No need to wait for a bank and it doesn't matter the blockchain, as long as it supports USDC and you have a crypto wallet, the payment goes through.
Stripe knows this already and crypto payments will be here for a very very long time as they already are today.
So, approximately six 0s of uptime for my use case?
I didn't say bitcoin. I said blockchains that use USDC.
> So, approximately six 0s of uptime for my use case?
No-one cares if 1 person (out of 8 billion and trillions of bots) won't use it. It exists and Shopify and Stripe have crypto payments with USDC which is useful for both humans and agents.
the point was about physical flesh-to-flesh shopping experiences.
If they have a POS Terminal at their physical brick and mortar store powered by Shopify, they can do just that [0] and it accepts crypto payments.
The same for Stripe Terminal which allows contactless payments with stablecoins such as USDC [0] for physical stores. They can accept crypto from there and Stripe handles the transaction seamlessly.
[0] https://www.shopify.com/uk/pos
[1] https://www.privy.io/blog/contactless-payments-with-stableco...
Like can you pay with crypto at a Stripe POS when the infrastructure goes down? Or was this just completely irrelevant?
which makes sense, you'd either end up paying in pegged, virtual crypto dollars, or pay with a completely separate crypto currency which then means that the shoes you bought a month ago are suddenly worth a magnitude more or less. might as well pay in turkish lira.
[0]https://www.six-group.com/en/home.html [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SumUp
Revolut, for example, has confirmed all its operations, that include, sign-ups, sign-ins, payments and transfers, top-ups, ATM withdrawals, stock trades, cryptocurrency, are all down.
For example, Phantom Wallet, MetaMask and Robinhood Wallet doesn't need a bank to make payments and send money anywhere.
2. This is Europe, we don't use USD directly or indirectly-via-backed-crypto for daily shopping.
3. Crypto comes in two layers: layer 1 which is too slow to replace interbank exchanges (which is much easier than everyone in Spain paying rent, which is much easier than everyone in Berlin buying lunch); and layer 2 which, as per memes about tech guys reinventing things which already exist, is reinventing the concept of a bank which is the thing here which fell over because the cloud it was on got unplugged.
Revolut’s “wallet” is managed by them and it is not the only wallet that exists.
2. We know and it does not matter since the EURC stablecoin exists today for that.
3. Most Layer 1 blockchains such as Solana, Stellar, XRP and Tempo are already fast (less than 10 seconds), worldwide with extremely very low fees for transactions.
2. Then USDC is irrelevant and you shouldn't have brought it up in this context.
3. Fees are irrelevant; worldwide is irrelevant; "10 seconds" is the wrong category of speed: throughput rather than duration.
Though 10 seconds isn't even fast in this context, payment cards are routinely used on e.g. the London Underground at the turnstiles, and anything over about 2 seconds would look like an error and that en-masse would cause noticeable queues getting into or out of the system and corresponding city-level commuting delays.
And normal card use in London public transport acts like a smart contract, as the fee isn't known on initial use, but when exiting the transport network later. Similar on hotels, from what I hear, though they handle it differently.
Both of these have a broader problem: anything on credit (which these function like as the final bill isn't known at point of sale) is fundamentally not part of the blockchain system, so even with all that, all credit cards need something bank-like (and if you use a smart contract to simulate this, you're taking on the risk of bugs in the contract).
From what I understand, TfL actually does all the hard work themselves and figures out the bill later, so if their DC went down the same time as Revolut's they'd not work even if this was a crypto solution that solved every other issue.
If I wanted to send money from my bank to another bank on Revolut, now I can't do that if GCP is down. Crypto wallets such as Phantom Wallet on the other hand can process that without needing GCP being up or down. That is the entire point of them.
2. There's a good reason why I said "stablecoins" and yes that includes USDC and EURC which are primarily used for payments; absolutely relevant for worldwide, instant low fee payments.
> Though 10 seconds isn't even fast in this context, payment cards are routinely used on e.g. the London Underground at the turnstiles, and anything over about 2 seconds would look like an error and that en-masse would cause noticeable queues getting into or out of the system and corresponding city-level commuting delays.
My point was towards the same ten seconds for buying physical goods. But since you want to switch the context and to talk about finality...
> From what I understand, TfL actually does all the hard work themselves and figures out the bill later, so if their DC went down the same time as Revolut's they'd not work even if this was a crypto solution that solved every other issue.
...technically TfL queues all these payments and they aren't finalized immediately. Even taking that time into account it takes from 12 hours to a day to finalize the payment for the travel after tapping a card on the reader.
But not a problem for blockchains like Solana which finalize even faster than that in 150ms rather than your slower example system of 12 hours.
So nope. There is a reason why an offline crypto wallet continues to work despite GCP and your bank going down at the same time and I can pay with a crypto card using Phantom Cash, but do go on.
If you were following Stripe for years, you would know that they are already using crypto for payments and it is here to stay.