US don't like someone, like Wikileaks? Card processors block all payments to them, so you consumer cannot get your money to them.

US want to profile all your transactions, to figure out where you eat, where you sleep, and what you do? They get all the data and you'll never even know.

Obviously this is not a problem, as long as you stay on good terms with US interests. The minute you become a target (which might simply be because you work at a competitor of a "strategic" US business), it's not so great, to put it mildly.

You're not necessarily aware of the inherent insecurity until you are on the wrong side of a breach. You might assume you can charge back if anything goes wrong, but you might have absolutely no guarantee in law that you will be able to do so. As with so much about cards, you are then at the mercy of your card issuer and/or the underlying card network, and they will act in their best interests, which might not coincide with yours.

You might think it's useful to have the credit facility, but the rates you're paying will almost always be far higher than you could get on a competitive loan from a bank. (And if you can't get such a loan, you certainly shouldn't be building up credit card debts either. The model becomes predatory and abusive at this point.)

You might think you're getting a good deal with the cashback schemes, but the merchants are getting hit with higher fees on the other side and they will be pricing that into the amount you were paying in the first place. Worse, since various places now limit or prohibit charging extra fees for card transactions, governments have legislated competition out of the payment methods market and anyone who chooses not to pay with a card is now stuck with the same higher prices.

You might find the automatic conversions for foreign payments useful, but you are almost certainly paying a silly exchange rate and maybe extra fees on top for the privilege.

Card payments are comically unreliable at the best of times. In a "good" case, this just causes some embarrassment when your card is unexpectedly declined at the store and you have to try it again or use something else to pay. In a more serious case, perhaps your card gets blocked because of a false positive on the security checks while you're abroad, and you are left with no easy way to pay for anything for potentially several days until it gets sorted out.

On top of this, there are the indirect effects of all the one-sided obligations imposed on credit card providers by governments and on merchants by credit card providers, where a bunch of people are required to take on potentially severe risks that should be entirely unnecessary just to carry out a simple financial transaction. Much of what is wrong with the industry actually comes down to these effects and what happens when the risk gets passed on or priced in.

In short, the people who benefit the most from card payments are the card networks. For everyone else involved, they are likely inferior to other payment methods in one or probably more important ways, and it is their established infrastructure and ubiquity internationally that keeps them relevant more than anything else. There is no good reason we shouldn't all switch to alternatives today, given the ease of doing so with modern mobile devices and Internet access, but again it comes down to momentum more than anything else.