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Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

675 points by tsneed290 9y ago

eqmvii 9y ago
Makes business and technological sense. Even the true believers have largely switched to advocating the store-of-value/digital gold model of bitcoin. We're absolutely in a bitcoin/cryptocurrency mania. Unfortunately, stating that is much easier than predicting what will happen next.
- Epenthesis 9y ago
  I've been hearing this a lot, but what does it actually mean? Isn't the most important thing you want from a store of value stability? Ie, that it'll store the value that you put into it? Bitcoin certainly doesn't have that property. And if that's not the desired property implied by "store of value", what is?
  - pault 9y ago
    I think most people are perfectly fine with the instability as long as the price doesn't go _down_.
    - notheguyouthink 9y ago
      I'm not - I don't want to buy bitcoin at the moment because I keep waiting for a bit of a dip, I don't want to buy it at a record high. Likewise I don't want to use my bitcoin because it keeps massively "growing" in value. A stable currency is far more usable to me. Bitcoin is very similar to gold at the moment, in that I'm as likely to use it as I am to carry around bricks of gold in my pocket. For different reasons, sure, but the net result is the same.
      - chrisco255 9y ago
        We've been seeing record highs for the past 4-6 months though. The likelihood of any dip going below the past 6 month low is pretty low in my opinion. Especially with Lightning network, NASDAQ, other large players getting on board. This may be the last time we see $13K.
        Fnoord 9y ago
        In your opinion, great. It may be last time we see $13k. Or it may not... So if something has been rising for 6 months, it cannot dip below that point, because of your opinion. Too bad we did not have your opinion in 1929 or 2008 or 2013 (Mt Gox). Would've saved us. How about businesses like Steam ditching Bitcoin support? How about Bitfinex not backing up their fake currency called tether?
        notheguyouthink 9y ago
        And to be clear, I'm not even holding out for a massive dip. I just can't fathom buying it during a clear spike. I want to buy it going down, even if it just goes down from 16k to 10k or 12k, whatever. Normal fluctuations in Bitcoin, really - I just don't want to buy it on the upswing, on principle alone lol.
    - mancerayder 9y ago
      Unless they're trading, in which case they're selling on perceived ups and downs, and in some cases making a killing - at least for now! The bullish trend with periodic pullbacks means profit for the bold / greedy.
      - pault 9y ago
        Right, but the Bitcoin evangelists have changed their rhetoric in the last few months, claiming that the current price is justified because Bitcoin is a good store of value, since it's obvious to everyone that the transaction infrastructure is a total dumpster fire at the moment and it's difficult to argue that it's so useful as a currency that $12,000/BTC is reasonable.
        chrisco255 9y ago
        Bitcoin will fail to scale, until it doesn't any more. There is far too much economic incentive to scale BTC as a payments network for the assorted parties not to work it out eventually. Could one of the other cryptos overtake BTC? Only if they can overcome BTC's network effects. Right now, BTC has 9 years of history and a huge first mover advantage.
  - nlperguiy 9y ago
    Main source of instability is price manipulation by big players and market inefficiency (not easy enough to arbitrage between exchanges). It would be interesting to see them do the same thing if BTC market cap is in couple of trillions. For example, if you're on any exchange that lists the total amount of orders in BTC, you can easily catch when the manipulation starts by seeing out of the ordinary sums (triple the amount of usual) for open positions. Not to mention insane bot activity that is equivalent to a DDOS attack on the exchange. During the last several hours of IOTA pump, exchanges, even the IOTA tangle were, and still are unstable.
    - gruez 9y ago
      >not easy enough to arbitrage between exchanges doesn't tether fix this?
      - nlperguiy 9y ago
        for arbitrage you want to move all currencies, not just one. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets for example, bitcoin is now huge on bithumb, I'd buy it at bitstamp and sell it for 10% more, and repeat. given the slow transaction times, huge fees, large mempool, this is impossible to do. exchanges also ban you for trying to do arbitrage too, so there's a risk of losing all the funds.
        celticninja 9y ago
        Exchanges don't ban users for exploiting arbitrage, every trade is money to the exchange and it benefits them to enable arbitrage to take place. No idea where you pulled that claim from. It's also not impossible to trade via bitstamp and bitthumb, sure it may take an hour or so to get your btc from bitstamp to bitthumb but that's not the bottleneck. Once you sell on bitthumb for USD you need to get that USD back to bitstamp. So you have to get it from a Korean Bank to your own account and then to bitstamps European bank account. Best case scenario that route takes 5-10 working days so the BTC network taking an hour or so to confirm is the least if your problems.
  - vasilipupkin 9y ago
    The argument I hear by people like Ari Paul of Blocktower Capital, is that many emerging market currencies are already less stable, so you can use bitcoin as a way to escape inflation/government control in those markets.
  - djrogers 9y ago
    The term gets used to contrast with 'medium of exchange', as the reality is that for most people, most of the time, bitcoin is not very liquid.
  - nicky0 9y ago
    Store at least the value you put in. Falling in value would be bad. But rising in value is a bonus.
  - michaelscott 9y ago
    Stores of value are normally viewed from a long term perspective. For most investors these are viewed as a hedge, even if the underlying store can be used for other purposes (think industrial and ornamental uses for silver, or the enjoyment of a renowned art piece), and so the short term fluctuation is not really an issue. That said, if the trend of wild volatility were to continue into the long term it would indeed prove to be a poor store of value, but market speculation would indicate as such long before we were to get there (assuming we pick now as the period delta starting point for a "long term").
  - eof 9y ago
    Nothing has that value if you look at a long enough time span. Gold, a traditional store of value, gained >100% and then lost >50% in the course of a decade. Obviously this is not even noise compared to bitcoin; but my point is that bitcoin has shown to be an exceptional store of value for a long term hold. Beyond that, I think most people who believe in bitcoin as a long term store of value expect that when it reaches a mature global-level market cap; the swings should be less severe.
- Havoc 9y ago
  >Even the true believers have largely switched to advocating the store-of-value/digital gold model of bitcoin. Which is absolutely insane. What's the point of a currency if you can't use it for transactions? Store-of-value? What value?
  - cgmg 9y ago
    > What value? $13K of value, and counting.
    - prawn 9y ago
      Now US$14k. ;)
    - sliverstorm 9y ago
      Well, that's what it is today. But if BTC has no fundamental value, you might argue the price fluctuations are the price-discovery function of markets screaming "there is no correct price because there is no actual value", or something like that. All other fiat currencies have some fundamental value. In the past they were backed by gold. Most common today, you have to pay your taxes using them, which means for example everybody who owes US taxes needs USD.
      - cgmg 9y ago
