Upon following the success of VISA card in the early 1960s’, a couple of American banks formed an alliance to launch a new card, called The Interbank Card in 1966. Ever since then Mastercard has been growing into a multinational payment system provider that offers its services internationally.

Global Acceptance of Mastercards

The services of Mastercard are available in more then 200 countries globally. In terms of market share, Mastercard owns about 15% of the card market. There were 201 million credit card and 189 million debit cards in circulation in 2016 solely in the United States. In total the purchasing power of these cards were about $1.2 trillion in 2016. Looking at the global market, there are more than 532 million Mastercards available globally.

More than 30 million online merchants accepts Mastercard as a method of payment around the globe. The number of POS terminals accepting Mastercard is unknown, however given number of the businesses worldwide this number means possibly more than 100 million retailers.

Benefits and challanges for bitcoin debit card holders

Mastercard is not charging any fees directly to its cardholders. All of the fees that are associated to a Mastercard is set by the card provider, such as the issuance fees, any annual charges or the reward and interest rates paid on the card. This means that bitcoin debit card holders are only charged to those fees that are available on the card provider’s website.

For those who wish to stay in low profile, Mastercard has the option to issue anonymous cards that only displays a single name on the card that can be freely given. Unfortunately these anonymous cards might not be accepted by all retailers as it may happen that the user is asked to show personal indentification documents. This is a known limitation of the anonymous bitcoin debit cards.