Chaos in Spain after payment card network crash
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.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 79.9 ms ] threadI don't think this was big news and I don't see this on any major news portal
> people who still don't believe that decentralized blockchain networks are the future of payments.
Anyone that has a modicum of experience and doesn't panic at a minor inconvenience like that? It's not like Bitcoin doesn't take multiple minutes to confirm a simple transaction
Seems like the main (only?) Card payment processor in Spain has stopped working, country wide, for one hour or two. That's a huge security/infrastructure problem.
News notes:
Cash?
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.
Sorry I only found information about this in Spanish.
[1] https://www.elmundo.es/economia/2023/11/18/6558baa1e4d4d8792...
[2] https://www.elmundo.es/economia/dinero-inversion/2023/11/19/...
Imagine if the network was working but at 7 global transactions per second and each purchase took 10 mins for the payment to clear.
Fact of the matter is that even with yesterday's outage, the Spanish payment card network still delivers excellent reliability and performance.
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.
Paper or metal in your wallet has worked for thousands of years in some form or another.
Also, replacing digital payment systems by decentralised blockchains does not mean replacing cash. Those can and probably will coexist
Decentralization is either a very attractive feature or a dangerous threat. It depends on who you ask and what they have at stake.
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.
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.
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.
But, currently I'm not aware of any widely-accepted cryptocurrency or blockchain tech which avoids all of these problems yet.
Edit: and isn't good old physical cash still a reasonable solution in Spain?
Yeah, cash is an option in Spain, however, most people, specially young people, is more likely to just carry their card and no cash.
Bitcoin was announced in 2008. That’s 15 years ago.
So when is all this stuff going to happen? Every time someone comes up with a criticism the solution will come later because it’s “early days”.
The iPhone, and the following smartphone revolution, absolutely changed the world. That’s been… 16 years. One more than bitcoin. And it was obvious the smartphone changed everything 10 years ago.
So far the blockchain has used up a bunch of resources, produced tons of scams, and enabled ransomware.
I’m still waiting.
Should we have given up on the internet by 1981 then?
Sometimes new technology takes a few (human) generations to take off. I know everyone wants instant gratification these days, but try to be patient.
It isn't going to happen
The bitcoin developers are too hard headed and there's too much infighting for anything to go ahead. And they still have to decide if it's a store of value, a payment means or a speculative asset. Hence the heads banging together
No wonder the main "stablecoins" are not distributed
One has to wonder how much waste heat has been produced, plus the associated carbon release from non renewable sources of electricity.
And with enough events like this, the young will learn why the old carry at least some cash.
This post sounds like “we should decommission every nuclear power plant because one was poorly managed 40 years ago.”
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.
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.