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Seems to me that the real villain is the network interchange companies. The credit companies which use said networks are numerous and are in reasonable competition with each other, continually eroding their share of the transaction fee to provide more and more compelling 'rewards' to their customers.

Once upon a time people dreamed that blockchain would provide the network, operating in a distributed fashion that isn't dependent on one or two companies, and bet big on it becoming that, but obviously that didn't pan out.