment system player. We at Visa won't process transactions that are cryptocurrency-based. We will only process fiat currency-based transactions." Fiat currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, are issued by governments as legal money.
This is where the differences come in as Bitcoin is not issued by anyone but rather it's "mined" or "discovered" by powerful computers around the world competing with each other to solve certain algorithms. The miners then write those transactions to the online blockchain ledger, where all activity is recorded and shared with everyone, according to the CoinDesk description.
"My take is that bitcoin is much more today than a commodity that somebody could invest in; and honestly, somewhat of a speculative commodity," said Kelly, who became the chief executive of Visa in December 2016.
This view is backed by the volatility of the Bitcoin market. The market which soared to record high of $19 000 per Bitcoin in the later parts of 2017 was quickly brought back down to earth as its value has dropped to half of that high at the beginning of 2018
Edited by Dean Workman
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