I used Solana pay irl last year, and it was as easy and quick as Apple Pay. Solana has a sub-second confirmation time.
If you live in a county with a functional and stable financial system then this announcement isn’t for you. If you live in xyz country where getting a credit card is a big challenge this will make it easier to shop online.
Bitcoin, which is unfortunately many people's first introduction to crypto, takes on average 10 minutes per block. Typically services then wait for finality which is 6 blocks, so about an hour.
On Ethereum, each block is 12 seconds and 64 blocks for finality, so 12.8 minutes. If Stripe were smart, they'd be using an L2 like Base where block times are ~2s.
On Solana, each block .45s and 20-40s for finality. But Solana makes a lot of sacrifices and tradeoffs to achieve this and thus isn't on the same level as Ethereum.
Edit: From another article is appears they'll be using custody funds though, at least to start. So in that case transactions should be instant due to a centralized layer as you mention.
There isn't such thing as "finality" in bitcoin right? The probability of another chain growing longer just dramatically shrinks each extra block mined (as most of the mining power will quickly shift to the longest known chain).
There is also a lot of historical data as the bitcoin blockchain has been running for many years. How many times has a chain with a 2-block lead been surpassed? It seems like the data is out there to create a pretty accurate graph for by-chance reversal for a given number of confirmations. (Intentional reversing is a bit of a different issue but you should be able to estimate the computation costs as well).
If you live in a county with a functional and stable financial system then this announcement isn’t for you. If you live in xyz country where getting a credit card is a big challenge this will make it easier to shop online.