Credit card based payment systems really shouldn't suffer these kinds of problems: The entire reason why credit cards exist in the first place (compared to debi

Credit card based payment systems really shouldn't suffer these kinds of problems: The entire reason why credit cards exist in the first place (compared to debit cards) is to enable distributed, asynchronous, eventually-consistent payments. It should be perfectly normal for a business like steam to simply store the details necessary to process payment and then eventually reconcile with them, at a pace that the processors can handle. Instead we've built a world that operates under physics-violating assumptions. Gah.