This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
100's ??? no no,no,no last I checked it was in the tens of thousands of nsfw games on itch.io
What are the alternatives to Visa/Mastercard?
Discover, American Express, Diner’s Club, and the one that still rules them all, Cash. There are probably others, but Visa and Mastercard are the two largest.
Diners Club is Discover, and they got bought up by Capital One a couple months ago. So you'll only really have Amex left.
How do I transfer my cash to online stores?
You can in Japan apparently. They have a system where you can go to convenience store and pay by scanning a code
You can also sorta use zelle, but the technical integration is not great. It's a very manual process as it is
Ultimately, the problem is we let two companies dominate commerce itself. We just need to let the governmet do payment processing, and require compatibility
In Italy, there's a debit card circuit called PagoBancomat.
Italy also has a digital-only payment system called Satispay. Denmark and Finland have MobilePay (which is way better than Satispay). Sweden has Swish.
Your country may have something similar, look it up. And then you can always pay with PayPal by connecting your bank account directly, with no cards involved (at least in Europe).
I’d love to boycott them, but literally everything I do uses one of those 2.
While the pressure on the credit card companies should still work due to conversations behind closed doors, my understanding is that those companies are not actually payment processors. Payment processors are a bunch of companies/banks, some you likely haven't heard of (one is PayPal though, feel free to make your voice heard to them), and they are taking legal responsibility for the transactions themselves, and thus actually have incentive to police transactions. Credit card companies themselves, not having those legal liabilities, would much rather people just spent their money everywhere as long as there was low risk of cards being stolen or misused.
