Where I am it's increasingly common to see credit card fees when checking out. I get it, because merchants are being charged 3-5% of their total revenue. I wish there was a low fee credit card network that merchants didn't charge a fee for, so I could continue the simplicity of digital payments but opt out of this crazy Visa Infinite rewards accounting boondoggle.

I just hope these leeches on society will sone go bankrupt.

All of them do the same : ensure I get the money from the customer. Of course it's a larger project to run this in the whole world, but shouldn't it scale to less along with the number of billions of customers instead of the other way round ?

This is an insane amount of money. They killed micro-transactions, they killed the business model of the Web in favor of ads, the only popular way to do microtransactions right now.

You can apply to a fund to implement this system.

https://nlnet.nl/taler/

The merchant pays 2.5%

The best way to pay for poor services already rendered and move on with life is to simply pay via card. Didn't like that haircut? Terrible food at the restaurant? Hold onto your cash and slip them the card.

https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2016/Visa-Commis...

The issuing bank keeps 2%

Is this why the best cash back credit cards give 2%?

* https://tautology.town/2026/02/14/learning-charcoal-grilling...

* https://tautology.town/2026/04/03/ten-times.html

Now they do all kinds of accounting tricks to pretend that they have thin profit margins because they split up every part of the business into hundreds of 1-3% chunks of the profit. To sidestep regulation that already barely exists.

There are benefits for merchants to accepting credit cards. More impulse buys, buying more per transaction. An owner may choose to absorb the merchant fee because the increase in sales (even at the lower profit per unit) means higher profits overall.

most importantly, this opens up a lot of money that the federal reserve can hold directly, something that will become more and more important as bond yields go sky high.

From the actual article:

The payment processor keeps 0.35% ($0.35), then pays 2% ($2.00) to the cardholder’s issuing bank and 0.15% ($0.15) to Visa. The 2% is the interchange fee, commonly known as interchange. The 0.15% is the network assessment fee. 8

In other words, they get 0.35% of every transaction ... and it does not require anything close to that to maintain their network.

It’s like if you gave your buddy $100 to give to his room mate, and he decides to wait a week and gamble it on Kalshi

A large part of the promise of crypto and stablecoins was to displace Visa and Mastercard rent-seeking. This didn't seem to happen. Most modern neobanks, our own included (https://peanut.me), actually seem to EMBRACE Visa and Mastercard. Almost all offer an actual Fiat card within their app, instead of boldly saying "No, pay with crypto, the future of money!"

This is somewhat disappointing in the short term, but longterm i believe it offers a clear transitory path to full decentralized money adoption. Already today we're seeing a growth in direct peer to peer payments in peanut, and merchants slowly starting to adopt it as well. I imagine the same is happening across the industry. In a competitive economy, the better currency (read: crypto, stablecoins) wins and eventually absorbs adoption.

my 2 cents

which is also why crypto bros get confused.

You're welcome!