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I assumed they meant spending stolen bitcoin on steam. It's common to call purchases made with a stolen credit card "fraudulent," even if there's nothing untowa
by giaour 5y ago
I assumed they meant spending stolen bitcoin on steam. It's common to call purchases made with a stolen credit card "fraudulent," even if there's nothing untoward about the purchase itself other than the payment instrument.
- toast0 5y ago> even if there's nothing untoward about the purchase itself other than the payment instrument. When you make a purchase with a credit card, you claim that you are an authorized user of the card, and that you will pay the bill in accordance with the account agreement. If that's not true, it's fraud. You've knowingly made an untrue claim in order to receive something of value.
- giaour 5y agoFrom the other comments on this thread, it seems like Steam was using a zero-confirmation payment validator of some kind. That makes bitcoin payments Steam accepted effectively a form of check, and if customers exploited this to double-spend bitcoin, then they paid steam with a hot check. Hence, fraud. Should Steam used a different form of validation? Yeah, that would have let them reject some (most? all?) of these fraudulent transactions. But anyone exploiting that situation to double-spend coins was committing fraud just as much as if they had written a worthless check, used a stolen credit card, or tried to pass off a counterfeit $100 bill.
- SilasX 5y agoI thought it was always really big news whenever someone even attempted a double spend, regardless of success? So if that’s what he meant, we should have been seeing those cases in the news back then. Edit: I guess not? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30480133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30480133