That's certainly true

Me in yurop, using a debit MasterCard, never needed a credit score. Who has my data, what are they doing with it, and how do I burn down their server?

(The answer, kids, is Stripe. Give it some years, it will be lit)

As it should be IMHO. Nothing is stopping you dropping cash for shit in the untracked economy which is massive but if you want to be a part of the larger system and all its benefits you need to be prepared to play by the rules that are designed by and large to protect people.

How can you buy things with monero? What merchants (online or in person) accept it?

Doesn't your credit card provider still get all your data?

E.g. doesn't visa/mastercard know about every transaction? They charge fees and they have a fraud prevention systems. So, I think, they do, right?

Probably the closest thing you can get to in terms of a "privacy" credit card. Everything about a credit card is tied to you by their very nature. So it depends on what or who you want privacy from.

Someone else mentioned privacy.com which I also use - it's good if you want to hide your transaction from the credit card company, or if you want to hide your identity from the merchant. But Privacy.com is more like a virtual debit card that connects to your bank account. Privacy.com still knows who you are.

That's a good idea

Most major American sites no longer accept these and they have become finnicky including locking the card so you have to call the call center to reopen the lock. This is due to curb laundering. Walmart in person works. Gas stations work. Used to work everywhere now, not much.

I use privacy.com but it only links to debit cards FYI

This, also a lot of credit card companies support virtual cards, American express does this, so does capital one. I'm sure there are others.

But Apple does and sees all the transactions so I don't know whether it's better privacy wise

Google Wallet, formally Google Pay, formally GPay, formally Android Pay, formally Google Wallet, formally Android Wallet, does the same thing.

Switching phones and returning something was such a pain since it generated an entirely new number.

The credit card company and everybody buying that data from them still does though, probably, which for me is the bigger concern.

There's no real way to do it. Unless you know someone who can trade you XMR<->cash and you somehow convince your employer to (break laws and) pay you in those forms, you can't avoid it. At some point, you'll have to get money on a real bank account, which requires real information to open.

7$ a dozen now from the farmer down the street from my parents. Inflation is wild!

Aren't cellphone NFC payment essentially a long-form version of this? As far as the machine is concerned they're getting your CC info, but Google/Samsung/Apple Pay are acting as a middleman and your actual credit card information is never actually shared.

That's why I love virtual card systems like MB NET. You just generate a random virtual card for every purchase (or a recurring one for each subscription vendor, for example) and move on. Your bank still knows what you're doing, of course, but vendors can't correlate anything. Preventing your bank from knowing where you're spending your money is much harder, for very practical reasons: fraud detection. The only real way is to use a secure crypto coin like Monero, but very few places accept it and you still have to deal with volatility.