One of my earliest memories is my mum paying for groceries using her credit card in the 90/00s, where the machine used was completely mechanical/manual. It copied the card number (that was embossed on the plastic) by literally taking a carbon paper rubbing of the card. The system was designed to be offline, because back then there was no "online".
You could argue the problem was that it took a system that more-or-less worked offline, and tried to hammer it into working online.
A "built for online first" payment paradigm would look different, but it would have an enormous chicken-egg or installed-base problem, unless you had something with government-level muscle enforcing it.
One of my earliest memories is my mum paying for groceries using her credit card in the 90/00s, where the machine used was completely mechanical/manual. It copied the card number (that was embossed on the plastic) by literally taking a carbon paper rubbing of the card. The system was designed to be offline, because back then there was no "online".