I hate to say it, but one more reason for crypto or any other alternatives. Those companies became too central and crucial. And with power always comes pressure from various sides and corruption.
There's a ton of other payment methods that don't go through CC processors. Wire transfers, ACH, digital checks, payment apps (which are an abstraction over these), or direct payment platforms (like Paypal).
Game retailers could get together to form their own payment company, let's call it GamerPay, which deducts purchases directly from a bank account, just like most other bills we pay. They could probably get a lot of non-gaming related companies on board if they offered lower fees and/or more transparency.
People seem to forget that banks have been transferring funds between accounts for much longer than credit cards have been around. The infrastructure exists for bypassing credit cards, they just aren't what the majority use.
Because almost no administration was ready to regulate it until recently. Payment and remittances are such obvious use cases but if every transaction create a tax event, it's also too cumbersome to implement for most merchant.
If the government has to regulate cryptocurrency for it to be useful as a currency, then it's not very useful as a decentralized currency, is it? In my view, most cryptocurrencies (bitcoin, at the very least) are built on fundamentally unsound economic principles which incentivize hoarding and speculation.
