Well if you're talking about stuff that's used at physical checkout counters, you need really fast transactions. Nobody wants to sit there for an extra 20-30 seconds holding up the line. Even if customers can tolerate it, businesses will be much less inclined to support such a feature.

But since when are ISPs contemplating adding an extra 20-30 seconds of latency to connections?

Someone doesn't understand the concept of consistency and transactions in distributed systems.

Regardless, I think we can all agree that slow payment processing is a Bad Thing.

Interestingly, apparently POS/ATM transactions are not strongly consistent (they are eventually consistent, on CAP they favour AP): http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/5/1/myth-eric-brewer-on...

Who is that someone? Distributed systems don't need any particular speed of interconnect to work. In fact, it's one of the benefits of distributed system designs.

Yes, that's what I was trying to say. The "someone" is whoever was quoted in the article; that person does not understand your point.

But it remains true that I, as a consumer, want my payments to be processed quickly. So do most other consumers, I imagine. But this has nothing to do with "making sense". I just want it to happen.