That's really at this point that's back to where I am with crypto. Through all the speculation and cruft, there is still a shot at owning our own payments, or rather no one owning them.

The payment networks have power, and if you can twist the arm of the gatekeepers, people subvert that power.

The only thing I don't know about these days is with the stablecoins, how do you avoid the government sinking their claws into you if you intrinsically (esp. if successful) have to hold that much in cash or short-term instruments? Or you have something like tether, which leaving aside anything else, you can definitely say is comically opaque for an entity that is nominally running $160B.