Visa and Mastercard are called card _networks_ for a reason. Wherever you are in the world, or in any site anywhere, if your card says Visa and the merchant’s POS machine (or payment gateway) take Visa, both parties know the transaction is good. The merchant gets his money and you get the product.

You get your card from your issuing bank, so the consumer’s last mile is the bank’s problem. The merchant get their POS/gateway from the acquirers. Your bank and the merchants acquirer don’t know each other.

Visa and Mastercard are intermediaries. There’s no way a NatWest card in the UK is connected to whatever POS is in Chile or whatever. They all route through the card brands.

This is why it’s so tough to break this monopoly.

Privacy.com issues cards from the Visa and Mastercard networks.

You can’t run your own card network easily because you would have to convince all of the merchant banks that take card transactions to do business with you.

Digital money movement requires an operating agreement between at least two financial entities - but most of the time there’s a lot more. Depending on the type of transaction you may have two or more gateways, facilitators, processors, issuers and underlying banks involved.

It’s a very fragmented system that relies on many, many different entities all having agreements and contracts with eachother.

> Privacy.com manages to issue card numbers somehow. How does that work?

Through Visa and Mastercard

They work with Visa and MasterCard to issue cards in systems run by both of them.

It needs to work with banks in different countries. It doesn't need to work everywhere, like being able to pay your dinner with it, obviously.

You have to offset negative ValveCard balances with USD in everyone's banks, and there's a convenient middleman called Visa who does exactly that by tying store accounts to bank accounts through the universally accepted membership card they issue.

By not working outside the US.