Comment by lxgr

> Ie: maybe I trust a mechanism by Google/Apple where tap becomes powered locally and the phone/device itself carries a balance.

That's something I'd definitely love to see, but it doesn't exist at the moment (in the US, at least; in Japan, there are stored-value cards in Apple Wallet that can support two-side offline transactions).

> Also, credit cards used to work in a similar way to checks. The information would be recorded and the transaction would be finalized later.

They used to, but they don't anymore. Almost all terminals and many cards won't let you do an offline transaction these days, for both credit and debit cards.

> it’s pretty fascinating how currency has evolved in the last half-century. There is no reason for me to think that it will stop where we are at today.

True, but unfortunately as far as I can see, it's all been moving towards a more centralized/connection-dependent system. That's great for when everything is working as expected, but raises some concerns about resilience.