Chaos in Spain after payment card network crash | Hacker News Reader

Chaos in Spain after payment card network crash

8 pointsmiguelaeh30 comments

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.

View on HN

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.

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/...

>I am genuinely interested on hearing the point of people who still don't believe that decentralized blockchain networks are the future of payments

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?

I see your point, but how I see it is, blockchain is right now what internet was at its very beggining, new layers will be added with time solving every one of those problems.

Yeah, cash is an option in Spain, however, most people, specially young people, is more likely to just carry their card and no cash.

> blockchain is right now what internet was at its very beggining

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.

ARPANET dates to 1966. You could have said the same thing in 1981: 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”.

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.

> So when is all this stuff going to happen?

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

> So far the blockchain has used up a bunch of resources

One has to wonder how much waste heat has been produced, plus the associated carbon release from non renewable sources of electricity.

Wasted semiconductor production, wasted resources shipping mining and GPUs all over then dumping them when something more efficient comes along…

> more likely to just carry their card and no cash

And with enough events like this, the young will learn why the old carry at least some cash.

> I am genuinely interested on hearing the point of people who still don't believe that decentralized blockchain networks are the future of payments.

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.

I guess lossing connection in a specific area has considerable less impact that leaving a whole country without a payment system.

Also, replacing digital payment systems by decentralised blockchains does not mean replacing cash. Those can and probably will coexist

> I am genuinely interested on hearing the point of people who still don't believe that decentralized blockchain networks are the future of payments.

Cash?

So some kind of portable, anonymous physical token? Fascinating idea, someone should look into that.

I think we did... thousands of years ago

Thats why I allways still try to pay in cash. also the anonymity is a big plus too.

One of my favorite occassional dopamine hits is when I have exact change for the transaction. Younger cashiers don't typically seem to care.

> people who still don't believe that decentralized blockchain networks are the future of payments

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.

You're describing Bitcoin, basically the oldest and cruftiest option, and without the Lightning network upgrades that are running on top of it now.

"Chaos" is a pretty strong word, don't you think? Were people rioting in the supermarket?

It was probably more like 10 min of annoyance or something

I 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

It's true it's kind of weird it isn't big news, and only has been kept as small notes in the newspapers.

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:

  https://elpais.com/tecnologia/2023-11-18/problemas-con-bizum-tarjetas-y-datafonos-la-caida-de-la-plataforma-redsys-tumba-los-sistemas-de-pago-bancarios.html
  https://theobjective.com/economia/2023-11-18/los-sistemas-pago-comercios-madrid/
  https://www.elcorreo.com/sociedad/pago-datafono-redsys-servicio-de-procesamiento-tarjeta-espana-20231118144047-nt.html

The only alternative to Redsys, which is owned by Spain's main banks, is managed by Cecabank but it's not very relevant, like a 90%-10% market split here.

I love how this reads normally until the sudden "but blockchain" comment at the end.

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

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.

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.

I had this happen once on a restaurant. They just gave me an invoice and asked to pay within 5 days. Problem solved without blockchain.

Honestly it wasn’t that bad. Y’all overreacting.

This post sounds like “we should decommission every nuclear power plant because one was poorly managed 40 years ago.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com