Edit: this is not entirely correct; transactions may go online or stay offline, depending on amount and connection speed. See comments below.<p>It might depend on where you are. Where I am, in the UK, chip card transactions are quite fast. Fast enough to use contactless (tap and go a.k.a. "pay by bonk") where you literally just tap your card on the pinpad and go on your merry way [1].<p>The difference is that in the UK, transactions are not immediately sent online. I repeat: <i>they're not immediately sent online</i>. So you don't have to wait for the merchant to contact the acquirer, for the acquirer to respond and so on and so forth.<p>Instead what happens is that you dip, or swipe, or tap your card; the pinpad and the card figure it out between themselves whether you are the rightful owner of the card; the pinpad makes a record of the transaction; and you're told the transaction is "approved", then pick up your goods and go home. Later in the day, the merchant (i.e. an automated process at the store) sends an overnight "batch" of transactions to the acquirer, (i.e. the bank or credit network etc) and the acquirer either transfers the funds directly to the merchant, or blocks out the funds so you can't use them again and they can be transferred to the merchant later.<p>That's the EMV standard in a nutshell and entirely from memory, with a distance of a good few years from the time I worked for an EMV vendor (we sold a bit of EMV software that went on the Point-Of-Sale machine and handled all of the above). I might be misremembering a few things but I believe the above is mostly accurate.<p>tl;dr: having to go online for each and every transaction takes forever.<p>___________<p>[1] Or of course sometimes do a double take, realise the transaction hasn't gone through, tap again, eyball the pinpad, then possibly insert or swipe etc. Sometimes it doesn't work.