Regulate Visa and MasterCard and the rest. As utility services, they should not have the ability to ban or deny service to any payment that is not clearly illegal. Or we should create a public alternative with private transactions.

I'm afraid regulators are happy with the current situation when they can make a phone call and Visa/MC will block whatever people in government don't like (e. g. porn), in exchange state allows Visa/MC to rake up fees.

It feels they should be a neutral payment system. They're implementing global policy otherwise due the monopoly they have, that's something that should handled at government/state level.

There is no "the rest". All the payment processors or aggregators ultimately talk to Visa or MasterCard. Even if there are alternative payment methods that include direct transfer etc. they still might get kicked off if they don't follow their rules.

> a public alternative with private transactions

This is exactly why governments should step in and regulate Visa and MasterCard, to prevent them from banning porn or other adult services.

If this kind of banning goes too far, there will come a point when even Joe Blow and his dog start using cryptocurrency. And once (truly private and anonymous) cryptocurrency becomes widely circulated, people will no longer need to exchange it back into fiat currency. Joe might start paying other people directly with crypto and eventually, perhaps even his rent, utilities, groceries...?

And then what? How will governments collect tax revenue?

>A public alternative with private transactions

Anyone heard of Monero? Kind of their whole purpose... I know, I know, crypto bad, but when censorship comes for [insert your thing/country here], it kind of becomes obvious why people talked about crypto before btc was six digits. Anyone who knows how tech works and also any history about how authoritarian states work should probably see why crypto got so big in the first place, long before [insert scam that makes otherwise sensible people disregard an entire class of technology here].