Buy European

Canada shares a land border with Denmark and a maritime border with France.

I think that is sufficient to include them in any extended EU schemes.

(To the degree that they want it, of course)

There is GNU Taler which is quite cool, but thats not really ready for use yet sadly.

social media engagement hype, predatory capitalism, and disinformation ruining something

I mean, it still works for getting around Visa and Mastercard. For instance it can be used to make donations to various media piracy groups. It's just that it's so useful to scammers and many people see the technology as a whole as being one 'brand'.

It really depends on the cryptocurrency in question. Some coins are much more credible than others. Lumping them all in together is like saying that the Japanese Yen and the Lebanese Pound are the same.

Yay GNU Taler is very promising, but I fear banks prefer proprietary systems.

It may become widely used if there's strong customer demand for GNU Taler, or regulation requiring an open electronic wallet. Most banks would probably be dragging their feet.

It has been a while since this appeared; I wonder if it picks up steam. Now or never?

Is it? Doesn't look like they offer debit/credit cards.

Looks more like a PayPal alternative.

As far as I know, Giropay is being replaced by Wero, which is already supported by some banks in different European countries.

It is so far one if the better PayPal/Visa/MasterCard alternatives I‘ve used, but adoption is still a problem.

Annoyingly, we already have fast transactions as part of SEPA. But they're somewhat inconvenient to do and especially not available by just holding your card in front of a sensor.

If we had a harmonized standard for that we could get rid of Visa and MasterCard. And if we had a common web interface to make SEPA transactions more convenient than manually typing an IBAN into a homebanking interface we could get rid of PayPal as well.

Yes, I know services like that exist but I really hate how the current ones expect me to type the login credentials for my homebanking into a third-party website.

Exactly. Austria has eps which works well within Austria and with Austrian companies online, but no further than that.

I'm Portuguese and also lived in other countries in Europe and Multibanco is a vastly superior system to everything else I've seen, but on the ATM side rather than the payments side (everybody seems to have their own payment solution or, like the UK, rely on the likes of Visa and MasterCard) - already back in the 90s in Portuguese ATMs, in addition to withdrawing money, you could check your bank account balance, get a statement with the last transactions on your account and even pay your bills all this well before widespread internet access and online banking: that stuff was way ahead of its time back then.

Right now they've added stuff like touchless mobile payments and transfers, but the rest has caught up with them so you'll find such solutions in most countries plus that whole system is entirely local as it's the product of ages ago (before neoliberalism) the government forcing the banks to get together and create a company - SIBS - under shared ownership of the banks, responsible for setting up and managing a national interbank payment systems.

I wouod even say that the Multibanco system probably helps Portuguese banks maintain market lock-in against external competitors, which does get translated to Portugal having pretty high banking fees compared to the rest of Europe, especially for one of the poorest countries in the EU.