        > You might argue the price fluctuations are the price-discovery function of markets screaming "there is no correct price because there is no actual value" That makes no sense. If the market were really 'screaming there is no actual value', the price would be around $0, not $14K.
        sliverstorm 9y ago
        It makes sense to me in a divide-by-zero sort of way. I'm not saying the market confidently believes bitcoin has no value. But such wild fluctuations might suggest that even after five years, the price discovery function still has no idea what bitcoin is worth. Now what does that mean? We can only speculate, of course. But to me I wonder if 1) there is no identified fundamental value today and 2) no one knows what the fundamental value will turn out to be
- tdb7893 9y ago
  I've always been told gold isn't a good place to put your money so proponents of bitcoin comparing it to gold is concerning to me
  - puranjay 9y ago
    Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I've always been told that gold is a great investment. The "digital gold" argument doesn't make sense to me at all. Human beings aren't rational spenders. Gold, if nothing else, looks good. I can buy a $10,000 bar of gold and even if its value crashes by 20% tomorrow, I at least have an aesthetic metal that feels nice to touch. BTC doesn't even give me that satisfaction
    - MarkMc 9y ago
      Check out the ratio of gold price to Dow Jones index for last 100 years: http://www.macrotrends.net/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-historical-chart http://www.macrotrends.net/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-h... In 1917 it was about 5, now it's about 15. So threefold increase in a century. Plus the Dow pays around 2% dividend per year which is 7-fold increase in a century. So US stocks outperformed gold by 21 times between 1917 and 2017. Looking at the chart, there are very few long-term periods when gold has outperformed US stocks.
vxNsr 9y ago
It's for the same reason that no one wanted to touch zimbabwe dollar back in 2007, if the value of the medium of exchange differs from breakfast to lunch it's not really a good medium of exchange. Doesn't matter if value is appreciating or depreciating, currency needs to have a reasonably stable value to be useful.
- testvox 9y ago
  It seems like the main issue is transaction fees are close to $20, so even simple operations like refunding users for a incorrect or incomplete transaction is infeasible.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    The "$20 transaction fee" was an absolute top, and when that happened it was the single most congested the bitcoin network has ever been. It's nowhere near that right now. The total cost for your "median" transaction right now (at 226 bytes) is about $4.30 USD (at 150 sat/byte). Even if you double that to 300 sat/byte you are still at ~$9. Edit: I'm not saying even $4 fees are okay, just pointing out that it's not $20. I agree with steam's decision here, and it's something that Bitcoin needs to solve before it can really be useful as a payment system.
    - niij 9y ago
      When did $4.30 transaction fees become even close to acceptable. I thought high TX fees was one of the things Bitcoin was purported to solve.
      - Klathmon 9y ago
        I'm not saying they are acceptable, i'm saying that $20 fees per average transaction isn't true in all cases except once in the history of bitcoin.
        ceejayoz 9y ago
thomasfl 9y ago
Steem is still supporting Bitcoin though.
- dajohnson89 9y ago
  But -- Oh, I see what you did there.
eliaskg 9y ago
Please accept Crypto Kittens.
zython 9y ago
Good heavens. The steam dev team is alive ? What a miracle, I thought valve was run by two interns and a coffee machine.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >I thought valve was run by two interns and a coffee machine. No, that's the average bitcoin exchange
Animats 9y ago
$20 transaction fee. Bitcoin for small payments is dead.
- benjaminjackman 9y ago
  And don’t forget nail #2 long confirmation times with high price volatility .
  - 659087 9y ago
    Who wouldn't want a "store of value" that might be worth +/- 20% by the time your transaction is complete?
- vasilipupkin 9y ago
  but you could set transaction fee to 20 cents, it would just take much longer to get confirmed?
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    Kind of, if you set it too low it might never get confirmed at all, but for the most part you can set fees pretty damn low if you are willing to wait for confirmation.
    - Domenic_S 9y ago
      Possibly much, much longer, but it could be returned in 14 days if it's too low and never makes it out of the mempool. That's where traditional electronic payments have a huge edge -- instant, incredibly cheap guaranteed verification.
      - Klathmon 9y ago
        Well it "can" be returned after 14 days, but a "malicious" node can also just rebroadcast it to prevent that from happening.
      - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jackmott 9y ago
I really wish we would stop wasting energy on this. I mean literal energy, as in the electricity.
giancarlostoro 9y ago
I wonder how many bitcoins Steam has, and how many of those they've even cashed out on.
- modeless 9y ago
  I think they used BitPay, so they likely had BitPay convert to dollars instantly for every transaction and never received Bitcoin themselves.
  - ionwake 9y ago
    ouch
- GunlogAlm 9y ago
  Realistically, they won't be storing any bitcoins, they will immediately convert it to USD.
- dclowd9901 9y ago
  Isn't this one of those questions that BTC advocates always crow about being one of the best things about BTC: complete transparency?
  - giancarlostoro 9y ago
    Someone else mentioned they used a third party payment service, so that might not have the exact amount they've received over time.
modeless 9y ago
Bought my first Bitcoin in 2011. Recently had my credit card stolen and deactivated, wanted to buy something from Steam, and needed an alternative payment method. Considered using Bitcoin, and decided against it for exactly these reasons. Valve is absolutely right. Bitcoin is not useful for day-to-day payments anymore.
heifetz 9y ago
why are transaction costs so high? I thought one of the selling points was that the transaction cost is negligible because miners main incentive comes from mining new bitcoins?
- moretai 9y ago
  Doesn't it become exponentially more expensive to mine bitcoins? The more bitcoins there are, the more resources it costs to mine new ones?
  - AgentME 9y ago
    No. The amount of miners isn't tied to how many bitcoins exist, or how many transactions are happening. Maybe you're thinking of how when more people are mining, it becomes harder to mine. This is because there is a global fixed rate of Bitcoin creation. Every 10 minutes, 12.5 new bitcoins come into existence. Miners are effectively competing for the chance to be the one to receive those new bitcoins. If mining becomes unprofitable, then some miners will drop out, causing it to become more profitable for those remaining. Miners don't set prices or rules; price affects profitability which either causes more miners to mine or some to drop out.
- zerostar07 9y ago
  because other people are willing to pay more fees for their transactions to be confirmed?
- openasocket 9y ago
  There's a finite number of bitcoins, fewer and fewer bitcoins are being produced over time by design. There can only be 21 million bitcoins, and the majority have already been mined. So the reward just for completing a block (not including the transaction fees) has been steadily decreasing, and that's not even taking into account that more and more miners means it's harder to get that reward. Thus the trend is going to be towards increased transaction fees.
  - Sargos 9y ago
corford 9y ago
