As opposed to a normal credit card transaction which takes days.

But not in a practical sense for the user. You don't have to wait 20 minutes for your authorization to clear so you can walk out of Dunkin with your iced coffee

Ironically you're more likely to have such an experience paying with cash these days.

I tried to buy a pizza from Dominos last week. Order online, pick up in person and pay with cash. Should have been simple, but it devolved into 5 minutes of Domino's employees trying to figure out "who's on cash?" (Had the credentials to open the cash drawer.) That person was apparently taking a smoke break, but when they came back it still took them another minute of furious hollywood hacker style keyboard pounding at the POS systems (accidental dual acronym of 'Point of Sale' and 'Piece of Shit'?) to open the cash drawer and give me my $1.20 change. Great job guys.

If you forgive me for being a little conspiratorial, I think point of sale systems must be designed to streamline credit card payments while artificially stalling cash transactions, as part of the financial industry's war against the cash economy.

I think the reason might be much simpler. For businesses, cash involves the risk of robbery, and in any case someone must drop it off at the bank periodically, or a pick-up must be arranged (adding cost). If your customers have a card anyway, why bother?

Fear of robbery might motivate a locked cash drawer, or no cash accepted at all. But only one person in the store being able to operate the cash drawer? The most generous explanation for this I can think of is the business fears their own employees are thieves, and want to reduce risk by only trusting a small number of them to handle cash.

But this doesn't explain why it's so hard for even the employee with the cash drawer credentials to open the drawer in a timely manner. They go full hackerman on the keyboard, scratching their head and cussing at the computer with utterances about the value of technology that would make the unabomber proud. It seems obvious to me the workflow for opening the cash drawer is inexcusably broken.

Sorry, my comment was in reply to the last paragraph of your comment, about POS systems being designed card-first. (Should've quoted it, but my tablet was acting up :) )

"who's on the bitcoin thing?" is also possible. it's still +n minutes under identical conditions

you're somewhat right about the POS thing. a system like clover, for example, takes credit cards on the main unit, but the cash drawer is an add-on

> "who's on the bitcoin thing?" is also possible. it's still +n minutes under identical conditions

That much seems certain. Switching to bitcoin to avoid the [artificial] annoyances of cash is like jumping out of the frying pan, into the fire.

You don't have to wait 20 minutes for a Bitcoin transaction to clear for the price of an iced coffee, either. For low-value transactions with a low risk of double-spending you can just verify that the transaction made it into the mempool and is likely to be included in the next block or two, a process which takes seconds at most. It could technically still be reversed during that window but you could just as easily get a chargeback from a credit card, or a bad check. And with Bitcoin you'll have confirmation within less than 30 minutes that the transaction is fully irreversible, vs. 30 days or more with most other methods. Only physical cash offers a faster clearing time.

Contactless from my phone takes well under a second, perhaps less when I walk through the ticket barrier