In India, even rural farmers have easy cashless mobile payments. In D.C., the capital of the US, nobody has easy cashless mobile payments, and even card payments are too difficult, with the government finally giving up and enshrining cash.
The goal was to "make illegal money" (i.e. tax evasion / sourced from corruption) useless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...
TLDR: blogger called a politician fat. The german prosecutors are considering prosecuting him and Deutsche Bank terminated his account.
India and China use cheap QR code transactions, but a lot of the overhead is taken in by VC money. So I think these companies are hoping to make money on these someday, just not right now.
The USA has a pretty well developed system, and debit and credit cards have been pretty ubiquitous for a few decades now. The issue is that our system is expensive, and no one is subsidizing it for future gains (the gains are today). Debit cards are cheaper, but credit cards have done some marketing to get people to prefer them.