Quote from: stonetz on March 29, 2011, 02:29:16 AM

Quote from: nofuture on March 29, 2011, 01:22:56 AM

Quote from: stonetz on March 28, 2011, 10:23:13 PM

Quote from: bitcool on March 28, 2011, 10:12:01 PM

Quote from: nofuture on March 28, 2011, 05:39:17 PM

Anonymous Debit Card
http://www.asset-protection-international.com/offshore-banking/anonymous-debit-card.php

Schedule Of Fees
Anonymous Card Fees: EURO $US DOLLAR
Set Up Fee: 1350 US$1500

man, even for drug dealers, few can afford these fees

Jesus that's just to get the card?
I'm assuming you get charged a pct etc too.
What else goes with it?

P.S. drug dealer is pretty general, the guy you buy your rocks from would have trouble but Scarface could afford that.

What you are getting for this amount of money is anonymity and offshore protection. The card is not in your name. This is one way how wealthy people protect their liquid assets. I think it is no unreasonable to have this high of a set up fee. The people who use these cards load them up with a lot of cash. To make it worthwhile someone would load the equivalent of $25k on these cards. The bitcoin market isn't there yet but it will get there. For one person to buy $25k on Mt. Gox would clear out the order book in th currrent market.

What could happen now is that someone could create these cards with a lower price by leaving out the anonymity and offshore protection. You would still have transaction fees but as you have said it will be worth it.

I can envision a day when the wealthy people will load these cards with $100,000 worth of bitcoins iinstead of Euros and use that. At the rate bitcoin is increasing you may not be able to deplete the card.

Makes sense, if you're going to put 20k or 100k on there then the setup fee is pretty minimal.
I would assume if there is demand then competition will cause other banks to offer lower setup fees.

You make a great a point though. The setup fee is too high for most users except very wealthy or for people who just got to have total anonymity (no paper trail with offshore). These people will come with time but right now we need to get BTC-powered VISAs to the masses. We need competition to bring it down. This is a good business opportunity for someone to exploit. The average the guy would be willing to pay less for a VISA that may not be anonymous but was still linked to a BTC address that did on the fly conversion.