Visa and Mastercard don't, but right now cash more or less does. If the state has a monopoly on digital payments, and can thus mass surveil all digital payments without any scrutiny, the state has a huge incentive to disincentivize or bar the use of cash. Then all it takes is a bad actor to come into power and abuse the system.
> Not relevant to the point I was making at all - the state running digital payments is no more an incentive to stop cash payments than Visa/MC.
Yes, it is. The state acting as a direct intermediary for all transactions creates new mechanisms of both mass surveillance and economic control that do not exist in the status quo where the state functions merely as the issuer of cash.
When private businesses create digital transaction systems that augment the cash economy, the state itself does not have direct access to or control over the transactions that flow through those systems, and must work within legal strictures to interact with the organizations managing them.
> User data is available from either and in the case of Visa/MC it also likely leaks overseas.
Perhaps, but the legal implications between the state obtaining access to illicitly leaked data and the state itself being the originator of that data are drastically different.