Until segwit, lightning network etc. shape up and the wild bull/bear runs smooth out, BTC (and most other cryptos: see ETH and crypto kitties; or IOATA and their overrun nodes) don't really make sense for small transactions. I know LTC says they are the small transaction coin but I guess they'd hit scaling issues too if volume went up (and even if they didn't, speculators and crazy price swings would still make things tricky). XRP seems less prone to wild speculation (much to the chagrin of some holders) but, afaik, Ripple are more focused on positioning XRP as a settlement layer for banks and big FX houses rather than as a day to day currency. Personally, I think all of the above will eventually sort itself out. All the crypto currencies are still very young and the entire space is experiencing hyper growth. Teething issues, design flaws and bumps along the way are to be expected. One thing's for sure though, there's too much promise, money and interest in this space for everyone to give up and decide blockchain/tangle tech can't safely scale. It's just a matter of time before a winner emerges with the right formula.
- jameskegel 9y ago
  >IOATA and their overrun nodes IOTA is a Tangle[1], which is coordinated[2] flow, similar to a Directed Acyclic Graph[3]. I'm not sure what you mean when you say "overrun nodes" but by virtue of how the network operates, this should not be an issue unless everyone is sticking with only the default nodes in their configuration, but that delves into a conversation of programmer vs user error that isn't pertinent to this thread. Some of us choose to run full nodes without incurring any speed loss, and it doesn't seem to be much of an issue of not having enough of them, only that people aren't using them. Even still, this has not degraded network performance. [1] - https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf [2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/792d6c/eli5_the_coordinator_and_what_does_it_do https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/792d6c/eli5_the_coord... [3] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2283757/can-someone-explain-in-simple-terms-to-me-what-a-directed-acyclic-graph-is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2283757/can-someone-expl...
  - corford 9y ago
    I'm an IOTA fan* but there aren't enough full nodes in the tangle at the moment (and also no direct financial incentive for more public ones to be created, afaik?). You just had to witness their slack last night to see that. People were setting up nodes and getting overrun almost immediately (I saw a guy complain he'd set up 4x 32GB nodes and watched them get swamped and CPU pegged within seconds). I gave up on a bitfinex withdrawal after waiting 12+ hours for it to process. But, yes, at least with IOTA the tech is proven. More nodes will let it scale. I just wonder how they will incentivize these nodes to come in to existence and keep ownership of them reasonably decentralized/well distributed (and make it easy for light wallet users to find and use them). * though admittedly I don't follow the project too closely - so apologies if some of the above is off-base/wrong.
rb808 9y ago
So one of the things I liked the idea of was micro payments - eg click to donate 5 cents to the author of an article. Are there any crypto currencies that work with negligible fees for micropayments? Is there a framework to use them? Thanks
- nvusuvu 9y ago
  Bitcoin cash, a hard fork from the original Bitcoin. Super low fees, and the community that supports Bitcoin cash considers themselves the Bitcoin for the people. There are apps/wallets to use them. Coinbase will support Bitcoin cash by Jan 2018.
  - celticninja 9y ago
    Litecoin
- igorgue 9y ago
  How about 0 fees? Try Steem (almost Steam lol), it's meant to do that https://steemit.com https://steemit.com their site is a social network where people get pay on Steem that isn't trying to phish for your personal data.
- nicky0 9y ago
  Lightning network (a 2nd layer on top of bitcoin) aims to solve this.
- canadaduane 9y ago
  A friend recently introduced me to IOTA. Its intended purpose is machine-to-machine transfer of value. It does so without fees by requiring each transactor to sign two other transactions. I kind of like how it turns the "ponzi" data structure into a useful workhorse, and pays for its own workload.
- AgentME 9y ago
  Pretty much all cryptocurrencies right now follow the same model as Bitcoin, and require similar fees when congestion increases. (See Ethereum's recent fee spike when CryptoKitties took off.) The Bitcoin and Ethereum communities are both seriously exploring and working on solutions like off-chain transactions to solve this issue.
bitxbitxbitcoin 9y ago
I can see the headlines now... "Bitcoin running out of steam?"
- masklinn 9y ago
  Not being used is the logical end of it when we know there's a fixed available amount[0]. That means bitcoin is intrinsically deflationary, and at there's absolutely no reason to use them: they'll be worth more tomorrow than today, and next week than tomorrow. Until everything grinds to a halt and crashes down. [0] in which sense it is very different from gold, which kept increasing in amount, just (mostly) slowly
  - scott_karana 9y ago
    GP's post was just a pun/joke. Think you missed it :)
naveen99 9y ago
Maybe they should have just switched to dogecoin instead of turning off crypto payments.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
I posted this as an Ask HN, but this might be interesting here. It's sort of off-topic, but in this case there's not much to say about Steam dropping Bitcoin anyway. Maybe it'll hover near the bottom: What should we do about the destabilizing potential of Bitcoin? There are two facts about Bitcoin worth worrying about: 1. There is no upper bound on the price 2. Everyone who thought the price won't continue to exponentially increase was wrong Greed is a powerful motivator. It's easy to smile at this[1] but it will only take a couple more 10x increases before people stop laughing. What happens when governments start putting money into Bitcoin because they don't want their economy to be left out? It'll only make the price go up even further. It might be a good idea to take a step back for a moment and stop thinking "Can I get rich?" and start thinking "Before this reaches a point where we should worry, what should we do?" I'm aware that this has roughly a 0.1% chance of happening. But if you'll suspend your disbelief for a few minutes and accept "What if it might be true?" then you'll find it's an interesting question worth thinking about. It's starting to feel like no one really has a plan for this contingency. It will be a relief if the price crashes back to $1k, but Bitcoin defies belief. How many of you have parents that are seriously talking about getting in? Everyone wants to become rich. And if that infectious mindset spreads to the whole population, we might get an uncontrolled upward spiral. Is there a way to prevent that? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_timetraveler_from_the_future_here_to_beg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_time...
- cgmg 9y ago
  Why would it be a 'relief' if the price crashes back to $1K?
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Because it's better than being on a trajectory where BTC hitting $1m is a real possibility. That world will be terrifying, and it's important for us to think about ways of mitigating or stopping it.
    - lifty 9y ago
lifty 9y ago
The current situation is quite terrible, and the hype that lead to the current price is not doing Bitcoin any favors. I would have hoped that it wouldn’t get so much attention before it gets a chance to improve the underlying tech more. That being said, the lightning network will be ready soon and perhaps that will improve the situation. The following is a demo doing a lightning payment: https://youtu.be/a73Gz3Tvx3k https://youtu.be/a73Gz3Tvx3k , and it is super fast.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
phaser 9y ago
