If it means I don’t have to carry around a wad of bills in a gold money clip and hand them out like I’m John Gotti, then yes, Visa did give me exceptional service.

That's Visa's normal service. Considering that exceptional is silly.

So should I not be tipping for normal service? Its pretty confusing because in my country tipping seems to be the expected default, not something reserved to exceptional circumstances.

Do you similarly tip your phone company, or electricity provider?

Do you if the service is exceptional?

All things equal, I do think tipping for normal service from people who are employees is messed up.

Unfortunately, culture in many countries is to tip in certain situations, especially in restaurants, even for normal service. But just because it's culturally normal to tip in restaurants in your country doesn't mean you'd tip a giant corporation like Visa. That's not how culture works.

Not that I disagree with this point but I'd say the best reason to choose cash would be that you can control who receives it. Give it directly to the person who provided the service you're tipping for, whenever possible.

Exactly! Otherwise you're giving control over the money to someone else, who will use that control to further screw over the already marginalized service worker.

Tipping cash is great whenever you have it, but it's not convenient. Not in the age of digital payments that can be completed with your mobile phone.

You're absolutely right, cash is indeed inconvenient. But all digital payments make you pay a middleman "platform" which tries to extract as much of the transaction as possible while providing the minimum possible value. Oh and by the way this platform's also trying to become a monopoly so it can eventually provide less than the minimum value without losing you as a customer.

Crypto claims to be a solution to this, but in practice approximately all crypto transactions go through a middleman (exchange) which takes a cut. It's unreasonable to expect your barista to go through the effort of accepting crypto payments without involving an exchange.

Cash doesn't have this problem.

I'd love to be proven wrong about this. Is there a digital payment method that runs on phones that doesn't subsidize a middleman?

Chinese payment platforms are the closest to a light middle man, but this might just be VC subsidizing things. Cash has its own expense of course, you need a middleman regardless, even if it’s just your local bank branch taking daily merchant cash deposits.