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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

Chargebacks are a feature for settling disputes, not a bug. Payment is still instant unless there is a dispute.

>Payment is still instant unless there is a dispute

If that was the case a merchant could withdraw cash immediately after someone paid them with a credit card. Which patently isn't the case. So no, Payment cards are not instant.

The payment happens and confirms instantly. Withdrawal of funds from the payment processor is not the payment, because payments are not limited by 'time to cash liquidity'.

Right and is there a problem with making our world more liquid?

Nobody said there was.

>The payment happens and confirms instantly.

Let's say that merchant accepts payment via Visa on Day 1. On Day 2, Visa goes out of business. The merchant will never receive the payment. So no the payment is not instantaneous. The merchant receives an IOU from Visa that settles in a few days. IOUs != settled payments.

Yes, in your carefully crafted hypothetical where a billion dollar company goes out of business tomorrow, it means that company can't make payments tomorrow. What about nuclear winter? Dissolution of the U.S.? Alien invasions? We need account for these hypotheticals too when discussing the validity of payments.

The delay event(bankruptcy, Visa’s servers go down for an hour) is meaningless. The point of debate is “Is the payment settled?”. To which the answer is a simple “no”.

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