I'm here to say the problems in selling games for Bitcoin are not the same for microtransactions. I'm the original developer of Bitquest[1], where we used to process hundreds of micropayments smaller than 1 cent each day using 0 fee Bitcoin transactions. When the blocks started to fill up we had to move all transactions off-chain except when players send money to the game and cashing out. From the player's perspective, it's hard to justify paying $2 each time get Bitcoin in/out of the game. On the other side, there's no cut for Apple, Google, et al. who charge for as much as 30% cut for micro transactions. I'm now working on a similar game[2] that will take advantage of Segwit and Lightning Network. There's still miner fees involved to send money in and opening a payment channel, however there's no cut to a payment processor and the associated problems of compliance. I'm not saying it's perfect but there's still important advantages on Cryptocurrency for game transactions and I'm confident that Steam and others will get back to it after it's infancy. [1] https://github.com/bitquest/bitquest https://github.com/bitquest/bitquest [2] https://hammerco.in https://hammerco.in
- solotronics 9y ago
  do you know of any current implementations of lightning on the actual blockchain and not testnet (BTC or LTC)? thanks!
  - bennyg 9y ago
    I believe some tests have been done on the mainnet: https://www.coindesk.com/lightning-last-test-shows-bitcoin-scaling-solution-almost-ready/ https://www.coindesk.com/lightning-last-test-shows-bitcoin-s...
  - gtrubetskoy 9y ago
    Looks like the first mainnet transaction went through today? https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-protocol-1-0-compatibility-achieved-f9d22b7b19c4 https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-protocol-1-0... "As developers of the Lightning Network protocol, we’re excited to announce version 1.0 RC of the Lightning protocol specification along with a successful cross- implementation test on Bitcoin mainnet!"
anonymous5133 9y ago
I don't blame them. Bitcoin's fees have been way too high. I had to spend $6 just to make a $20 purchase. This is ridiculous.
hateful 9y ago
You know what I think is the best alternative digital currency for Steam? The Steam Wallet!
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
a) they should be using segwit addresses b) they have the option of using a payment processor that handles ALL OF THE PROBLEMS THEY DESCRIBED on the backend, behind the scenes c) switch to a different blockchain. they already built the rails, different trains can run on them already. d) bitcoin futures start trading on Sunday, its an easy way to hedge volatility, so there goes that argument. Professionals in multinational companies know what these are used for.
Angostura 9y ago
I'd venture to guess that the unspoken issue here is that when Valve originally announced it was accepting Bitcoin, Bitcoin was cool and exciting and trendy. Just accepting it made Valve seem and the leading edge - part of the future. That’s really not true any more and so a large part of the value of accepting it has simply disappeared. Really, why should they bother any more?
- djhworld 9y ago
  Valve introduced bitcoin payments back in the days when people used to use Bitcoin as a currency
mohamedmansour 9y ago
Finally! This was caused by my complains, I paid $32 for a $25 dollar game, and I it didn't go through since txn fees were not right 4 cents less. And BitPay refunded me just $17. I am so thankful Steam did it right, meanwhile BitPay still blames the customer! Here are the different threads of where the complain went viral. The internet wins at the end, removing the shady business of BitPay. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15768303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15768303 http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/3183345176714002755/ http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/3183345176714... https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7e7wsq/shady_business_of_bitpay_buy_29_game_on_steam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7e7wsq/shad...
jondubois 9y ago
Bitcoin is not meant to be used for small transactions. Bitcoin can scale indefinitely in terms of dollar value of daily transactions but it is limited when it comes to number of transactions. I don't think that the lightning network will offer a solution. In engineering, problems are always better solved at the root. As clever as it might be, the lightning network is a bandaid patch on top of a suboptimal solution... There are many cryptocurrencies that scale better than Bitcoin in terms of number of transactions.
- mdotk 9y ago
  any blockchain that doesn't set a limit on the value of one single transaction can scale indefinitely in terms of dollar value
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jondubois 9y ago
    Sounds obvious but maybe it explains why Bitcoin's scalability problem doesn't seem to have any effect on its price.
icetoad 9y ago
watching bitcoin implode will be a glorious day..... the volatility in that market is astounding..
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
Fair enough, when I tried to spend it with them I got pretty bad exchange rates so I stayed away. g2a accepts bitcoin and I saw more reasonable rates there.
juanmirocks 9y ago
I cannot see barely any cryptocurrencies really replacing fiat currencies unless stability is kept. It's for this, I personally bet on Ripple.
- summer_steven 9y ago
  Ripple, the currency that is being investigated by the SEC ?
  - juanmirocks 9y ago
    The market should be regulated if ALL OF US (grandmas too) are really going to end using cryptocurrencies.
nikolay 9y ago
Why the bitcoin crazies ignore news like this but salivate and hike the price over the fake news about Amazon accepting Bitcoin?!
wnevets 9y ago
bitcoin boosters will try and spin this as good for bitcoin somehow
kpozin 9y ago
In the U.S., it seems absurd to even consider Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) for small day-to-day transactions like Steam purchases. Under the current IRS guidance, every sale or exchange of cryptocurrency is a taxable event. That means that for every $10 game you bought with Bitcoin during the last summer sale, you now have to calculate the cost basis, capital gains, etc., of the BTC you used, and list it on a Form 8949 in April.
- granitosaurus 9y ago
  Fortunately that's not the case in the rest of the world. I've recently emailed Estonian tax agency for clarification of this exactly because of people claiming this to be the case. They told me if you buy bitcoin and pay in bitcoin you are not required to declare this spending. However various taxing agencies are still trying to figure out what to do with crypto, so I reckon it's too early to claim absolutes.
erikbye 9y ago
The problems we see with Bitcoin now are severe and detrimental and not at all aligned with its original goal and purpose. However, these issues were foreseen, hence the fork (Bitcoin Cash). High transaction fees coupled with extreme volatility and a slow transaction time is making sure BTC will not be used for small transactions. If things continue to escalate or stay status quo, BTC's purpose will as predicted be just as a backing coin, like gold once was, but even for that purpose, it needs to be less volatile.
kjullien 9y ago
"We asked our user to pay X at T but when we received the payment at T' the price wasn't the same so we need to match the price currently so ask for X' actually and when we receive the payment at T'' the price has changed so actually ask them for X'' oh but wait..."
myth_buster 9y ago
but the degree of volatility has become extreme in the last few months, losing as much as 25% in value over a period of days This statement would be true during any period of Bitcoin's existence.
gbraad 9y ago
The partner they used has been very untrustworthy when it comes to the transactions. Many of the stories can be found on the subreddit of Steam. Also, the transaction cost made even discount often not worthy.

