The quiet story of the most powerful and profitable monopoly in the world

Full ack. Since a few years I’m considering what strategy could be used to grow a competitor that is much cheaper.

The market gap where to start this is obvious to me: at least in Germany a lot of street food vendors don’t accept credit cards and there you can only pay with cash. They purely compete on price and quality, the payment means is no differentiator for them. It may even be that other properties of cash are crucial to their current mode of operation.

The strategy how to start a cc competitor is not obvious to me. Either one needs to plow a ton of money into the market to spur adoption or some Schema for organic growth must be found. The latter would be strictly preferable as the risk is much smaller.

finding out about these aspects of how our society currently runs like he mentioned in the article has deeply informed my political views. Every Electronic payments should not be something a corporation gets to profit off of by ~2% every time there is an exchange. That's basically a sales tax but some already crazy rich person gets it and for what?

This is the consequences of having a privatized electronic money system.

No. Financial markets are state weapons. Much more effective than conventional ones.