It's interesting how in China they kinda leapfrogged credit cards all together (they still exist, but they're not ubiquitous). Here it's either cash or payments through phones and QR codes using Alipay/Wechat/etc. It's pretty fantastic and there is very little lock in like b/c these aren't hardware-centric technologies. Just download an app, connect it to a bank account and you're good to go (both merchant and customer). So competitors are free to disrupt all they want.

Meanwhile parasites like Visa skim an insane 3% off of the whole US retail economy. How this isn't banned by the government is beyond me... I'm sure it rivals the sales tax in some jurisdictions.