675 points by tsneed290 9y ago

Makes business and technological sense. Even the true believers have largely switched to advocating the store-of-value/digital gold model of bitcoin. We're absolutely in a bitcoin/cryptocurrency mania. Unfortunately, stating that is much easier than predicting what will happen next.

Epenthesis 9y ago
I've been hearing this a lot, but what does it actually mean? Isn't the most important thing you want from a store of value stability? Ie, that it'll store the value that you put into it? Bitcoin certainly doesn't have that property. And if that's not the desired property implied by "store of value", what is?
- pault 9y ago
  I think most people are perfectly fine with the instability as long as the price doesn't go _down_.
  - notheguyouthink 9y ago
    I'm not - I don't want to buy bitcoin at the moment because I keep waiting for a bit of a dip, I don't want to buy it at a record high. Likewise I don't want to use my bitcoin because it keeps massively "growing" in value. A stable currency is far more usable to me. Bitcoin is very similar to gold at the moment, in that I'm as likely to use it as I am to carry around bricks of gold in my pocket. For different reasons, sure, but the net result is the same.
    - chrisco255 9y ago
      We've been seeing record highs for the past 4-6 months though. The likelihood of any dip going below the past 6 month low is pretty low in my opinion. Especially with Lightning network, NASDAQ, other large players getting on board. This may be the last time we see $13K.
      - Fnoord 9y ago
        In your opinion, great. It may be last time we see $13k. Or it may not... So if something has been rising for 6 months, it cannot dip below that point, because of your opinion. Too bad we did not have your opinion in 1929 or 2008 or 2013 (Mt Gox). Would've saved us. How about businesses like Steam ditching Bitcoin support? How about Bitfinex not backing up their fake currency called tether?
        notheguyouthink 9y ago
        And to be clear, I'm not even holding out for a massive dip. I just can't fathom buying it during a clear spike. I want to buy it going down, even if it just goes down from 16k to 10k or 12k, whatever. Normal fluctuations in Bitcoin, really - I just don't want to buy it on the upswing, on principle alone lol.
  - mancerayder 9y ago
    Unless they're trading, in which case they're selling on perceived ups and downs, and in some cases making a killing - at least for now! The bullish trend with periodic pullbacks means profit for the bold / greedy.
    - pault 9y ago
      Right, but the Bitcoin evangelists have changed their rhetoric in the last few months, claiming that the current price is justified because Bitcoin is a good store of value, since it's obvious to everyone that the transaction infrastructure is a total dumpster fire at the moment and it's difficult to argue that it's so useful as a currency that $12,000/BTC is reasonable.
      - chrisco255 9y ago
        Bitcoin will fail to scale, until it doesn't any more. There is far too much economic incentive to scale BTC as a payments network for the assorted parties not to work it out eventually. Could one of the other cryptos overtake BTC? Only if they can overcome BTC's network effects. Right now, BTC has 9 years of history and a huge first mover advantage.
- nlperguiy 9y ago
  Main source of instability is price manipulation by big players and market inefficiency (not easy enough to arbitrage between exchanges). It would be interesting to see them do the same thing if BTC market cap is in couple of trillions. For example, if you're on any exchange that lists the total amount of orders in BTC, you can easily catch when the manipulation starts by seeing out of the ordinary sums (triple the amount of usual) for open positions. Not to mention insane bot activity that is equivalent to a DDOS attack on the exchange. During the last several hours of IOTA pump, exchanges, even the IOTA tangle were, and still are unstable.
  - gruez 9y ago
    >not easy enough to arbitrage between exchanges doesn't tether fix this?
    - nlperguiy 9y ago
      for arbitrage you want to move all currencies, not just one. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets for example, bitcoin is now huge on bithumb, I'd buy it at bitstamp and sell it for 10% more, and repeat. given the slow transaction times, huge fees, large mempool, this is impossible to do. exchanges also ban you for trying to do arbitrage too, so there's a risk of losing all the funds.
      - celticninja 9y ago
        Exchanges don't ban users for exploiting arbitrage, every trade is money to the exchange and it benefits them to enable arbitrage to take place. No idea where you pulled that claim from. It's also not impossible to trade via bitstamp and bitthumb, sure it may take an hour or so to get your btc from bitstamp to bitthumb but that's not the bottleneck. Once you sell on bitthumb for USD you need to get that USD back to bitstamp. So you have to get it from a Korean Bank to your own account and then to bitstamps European bank account. Best case scenario that route takes 5-10 working days so the BTC network taking an hour or so to confirm is the least if your problems.
- vasilipupkin 9y ago
  The argument I hear by people like Ari Paul of Blocktower Capital, is that many emerging market currencies are already less stable, so you can use bitcoin as a way to escape inflation/government control in those markets.
- djrogers 9y ago
  The term gets used to contrast with 'medium of exchange', as the reality is that for most people, most of the time, bitcoin is not very liquid.
- nicky0 9y ago
  Store at least the value you put in. Falling in value would be bad. But rising in value is a bonus.
- michaelscott 9y ago
  Stores of value are normally viewed from a long term perspective. For most investors these are viewed as a hedge, even if the underlying store can be used for other purposes (think industrial and ornamental uses for silver, or the enjoyment of a renowned art piece), and so the short term fluctuation is not really an issue. That said, if the trend of wild volatility were to continue into the long term it would indeed prove to be a poor store of value, but market speculation would indicate as such long before we were to get there (assuming we pick now as the period delta starting point for a "long term").
- eof 9y ago
  Nothing has that value if you look at a long enough time span. Gold, a traditional store of value, gained >100% and then lost >50% in the course of a decade. Obviously this is not even noise compared to bitcoin; but my point is that bitcoin has shown to be an exceptional store of value for a long term hold. Beyond that, I think most people who believe in bitcoin as a long term store of value expect that when it reaches a mature global-level market cap; the swings should be less severe.
Havoc 9y ago
>Even the true believers have largely switched to advocating the store-of-value/digital gold model of bitcoin. Which is absolutely insane. What's the point of a currency if you can't use it for transactions? Store-of-value? What value?
- cgmg 9y ago
  > What value? $13K of value, and counting.
  - prawn 9y ago
    Now US$14k. ;)
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    Well, that's what it is today. But if BTC has no fundamental value, you might argue the price fluctuations are the price-discovery function of markets screaming "there is no correct price because there is no actual value", or something like that. All other fiat currencies have some fundamental value. In the past they were backed by gold. Most common today, you have to pay your taxes using them, which means for example everybody who owes US taxes needs USD.
    - cgmg 9y ago
      > You might argue the price fluctuations are the price-discovery function of markets screaming "there is no correct price because there is no actual value" That makes no sense. If the market were really 'screaming there is no actual value', the price would be around $0, not $14K.
      - sliverstorm 9y ago
        It makes sense to me in a divide-by-zero sort of way. I'm not saying the market confidently believes bitcoin has no value. But such wild fluctuations might suggest that even after five years, the price discovery function still has no idea what bitcoin is worth. Now what does that mean? We can only speculate, of course. But to me I wonder if 1) there is no identified fundamental value today and 2) no one knows what the fundamental value will turn out to be
tdb7893 9y ago
I've always been told gold isn't a good place to put your money so proponents of bitcoin comparing it to gold is concerning to me
- puranjay 9y ago
  Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I've always been told that gold is a great investment. The "digital gold" argument doesn't make sense to me at all. Human beings aren't rational spenders. Gold, if nothing else, looks good. I can buy a $10,000 bar of gold and even if its value crashes by 20% tomorrow, I at least have an aesthetic metal that feels nice to touch. BTC doesn't even give me that satisfaction
  - MarkMc 9y ago
    Check out the ratio of gold price to Dow Jones index for last 100 years: http://www.macrotrends.net/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-historical-chart http://www.macrotrends.net/1378/dow-to-gold-ratio-100-year-h... In 1917 it was about 5, now it's about 15. So threefold increase in a century. Plus the Dow pays around 2% dividend per year which is 7-fold increase in a century. So US stocks outperformed gold by 21 times between 1917 and 2017. Looking at the chart, there are very few long-term periods when gold has outperformed US stocks.

