It's incorrect to compare Bitcoin's "confirmation" with the banking system's "pre-auth"

There was a post yesterday where someone complained that their bitcoin confirmation took 26 minutes, and here is why that's an unfair assessment:

Bitcoin's "broadcast" vs "confirm" is analogous to the banking system's "pre-auth" vs "settlement", but I think that person was unfairly comparing a bitcoin confirmation to a pre-auth.

When you swipe a credit card people think it's instant but it's not. There is an initial pre-authorization that happens instantly but settlement doesn't happen for days.

Things can & do go wrong in both systems during this period to cause settlement not to happen, but the odds of a btc transaction reversing before settlement is astronomically lower than a CC swipe.

Understanding that, it's not a fair comparison to compare bitcoin's "confirmation" to the banking system's "pre-auth". It's more appropriate to compare bitcoin's "broadcast" to the banking system's "pre-auth".

With this better comparison both happen instantly, but bitcoin "settles" within minutes whereas a CC transaction takes days.

This is how you counter the "who's going to stand around for confirmations" argument people use for the idea of paying with bitcoin in a retail environment. There's no reason to wait around for confirmations. Retailers already accept pre-auth CC transactions that are much riskier than a "pending" btc transaction so it's a non-issue.