Wow, this is really cool. Literarily just debt cards without the cards, or Apple/Google pay without the proprietary software. Also the option to pay friends like venmo. Open standard, open software and no reason other than capitalism to not use it.

I wonder if Taler could follow an implementation path like Apple/Google pay, I’m not sure how those services even work (is Apple/Google considered a bank? A payment processor?), yet they have point of sale integration which everyone everywhere had to pay to upgrade their systems to support.

The problems you describe are due to capitalism: profit motivated commerce. The open source business model has a focus that monetizes the human actions that are a value-add, such as continued development of targeted features, tech support and other things it makes sense to pay for specialized knowledge, but the tangibles are still open for all to modify, audit or use as they want.