Hardly. Chargebacks on credit cards can occur up to 3 months after payment. Good for customers who need that dispute feature but bad for others because those costs are socialized onto merchants and other consumers.
>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'.
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”.
This is one of the problems with cryptocurrencies though. Consumers are unlikely to accept a system where they can't contest charges, either through a trusted large institution (e.g. Visa) nor through the courts. I haven't heard an explanation yet of how to solve that without layering on central authorities, which undermines the decentralization that's supposed to be crypto's #1 advantage.
Hardly. Chargebacks on credit cards can occur up to 3 months after payment. Good for customers who need that dispute feature but bad for others because those costs are socialized onto merchants and other consumers.