None of these are actually trusted by the general population. The average person has never even heard of USDT and USDC and barely knows what the other 2 are.

So excluding crypto/web3 for the above reasons, does anyone have recommendations for non stripe mostly us friendly solutions?

There will be Crickets

Most people outside of circles like this one have never heard of Ethereum, let alone USDT or USDC, and when they hear Bitcoin, they think "risky" or "scam". If your product or service is specifically aimed at tech enthusiasts and you take pains to make it easy, maybe you could get away with accepting payments only in crypto (though I doubt it), but otherwise there's no way.

So your answer is that they aren’t well-knowj enough, and the ecosystem isn’t consumer-friendly enough, kind of like decades of personal computers and tech enthusiasts like the Homebrew Club, which preceded the Personal Computer going mainstream, and then the corporate-produced Mobile Phone explosion based on software that was developed originally for personal computers? Yeah sure, these things take time.

Another downside of these alternatives is that they are not decentralized either. USDT and USDC are controlled by a single entity each. The top 0.01% of Bitcoin holders own 27% of all the Bitcoin [0], and even worse, the top 0.1% of Bitcoin miners control half of the miner capacity [1]. I am not sure about Ethereum, but as in any pure capitalistic system, the accumulation of wealth by a few is inevitable [2].

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-weal...

[1] https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-mining-capacity-owner...

[2] "capital has the tendency for concentration and centralization in the hands of richest capitalists. Marx explains" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation#:~:text=c...

“Controlled” is a strong word considering that there is no master key that can just misuse all the tokens secretly the way that FTX or Celsius did. Everyone gets their own key, to move their tokens.

Even if Ethereum comes to be controlled by a few people, their incentives are not to kill the value of their own ecosystem (unless they are a state actor, or if all Ethereum tokens are somehow bought out completely by Elon Musk lol). And the only way the blockchain can get screwed is by miners ALL agreeing to refuse to mint new blocks. Or miners could re-order transactions within a block, which they already do. That’s it.

Now you could say that the dollar reserves of USDC are controlled by one company, and I agree. Even though USDC is run by Circle which is a regulated company that can pay out with no slippage to your bank account, and receive dollars the same way. They are one step away from banks and may even get insurance and reinsurance similar to FDIC.

But you may still not want to see one company be the gateway. That’s why we started the Intercoin project, to make a truly decentralized ecosystem including decentralizing the gateways too (just like the Internet is).

But for today, it’s already no different than any bank in the Free Banking Era, which is how the United States did almost all of its money all the way before the greenback. As long as the music is on and the musical chairs are moving, your $500 in tokens that you use for your consumer purchases is safe.

Not really. I cannot use bitcoin with any stretch of imagination the same way I can use EUR.