I'm discovering a number of people here who see the world very differently than me. I would have taken it as a given that most people would agree that it would be healthy for the US market overall if we shook up the payment industry and got some new options.

A lot of Visa/Mastercard's terms for businesses are really bad. There are entire industries that are being pushed out of the market right now. Not to mention that these cards come with a tremendous amount of user tracking that's basically impossible to opt out of if you want to buy anything online.

That's why people are throwing everything at the wall from Bitcoin to GNU Taler trying desperately to find any kind of Open alternative that might work for online micropayments.