RE: Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are great for the environment! Don't believe the mainstream media!
Of all things, "Crony Capitalism" is the worst, I think - and unfortunately quite real, some of the biggest corporations consider politicians to be mere puppets that can be controlled for giving the corporation even bigger power. For instance, there seems to be no upper bound on how much of the tax money is directly or indirectly subsidizing Microsoft - for instance, our schools and universities are efficiently tax-paid mandatory institutions where the masses are being instructed to become good users of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. It's an extreme subsidy - of course anyone in their full minds will choose Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office when that's products 99.5% of all the (potential) employees knows how to use.
I absolutely don't believe crypto currencies aren't going to solve all world problems, it will solve some problems and induce new problems.
To me, I find it important getting rid of the credit card oligopoly, to get rid of the need of "trusted parties" taking a big cut in transactios for doing very little useful work ... I do believe blockchains may help with this (hence, I'm very positive towards blockchain technology as such), but it's absolutely no trouble-free "silver bullet".
In credit cards the seller pays a fee. In bitcoin the buyer pays. The store should be able to offer lower prices if they accept crypto. We should expect a discount from a store that offers both options.
Yes, it's a big problem. The credit card duopoly have standard conditions that the merchant should carry all the fees and give the customers the same price no matter the payment method. I believe that in some few jurisdictions there are regulations in place forbidding such agreements, i.e. in Denmark they do push the credit card fees over on the end-user.
I was a big user of credit cards for quite a while and a very early adopter; quite many of us are efficiently bribed to use credit cards. The prices in the shops are the same no matter if using credit cards or not, but the shop pays hefty fees for accepting credit card payments. In addition the credit card companies rake in penalties and heavy interests from those who aren't able to pay the full credit on the due date.
Quite some of the credit card issuers efficiently pays their customers to use the credit card - sometimes with up to 1% kickback on all purchases, sometimes even higher kickbacks on some of the purchases, often with a free time-limited credit, often with other perks, such as access to airport lounges, free travel insurance, etc.
In Norway we were very quite early adopters of plastic payment cards with magnet strip, we have a national de-facto standard ("Bank Axept") for debet payments, some of the banks were even experimenting with smart chips on their banking cards around 1990 - decades before it got normal.
I don't like the Norwegian "Bank Axept" standard as it's a proprietary solution that have had sort of a de-facto monopoly in Norway, but at least it's a lot cheaper and better than the Visa/Mastercard duopol - and it's gradually being pushed out. The shops pretty much needs to support the international credit cards both due to tourists and due to fellow Norwegians using credit cards - and due to the bribes, more and more people choose credit cards without support for "bank axept".