US banks are queueing up to stop customers from buying bitcoin using credit cards, as wild price swings continue on the biggest cryptocurrency.
JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America both last night said they will ban the practice, according to CNBC, which could leave customers chasing the big price rises which bitcoin has seen over the past year with big losses. Citigroup also joined in the ban, according to Bloomberg.
Credit card providers which allow transactions with cryptocurrency exchanges could be left exposed to higher risk than usual because of the massive volatility of the assets.
Read more: Bitcoin dips below $8,000 as concerns mount over regulatory crackdown
Bitcoin has seen its price surge by more than 700 per cent over the past year, according to the OnchainFX website, but the last month has seen its dollar price fall by more than 40 per cent as fears of what many economists have called a bubble spread.
Yesterday the price of bitcoin fell below the $8,000 mark for the first time since November, after rising almost as far as $20,000 in December, amid a broad fall in dollar values across the major cryptocurrencies.
Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JP Morgan, has been among the most prominent sceptics of digital currencies, infamously describing bitcoin as a "fraud".
Yesterday Nouriel Roubini, a New York University economist who is credited with having predicted the financial crisis, said bitcoin is the "mother of all bubbles", and added that he expects regulators around the world to crack down on the lightly regulated space in an interview with Bloomberg television.
Read more: January bitcoin blues: $44bn has been wiped from its value so far this year
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