Yesterday the payment card network in Spain was down for several hours. I personally was in the supermarket and it was chaos. People with all the products in their baskets were piling up without being able to pay. The same thing happened in restaurants and basically anywhere you had to pay, including online payments. The event probably caused losses to the majority of Spanish businesses, and everything occurred because of the failure in the system of a single company.
I am genuinely interested on hearing the point of people who still don't believe that decentralized blockchain networks are the future of payments.
More info according to [1]. At 13:10 Redsys (a payment Gateway) experienced an outage for hours[2]. At least around 18:00 it was resolved because I bought some groceries without any issue.<p>Sorry I only found information about this in Spanish.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.elmundo.es/economia/2023/11/18/6558baa1e4d4d879278b4578.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.elmundo.es/economia/2023/11/18/6558baa1e4d4d8792...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.elmundo.es/economia/dinero-inversion/2023/11/19/6559063fe4d4d8d5388b4582.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.elmundo.es/economia/dinero-inversion/2023/11/19/...</a>
>I am genuinely interested on hearing the point of people who still don't believe that decentralized blockchain networks are the future of payments<p>Decentralization is either a very attractive feature or a dangerous threat. It depends on who you ask and what they have at stake.<p>I think decentralization is a very attractive feature. But there are many problems with various blockchain-type technologies currently. These problems include high energy costs, slow and limited transaction rates, lack of privacy of transactions, and being too complicated for any average person to use safely.<p>Not all blockchain technologies have all of these problems. There are many mitigations for these problems. Some people say that some of these issues (like irreversible transactions) are features, not problems.<p>One way of seeing it is that the current technology is just a a low-level base layer, and better things will be built on top of it.<p>But, currently I'm not aware of any widely-accepted cryptocurrency or blockchain tech which avoids all of these problems yet.<p>Edit: and isn't good old physical cash still a reasonable solution in Spain?
> I am genuinely interested on hearing the point of people who still don't believe that decentralized blockchain networks are the future of payments.<p>This assumes the internet and power will never go down in an area. Wires will never be cut, solar flares will never happen, motivated forces will never hack networks, whatever.<p>Paper or metal in your wallet has worked for thousands of years in some form or another.
> I am genuinely interested on hearing the point of people who still don't believe that decentralized blockchain networks are the future of payments.<p>Cash?
> people who still don't believe that decentralized blockchain networks are the future of payments<p>Imagine if the network <i>was</i> working but at 7 global transactions per second and each purchase took 10 mins for the payment to clear.<p>Fact of the matter is that even with yesterday's outage, the Spanish payment card network still delivers excellent reliability and performance.
I love how this reads normally until the sudden "but blockchain" comment at the end.<p>Blockchain payment processing is slower, more costly, and a silly suggestion to ameliorate problems in payments that don't violate laws or international agreements or need to completely ignore kyc.
> decentralized blockchain networks<p>The system could also be decentralized and not based on a blockchain? If the system has one point of failure it seems to me to be a design flaw.
My point is: you are at the cashier and there is no connectivity. But in your smartphone there is a app that is like a physical wallet and you can use it to pay like you use physical money. I guess that kind of solution don't need blockchain networks to work.Because outages like this can happen to decentralised blockchain networks too.
>... decentralized blockchain networks are the future of payments.<p>That won't help if physical access is through a common or shared infrastructure that gets shut down from a hardware failure or line cut. Having a local system that queues transactions for processing after things comes back online would make more sense.
So what happens when shops connection to this blockchain or whatever goes down? Or maybe by accident or by plan? Do they trust that customers won't notice and go do double spend? Will they risk it? Does it actually solve anything from perspective of the shop?
More likely they will track down the cause of the issue and implement a patch, rather than do something blockchain-centric. I'm all for multiple payment options; hopefully a bitcoin layer2 payment solution can co-exist alongside the legacy systems.
Honestly it wasn’t that bad. Y’all overreacting.<p>This post sounds like “we should decommission every nuclear power plant because one was poorly managed 40 years ago.”