> Let me say first of all that the card networks do great work enabling commerce by being lightning-fast and generally secure.

A lot of that is smoke and mirrors. They give a very fast pinky promise of payment, but it usually takes several days to become irrevocable. Similarly, it has taken decades for them to implement any form of genuine security, and even today the main form of fraud protection is... simply having the merchant pay for it.

The most impressive part is how they managed to stay this popular, despite being built on fundamentally flawed concepts.