There's a ton of other payment methods that don't go through CC processors. Wire transfers, ACH, digital checks, payment apps (which are an abstraction over these), or direct payment platforms (like Paypal).

Game retailers could get together to form their own payment company, let's call it GamerPay, which deducts purchases directly from a bank account, just like most other bills we pay. They could probably get a lot of non-gaming related companies on board if they offered lower fees and/or more transparency.

People seem to forget that banks have been transferring funds between accounts for much longer than credit cards have been around. The infrastructure exists for bypassing credit cards, they just aren't what the majority use.

Remember that in any digital transmission either your system can’t claw back funds or you are extending credit to someone.

Where you set that dial is the kind of fraud you will get.

Regulation in place, lobbied into law by the major CC processors, is designed to make the appearance of new payment processors hard to impossible.

The bnpl vendors would suggest you are wrong.

Why do you hate to say that a non-centralised approach is better than a strict duopoly?

Crypto is obviously not without its own issues

Yes it, too, has its issues. It appears no system is perfect.

Because Crypto has historically found more use as a form of high tech gambling and vehicle for fraud than it has as actual currency

The US dollar is used by just about all drug dealers, money launderers and human traffickers, yet we also use it for our daily transactions.

Well yes because the US dollar's value is regulated by economic experts. Bitcoin's core idea was always based on pseudo-economic monetary theories

Sure. GP wrote "found more use" - it's about relative not absolute value.

Because almost no administration was ready to regulate it until recently. Payment and remittances are such obvious use cases but if every transaction create a tax event, it's also too cumbersome to implement for most merchant.

If the government has to regulate cryptocurrency for it to be useful as a currency, then it's not very useful as a decentralized currency, is it? In my view, most cryptocurrencies (bitcoin, at the very least) are built on fundamentally unsound economic principles which incentivize hoarding and speculation.

To be fair, money has been around for more than 20 years and people still find ways to make it a vehicle for fraud.