thanks for clarifying. there’s still the risk of your IBAN getting leaked in a hack, no?

you mean gift cards bought at convenience stores? or do they buy them using a credit card and then the credits show up in your account?

regardless, Visa and MasterCard have hegemonic monopolies on the market. anybody not using them will see huge losses in sales.

excluding SEPA, it’s impossible to buy most things using them in my EU country.

SEPA also doesn’t have disposable credentials using randomized credit cards. i don’t want the stores I buy from to have my bank account info and potentially be charged by them randomly.

it’s always been a pump and dump scheme, as all black markets are

not really. Russia made their own payment processor because of being kicked out from SWIFT but using their system would be immoral.

it would be interesting if the EU makes their own payment processor.

some people were peddling crypto as a way to regain autonomy but most consumers don’t have the skills to buy it using cash and sideline Visa/MasterCard. it’s also not as accessible to people without technical skills.

really off-topic here, but as long as you factory reset a google pixel before leaving home why wouldn’t you bring that with you?

AFAIK it’s possible to detect government tampering by using GrapheneOS’ Auditor

I’m asking in good faith but maybe it would be dangerous to stand out by running non-standard OSes