Until the operators decide for their own mysterious reasons to make your small card stop working, or that you suddenly owe them a bunch of money you never had, or both at the same time.

How is any of this possible in the real world? If my bank says I owe them money, it’s on them to prove it. If they can’t I can easily take them to court.

"Easily" is far from my experience. I eventually got everything back but it took literally years.

I’d love to hear more.

I don't know much more, which is the frustrating part of the experience. When we got an actual court date they were suddenly happy to give me all my money back, and I was too tired to push further. But until then it was block, stall, ask for more copies of the same identity verification documents or claim that they somehow didn't meet the requirements (e.g. claiming that my bank statements weren't acceptable identify verification because they didn't show the account being in active use, despite it being my main daily account), insist simultaneously that they couldn't tell me anything but it would all be resolved soon.

I’m not a crypto fanatic but credit and debit cards are very susceptible to fraud

But in those cases the user gets their money back. This isn’t the case with crypto.

People with time get their money back. People without it get nothing back. And that’s not even mentioning the legal scams like overdraft charges… I’m just saying, the existing system sucks too.

It's not that much time, and frankly you need the time with any method. The last time it happened to me, my card provider noticed the transactions, blocked the card and phoned me to ask if I made them.

The time before, I phoned my bank and told them I had a charge I didn't recognize, they asked me to fill in a form and refunded me within 48 hours.

Absolutely, as much as any other payment method. Meanwhile there are consumer protections available for them. One phonecall and a form will pretty much instantly reverse a debit card, credit card, or direct debit transaction with any bank in Europe. On more than one occasion this has happened to me and it's taken less than 15 minutes to resolve.