vxNsr 9y ago

It's for the same reason that no one wanted to touch zimbabwe dollar back in 2007, if the value of the medium of exchange differs from breakfast to lunch it's not really a good medium of exchange. Doesn't matter if value is appreciating or depreciating, currency needs to have a reasonably stable value to be useful.

testvox 9y ago
It seems like the main issue is transaction fees are close to $20, so even simple operations like refunding users for a incorrect or incomplete transaction is infeasible.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  The "$20 transaction fee" was an absolute top, and when that happened it was the single most congested the bitcoin network has ever been. It's nowhere near that right now. The total cost for your "median" transaction right now (at 226 bytes) is about $4.30 USD (at 150 sat/byte). Even if you double that to 300 sat/byte you are still at ~$9. Edit: I'm not saying even $4 fees are okay, just pointing out that it's not $20. I agree with steam's decision here, and it's something that Bitcoin needs to solve before it can really be useful as a payment system.
  - niij 9y ago
    When did $4.30 transaction fees become even close to acceptable. I thought high TX fees was one of the things Bitcoin was purported to solve.
    - Klathmon 9y ago
      I'm not saying they are acceptable, i'm saying that $20 fees per average transaction isn't true in all cases except once in the history of bitcoin.
      - ceejayoz 9y ago

thomasfl 9y ago

Steem is still supporting Bitcoin though.

dajohnson89 9y ago
But -- Oh, I see what you did there.

eliaskg 9y ago

Please accept Crypto Kittens.

zython 9y ago

Good heavens. The steam dev team is alive ? What a miracle, I thought valve was run by two interns and a coffee machine.

coldtea 9y ago
>I thought valve was run by two interns and a coffee machine. No, that's the average bitcoin exchange

Animats 9y ago

$20 transaction fee. Bitcoin for small payments is dead.

benjaminjackman 9y ago
And don’t forget nail #2 long confirmation times with high price volatility .
- 659087 9y ago
  Who wouldn't want a "store of value" that might be worth +/- 20% by the time your transaction is complete?
vasilipupkin 9y ago
but you could set transaction fee to 20 cents, it would just take much longer to get confirmed?
- Klathmon 9y ago
  Kind of, if you set it too low it might never get confirmed at all, but for the most part you can set fees pretty damn low if you are willing to wait for confirmation.
  - Domenic_S 9y ago
    Possibly much, much longer, but it could be returned in 14 days if it's too low and never makes it out of the mempool. That's where traditional electronic payments have a huge edge -- instant, incredibly cheap guaranteed verification.
    - Klathmon 9y ago
      Well it "can" be returned after 14 days, but a "malicious" node can also just rebroadcast it to prevent that from happening.
    - 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jackmott 9y ago

I really wish we would stop wasting energy on this. I mean literal energy, as in the electricity.

giancarlostoro 9y ago

I wonder how many bitcoins Steam has, and how many of those they've even cashed out on.

modeless 9y ago
I think they used BitPay, so they likely had BitPay convert to dollars instantly for every transaction and never received Bitcoin themselves.
- ionwake 9y ago
  ouch
GunlogAlm 9y ago
Realistically, they won't be storing any bitcoins, they will immediately convert it to USD.
dclowd9901 9y ago
Isn't this one of those questions that BTC advocates always crow about being one of the best things about BTC: complete transparency?
- giancarlostoro 9y ago
  Someone else mentioned they used a third party payment service, so that might not have the exact amount they've received over time.

modeless 9y ago

Bought my first Bitcoin in 2011. Recently had my credit card stolen and deactivated, wanted to buy something from Steam, and needed an alternative payment method. Considered using Bitcoin, and decided against it for exactly these reasons. Valve is absolutely right. Bitcoin is not useful for day-to-day payments anymore.

heifetz 9y ago

why are transaction costs so high? I thought one of the selling points was that the transaction cost is negligible because miners main incentive comes from mining new bitcoins?

moretai 9y ago
Doesn't it become exponentially more expensive to mine bitcoins? The more bitcoins there are, the more resources it costs to mine new ones?
- AgentME 9y ago
  No. The amount of miners isn't tied to how many bitcoins exist, or how many transactions are happening. Maybe you're thinking of how when more people are mining, it becomes harder to mine. This is because there is a global fixed rate of Bitcoin creation. Every 10 minutes, 12.5 new bitcoins come into existence. Miners are effectively competing for the chance to be the one to receive those new bitcoins. If mining becomes unprofitable, then some miners will drop out, causing it to become more profitable for those remaining. Miners don't set prices or rules; price affects profitability which either causes more miners to mine or some to drop out.
zerostar07 9y ago
because other people are willing to pay more fees for their transactions to be confirmed?
openasocket 9y ago
There's a finite number of bitcoins, fewer and fewer bitcoins are being produced over time by design. There can only be 21 million bitcoins, and the majority have already been mined. So the reward just for completing a block (not including the transaction fees) has been steadily decreasing, and that's not even taking into account that more and more miners means it's harder to get that reward. Thus the trend is going to be towards increased transaction fees.
- Sargos 9y ago

corford 9y ago

Until segwit, lightning network etc. shape up and the wild bull/bear runs smooth out, BTC (and most other cryptos: see ETH and crypto kitties; or IOATA and their overrun nodes) don't really make sense for small transactions. I know LTC says they are the small transaction coin but I guess they'd hit scaling issues too if volume went up (and even if they didn't, speculators and crazy price swings would still make things tricky). XRP seems less prone to wild speculation (much to the chagrin of some holders) but, afaik, Ripple are more focused on positioning XRP as a settlement layer for banks and big FX houses rather than as a day to day currency. Personally, I think all of the above will eventually sort itself out. All the crypto currencies are still very young and the entire space is experiencing hyper growth. Teething issues, design flaws and bumps along the way are to be expected. One thing's for sure though, there's too much promise, money and interest in this space for everyone to give up and decide blockchain/tangle tech can't safely scale. It's just a matter of time before a winner emerges with the right formula.

