[batou]

I missed the confirmation step above. That would happen once the payment has been correlated.

At step 3 in your list above the payment would time out and a refund would be issued. Usually payments time out as well so you can usually reserve cash (pre-auth in banking terms). So we end up with stacks of reservations.

If something breaks you can retry within a reasonable limit or wait for everything to drop all the reservations.