Sure. I wasn't saying anything about the price. I was just responding to the statement that the product is not good. The product is great. The price may not be worth it. But lets not pretend like Visa/MC is a substandard product.

How is the product great? It's exactly the same as any other such service. If I didn't look and randomly picked a cc from my wallet I wouldn't even know which card I paid with until I look at the bill.

The fact that Visa and Mastercard have these great margins is entirely down to their duopoly. In a competitive market the fees would be massively lower because it's not actually that expensive running the network. 2%, think about that! With the amount of transactions they do they're printing money. You're paying for this, it's your money and that of every other person, even those who do not use the companies, because the vendors pay the fee. That's the genius part of their model and since most people don't care about finance they don't understand how they're being ripped off.

I don't know why people think I'm interested in talking about the fees. I'm responding to the quote that "Like most monopolies the quality and price of service is not actually that good." The price may be a ripoff, but the quality of the service is good. The reason you can pick a random CC from your wallet without thinking and it just works is because of the oligopoly. Credit cards 'just work' virtually everywhere, and that is a huge part of what it means for a payment system to be high-quality.

What other payment system currently offers the same speed, ubiquity, reliability, and fraud protection to consumers? If I'm going to travel the world, I'm going to rely on Visa/Mastercard for a reason.

It’s not a duopoly? Amex exists and so does discover. Visa and Mastercard may be large but certainly not the only game in town

The security, at least in the US, is distinctly substandard.