jameskegel 9y ago
>IOATA and their overrun nodes IOTA is a Tangle[1], which is coordinated[2] flow, similar to a Directed Acyclic Graph[3]. I'm not sure what you mean when you say "overrun nodes" but by virtue of how the network operates, this should not be an issue unless everyone is sticking with only the default nodes in their configuration, but that delves into a conversation of programmer vs user error that isn't pertinent to this thread. Some of us choose to run full nodes without incurring any speed loss, and it doesn't seem to be much of an issue of not having enough of them, only that people aren't using them. Even still, this has not degraded network performance. [1] - https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf https://iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf [2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/792d6c/eli5_the_coordinator_and_what_does_it_do https://www.reddit.com/r/Iota/comments/792d6c/eli5_the_coord... [3] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2283757/can-someone-explain-in-simple-terms-to-me-what-a-directed-acyclic-graph-is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2283757/can-someone-expl...
- corford 9y ago
  I'm an IOTA fan* but there aren't enough full nodes in the tangle at the moment (and also no direct financial incentive for more public ones to be created, afaik?). You just had to witness their slack last night to see that. People were setting up nodes and getting overrun almost immediately (I saw a guy complain he'd set up 4x 32GB nodes and watched them get swamped and CPU pegged within seconds). I gave up on a bitfinex withdrawal after waiting 12+ hours for it to process. But, yes, at least with IOTA the tech is proven. More nodes will let it scale. I just wonder how they will incentivize these nodes to come in to existence and keep ownership of them reasonably decentralized/well distributed (and make it easy for light wallet users to find and use them). * though admittedly I don't follow the project too closely - so apologies if some of the above is off-base/wrong.

rb808 9y ago

So one of the things I liked the idea of was micro payments - eg click to donate 5 cents to the author of an article. Are there any crypto currencies that work with negligible fees for micropayments? Is there a framework to use them? Thanks

nvusuvu 9y ago
Bitcoin cash, a hard fork from the original Bitcoin. Super low fees, and the community that supports Bitcoin cash considers themselves the Bitcoin for the people. There are apps/wallets to use them. Coinbase will support Bitcoin cash by Jan 2018.
- celticninja 9y ago
  Litecoin
igorgue 9y ago
How about 0 fees? Try Steem (almost Steam lol), it's meant to do that https://steemit.com https://steemit.com their site is a social network where people get pay on Steem that isn't trying to phish for your personal data.
nicky0 9y ago
Lightning network (a 2nd layer on top of bitcoin) aims to solve this.
canadaduane 9y ago
A friend recently introduced me to IOTA. Its intended purpose is machine-to-machine transfer of value. It does so without fees by requiring each transactor to sign two other transactions. I kind of like how it turns the "ponzi" data structure into a useful workhorse, and pays for its own workload.
AgentME 9y ago
Pretty much all cryptocurrencies right now follow the same model as Bitcoin, and require similar fees when congestion increases. (See Ethereum's recent fee spike when CryptoKitties took off.) The Bitcoin and Ethereum communities are both seriously exploring and working on solutions like off-chain transactions to solve this issue.

bitxbitxbitcoin 9y ago

I can see the headlines now... "Bitcoin running out of steam?"

masklinn 9y ago
Not being used is the logical end of it when we know there's a fixed available amount[0]. That means bitcoin is intrinsically deflationary, and at there's absolutely no reason to use them: they'll be worth more tomorrow than today, and next week than tomorrow. Until everything grinds to a halt and crashes down. [0] in which sense it is very different from gold, which kept increasing in amount, just (mostly) slowly
- scott_karana 9y ago
  GP's post was just a pun/joke. Think you missed it :)

naveen99 9y ago

Maybe they should have just switched to dogecoin instead of turning off crypto payments.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

I posted this as an Ask HN, but this might be interesting here. It's sort of off-topic, but in this case there's not much to say about Steam dropping Bitcoin anyway. Maybe it'll hover near the bottom: What should we do about the destabilizing potential of Bitcoin? There are two facts about Bitcoin worth worrying about: 1. There is no upper bound on the price 2. Everyone who thought the price won't continue to exponentially increase was wrong Greed is a powerful motivator. It's easy to smile at this[1] but it will only take a couple more 10x increases before people stop laughing. What happens when governments start putting money into Bitcoin because they don't want their economy to be left out? It'll only make the price go up even further. It might be a good idea to take a step back for a moment and stop thinking "Can I get rich?" and start thinking "Before this reaches a point where we should worry, what should we do?" I'm aware that this has roughly a 0.1% chance of happening. But if you'll suspend your disbelief for a few minutes and accept "What if it might be true?" then you'll find it's an interesting question worth thinking about. It's starting to feel like no one really has a plan for this contingency. It will be a relief if the price crashes back to $1k, but Bitcoin defies belief. How many of you have parents that are seriously talking about getting in? Everyone wants to become rich. And if that infectious mindset spreads to the whole population, we might get an uncontrolled upward spiral. Is there a way to prevent that? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_timetraveler_from_the_future_here_to_beg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_time...

