The chokepoint isn't the government in this case, but rather the major card brands (Visa, MasterCard, American Express). In the US, these brands have embedded morality clauses that prohibit these payments from riding their rails[1].
That being said, most US debit networks (Star, Pulse, Coop, etc) don't have these restrictions. It does damage the user experience to limit your card acceptance to most debit cards.
It's that weird American kind of funny that you can't pay for porn with an American Express credit card, but you can buy guns and a few crates of ammo.
You're slicing the baloney pretty thin if you agree that the government has taken action against these same financial institutions, with respect to their processing similar payments, but it's completely unrelated to the current situation, and that the financial institutions should act as if nothing's ever happened before.
Or non-action. Europe and Australia have regulated/reduced credit card interchange fees, but USA has not.
This whole “pay with card to get a lot of points!” thing while also allowing processors to have anti-competitive terms forbidding surcharges for credit card payments is a huuuuuuuge boon for their industry.
It's really pretty crazy when you think about it. My card is 2% cash back everywhere. Discover is basically letting me steal 2% of the revenue of every shop I visit and the shops can't do anything about it.
This is where you build a UX around buying some crypto-token in the check-out flow via a simple redirect to a partner, fix your credit card issue, and the partner immediately gets you a USDC transfer after charging the credit card.
Yes, there are companies out there that will do this.
