Black Friday Fiat Fail

[DooMAD]

Having plenty of fun and games at work today.  The payment processor we use is experiencing issues and we are currently unable to process card payments.  Probably overloaded with the increased transaction volumes for Black Friday.  Such is the nature of central points of failure.

<insert 'Bitcoin user not affected' meme here>


//EDIT:  To clarify, as there seems to be some confusion, I spend my day at work processing card payments over the phone, among other things.  The payment processor my company use had a temporary fault affecting anyone who was calling in for about 30 minutes.

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[Malam90]

There is huge selling pressure and withdraw fiat balance in the last 2 days. Investors are trying to pick up their profits from the markets and trying to cash it out. As a result, market price fall and market liquidity decreased a lot, also cmc lost almost $50B in the last 2 days. I am fearing about the possible same of  after 2017 what was the black period in cryptocurrency history.

[joniboini]

There is huge selling pressure and withdraw fiat balance in the last 2 days. Investors are trying to pick up their profits from the markets and trying to cash it out.

I get the feeling that you guys are talking about different things?
Bitcoin is indeed in the correction phase, you should expect it after crypto media, influencer, and so on shill so hard. It's time for them to take profits and prepare for the next leg up.

Still, that doesn't have any correlation to the issues on fiat transactions mentioned by OP.

[Josefjix]

I suspect overloaded transactions from your bank, have you tried with another debit card and you got the same result?  I wouldn't be surprised if the Bitcoin network is overcrowded as well to delay payments, what happens when a failed transaction occurre at the peak of such important offer? Wouldn't buyers be disappointed in Bitcoin?

[davis196]

Having plenty of fun and games at work today.  The payment processor we use is experiencing issues and we are currently unable to process card payments.  Probably overloaded with the increased transaction volumes for Black Friday.  Such is the nature of central points of failure.

<insert 'Bitcoin user not affected' meme here>

What kind of payment processor are you currently using?
I think that the real competitor of Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies is cash,not debit/credit cards.
If we want mass adoption and global domination,we will have to make Bitcoin more convenient,secure and user-friendly than cash.
Cash payments will never face the problems that payment processors have.It doesn't matter if it's a fiat payment processor or a cryptocurrency blockchain.Digital payment systems always get stuck at one point or another.

[gentlemand]

Such is the nature of central points of failure.

I often wonder whether governments wonder about whether having much of their economies running through two companies is a sensible idea. In the UK the major banks often have a giant outage. TSB had one that carried on for days. In cashless world that means an absolute grind to a halt for everything.

[DooMAD]

What kind of payment processor are you currently using?
I think that the real competitor of Bitcoin/cryptocurrencies is cash,not debit/credit cards.
If we want mass adoption and global domination,we will have to make Bitcoin more convenient,secure and user-friendly than cash.
Cash payments will never face the problems that payment processors have.It doesn't matter if it's a fiat payment processor or a cryptocurrency blockchain.Digital payment systems always get stuck at one point or another.

I believe they're a subsidiary of Mastercard.

In the end, it was only a short blip.  Probably less than 30 minutes of disruption.  20 minutes of very slow transactions and 10 minutes of failures.  Still annoying to deal with, though. 

[Husires]

It is not a failure of centralization, but rather a failure of central planning. At such times, higher transactions are expected than normal. Therefore, it is better to allocate more resources to address them, which is something that occurs slowly in central solutions and can be rapid in well-designed central networks.

Bitcoin can act bad when congestion occurs and needs some time to fix.

[gentlemand]

It is not a failure of centralization, but rather a failure of central planning. At such times, higher transactions are expected than normal. Therefore, it is better to allocate more resources to address them, which is something that occurs slowly in central solutions and can be rapid in well-designed central networks.

Bitcoin can act bad when congestion occurs and needs some time to fix.

Ultimately though that entire system routes through a pretty modest number of pathways. There have been national outages and there will be again. That's not possible with Bitcoin no matter what happens beyond a global shutdown or solar flare or something. In that scenario there are more important things to fret about than money.

[hatshepsut93]

Such is the nature of central points of failure.

<insert 'Bitcoin user not affected' meme here>

Bitcoin can't get overloaded by design, because the blockspace is so limited - centralization/decentralization has nothing to do with. Which leads to $50 transaction fees in situations like these. If Visa worked on the same principle as Bitcoin - charging customers higher fees during peaks of transactions, they'd have much less users than their competitor who allows 10 minute outages to happen.

No, this isn't an argument for big blocks, I'm just saying how it is. As for Lightning Network, I imagine it would also have a lot of routing failures if the amount of transactions is past some tipping point - no system is infinitely scalable.

[Lorence.xD]

Your company needs to either integrate blockchain in their business model or spend more on upgrading their current infrastructure which is more expesive of the two choices. I think that they will choose to do the latter because they see this as a spike and not a constant phenomenon, hopefully some sense goes into the heads of the higher ups and do the reasonable thing.

[verita1]

This case is recurrent in my city. The congestion of payment systems through debit cards. We have also been affected by the internet service due to a tropical storm and therefore the businesses were unable to process customer payments. The banking system is showing its failures when it collapses the mechanisms they employ to process customer payments.

[NotATether]

No, this isn't an argument for big blocks, I'm just saying how it is. As for Lightning Network, I imagine it would also have a lot of routing failures if the amount of transactions is past some tipping point - no system is infinitely scalable.

Big blocks would also suffer from the same transaction overload that the OP's payment processor experienced, except instead of hard failures, there will also be very slow transactions.

In the end, it was only a short blip.  Probably less than 30 minutes of disruption.  20 minutes of very slow transactions and 10 minutes of failures.  Still annoying to deal with, though.  

I'm not impressed that at this point, with Black Friday + Covid19 traffic, there are people who still think that VISA's transaction speeds are the holy grail for bitcoin, since an error like this can happen to anyone. There may one day be an even bigger load that overwhelms their transaction throughput. For the back-end folks, throughput limitations are a fact of life.

Sure, they can always scale, but you can only scale so much vertically using optimization techniques. After that you can only scale horizontally by buying more processing power but you will eventually hit a budget wall.