[manxman]

From what I saw of the mindset I don’t think it works that way there.

In London “oyster” contactless cards replaced cash/paper tickets for buses and the tube. It was then incremented to contactless bank payment cards as soon as the banks added such cards. This seemed largely to be an internal systems upgrade leveraging existing infrastructure.

Japanese suica/pasmo contactless payment cards are more like oyster and need topping up. Their bank payment cards are incompatible with international contactless systems. International contactless cards don’t work locally on many payment terminals.

Many retailers that support both local and international cards literally have mutiple contactless terminals. Some manage to take a contactless payment but then print a bit of paper for you to sign (total WTF moment!!).

But this post was originally about trees. And what I was getting at was the culture reveres preserving and optimising paths after those paths stop making sense or become obsolete. Some of that is very cool to see but I’m not sure if it’s going to be sustainable given their decline.