cgmg 9y ago
Why would it be a 'relief' if the price crashes back to $1K?
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Because it's better than being on a trajectory where BTC hitting $1m is a real possibility. That world will be terrifying, and it's important for us to think about ways of mitigating or stopping it.
  - lifty 9y ago

lifty 9y ago

The current situation is quite terrible, and the hype that lead to the current price is not doing Bitcoin any favors. I would have hoped that it wouldn’t get so much attention before it gets a chance to improve the underlying tech more. That being said, the lightning network will be ready soon and perhaps that will improve the situation. The following is a demo doing a lightning payment: https://youtu.be/a73Gz3Tvx3k https://youtu.be/a73Gz3Tvx3k , and it is super fast.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

phaser 9y ago

I'm here to say the problems in selling games for Bitcoin are not the same for microtransactions. I'm the original developer of Bitquest[1], where we used to process hundreds of micropayments smaller than 1 cent each day using 0 fee Bitcoin transactions. When the blocks started to fill up we had to move all transactions off-chain except when players send money to the game and cashing out. From the player's perspective, it's hard to justify paying $2 each time get Bitcoin in/out of the game. On the other side, there's no cut for Apple, Google, et al. who charge for as much as 30% cut for micro transactions. I'm now working on a similar game[2] that will take advantage of Segwit and Lightning Network. There's still miner fees involved to send money in and opening a payment channel, however there's no cut to a payment processor and the associated problems of compliance. I'm not saying it's perfect but there's still important advantages on Cryptocurrency for game transactions and I'm confident that Steam and others will get back to it after it's infancy. [1] https://github.com/bitquest/bitquest https://github.com/bitquest/bitquest [2] https://hammerco.in https://hammerco.in

solotronics 9y ago
do you know of any current implementations of lightning on the actual blockchain and not testnet (BTC or LTC)? thanks!
- bennyg 9y ago
  I believe some tests have been done on the mainnet: https://www.coindesk.com/lightning-last-test-shows-bitcoin-scaling-solution-almost-ready/ https://www.coindesk.com/lightning-last-test-shows-bitcoin-s...
- gtrubetskoy 9y ago
  Looks like the first mainnet transaction went through today? https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-protocol-1-0-compatibility-achieved-f9d22b7b19c4 https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-protocol-1-0... "As developers of the Lightning Network protocol, we’re excited to announce version 1.0 RC of the Lightning protocol specification along with a successful cross- implementation test on Bitcoin mainnet!"

anonymous5133 9y ago

I don't blame them. Bitcoin's fees have been way too high. I had to spend $6 just to make a $20 purchase. This is ridiculous.

hateful 9y ago

You know what I think is the best alternative digital currency for Steam? The Steam Wallet!

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

a) they should be using segwit addresses b) they have the option of using a payment processor that handles ALL OF THE PROBLEMS THEY DESCRIBED on the backend, behind the scenes c) switch to a different blockchain. they already built the rails, different trains can run on them already. d) bitcoin futures start trading on Sunday, its an easy way to hedge volatility, so there goes that argument. Professionals in multinational companies know what these are used for.

Angostura 9y ago

I'd venture to guess that the unspoken issue here is that when Valve originally announced it was accepting Bitcoin, Bitcoin was cool and exciting and trendy. Just accepting it made Valve seem and the leading edge - part of the future. That’s really not true any more and so a large part of the value of accepting it has simply disappeared. Really, why should they bother any more?

djhworld 9y ago
Valve introduced bitcoin payments back in the days when people used to use Bitcoin as a currency

mohamedmansour 9y ago

Finally! This was caused by my complains, I paid $32 for a $25 dollar game, and I it didn't go through since txn fees were not right 4 cents less. And BitPay refunded me just $17. I am so thankful Steam did it right, meanwhile BitPay still blames the customer! Here are the different threads of where the complain went viral. The internet wins at the end, removing the shady business of BitPay. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15768303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15768303 http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/3183345176714002755/ http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/3183345176714... https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7e7wsq/shady_business_of_bitpay_buy_29_game_on_steam/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7e7wsq/shad...

jondubois 9y ago

Bitcoin is not meant to be used for small transactions. Bitcoin can scale indefinitely in terms of dollar value of daily transactions but it is limited when it comes to number of transactions. I don't think that the lightning network will offer a solution. In engineering, problems are always better solved at the root. As clever as it might be, the lightning network is a bandaid patch on top of a suboptimal solution... There are many cryptocurrencies that scale better than Bitcoin in terms of number of transactions.

mdotk 9y ago
any blockchain that doesn't set a limit on the value of one single transaction can scale indefinitely in terms of dollar value
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jondubois 9y ago
  Sounds obvious but maybe it explains why Bitcoin's scalability problem doesn't seem to have any effect on its price.

icetoad 9y ago

watching bitcoin implode will be a glorious day..... the volatility in that market is astounding..

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago

Fair enough, when I tried to spend it with them I got pretty bad exchange rates so I stayed away. g2a accepts bitcoin and I saw more reasonable rates there.

juanmirocks 9y ago

I cannot see barely any cryptocurrencies really replacing fiat currencies unless stability is kept. It's for this, I personally bet on Ripple.

summer_steven 9y ago
Ripple, the currency that is being investigated by the SEC ?
- juanmirocks 9y ago
  The market should be regulated if ALL OF US (grandmas too) are really going to end using cryptocurrencies.

nikolay 9y ago

Why the bitcoin crazies ignore news like this but salivate and hike the price over the fake news about Amazon accepting Bitcoin?!

wnevets 9y ago

bitcoin boosters will try and spin this as good for bitcoin somehow

kpozin 9y ago

In the U.S., it seems absurd to even consider Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) for small day-to-day transactions like Steam purchases. Under the current IRS guidance, every sale or exchange of cryptocurrency is a taxable event. That means that for every $10 game you bought with Bitcoin during the last summer sale, you now have to calculate the cost basis, capital gains, etc., of the BTC you used, and list it on a Form 8949 in April.

granitosaurus 9y ago
Fortunately that's not the case in the rest of the world. I've recently emailed Estonian tax agency for clarification of this exactly because of people claiming this to be the case. They told me if you buy bitcoin and pay in bitcoin you are not required to declare this spending. However various taxing agencies are still trying to figure out what to do with crypto, so I reckon it's too early to claim absolutes.

erikbye 9y ago

The problems we see with Bitcoin now are severe and detrimental and not at all aligned with its original goal and purpose. However, these issues were foreseen, hence the fork (Bitcoin Cash). High transaction fees coupled with extreme volatility and a slow transaction time is making sure BTC will not be used for small transactions. If things continue to escalate or stay status quo, BTC's purpose will as predicted be just as a backing coin, like gold once was, but even for that purpose, it needs to be less volatile.

kjullien 9y ago

"We asked our user to pay X at T but when we received the payment at T' the price wasn't the same so we need to match the price currently so ask for X' actually and when we receive the payment at T'' the price has changed so actually ask them for X'' oh but wait..."

myth_buster 9y ago

but the degree of volatility has become extreme in the last few months, losing as much as 25% in value over a period of days This statement would be true during any period of Bitcoin's existence.

gbraad 9y ago

The partner they used has been very untrustworthy when it comes to the transactions. Many of the stories can be found on the subreddit of Steam. Also, the transaction cost made even discount often not worthy.