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Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

blog.bitpay.com

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Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#271

Post by Rmilb »

VMG wrote: post #174
flatline wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners can elect to not include certain transactions. I'm not aware of any evidence that this is happening now except with low/no-fee transactions, but the centralization of hash power makes it possible and, I would contend, inevitable, given sufficient time and adoption. We already see this with the banking institutions that grow like barnacles on the side of the blockchain - they track where their customers spend c…

Sure, there certainly is a risk of centralization in Bitcoin. At the moment Chinese miners probably are in a position to collude and censor transactions they don't like. However they can't steal assets, so they have a limited incentive to do so. Users only need to find one miner that includes a transaction in order to make a payment, albeit a slow one.

And those miners know the minute they start to censor transactions the price of BTC would probably suffer greatly.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#272

Post by ajkjk »

[deleted] wrote: post #263
vectorpush wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll offer a controversial explanation: bitcoin enthusiasts have exhausted most of the oxygen in the room with regard to rational bitcoin discussion. The never-ending adulation of bitcoin as the greatest invention since the internet, the hyperbolic claims that bitcoin will do things like revolutionize payments, end global war, eliminate the need for banks, liberate the people from bondage, the litany of bitcoin and b…

[deleted]

I felt like that long list of complaints about the discourse around bitcoin hit home and did a pretty good job of justifying that claim. Moreover, it was full of examples that contributed meaningfully, so it's weird to say that it contributes nothing. If you'd rather call people names than respond to their points, aren't you doing exactly what s/he condemned?

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#273

Post by mbmott »

ryanlol wrote: post #191
mbmott wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know you can't make a purchase without having valid payment data. There might be a work around, but probably not via Bitcoin payments. Bitpay is definitely subject to KYC / AML compliance.

> As far as I know you can't make a purchase without having valid payment data. What is "valid payment data"? How do they validate this data? >Bitpay is definitely subject to KYC / AML compliance. Why is that relevant?

What is "valid payment data"? How do they validate this data?

You need to have a valid payment method. I'm not sure how better to explain this... a credit card or paypal account etc. It's validated when the payment clears. Both of these have strong identity data linked to them.

KYC (Know your customer) / AML (Anti Money Laundering) compliance means validating the identities of those you do business with. That means, using Steam to launder money isn't possible. This should be pretty obvious.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#274

Post by wallacoloo »

aianus wrote: post #226
flatline wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't accept bitcoin directly, they instead accept fiat from Bitpay on behalf of people who wish to pay in bitcoin. It is an important distinction. On the one hand this makes a lot of sense for Steam, it reduces the up-front overhead and risk of accepting digital currencies and I would imagine it offloads the onus of AML/KYC compliance to Bitpay. On the other hand it is hardly a ringing endorsement of bitcoin it…

"They don't accept CNY directly, they instead accept USD from their merchant bank on behalf of people who wish to pay in CNY" This is a pointless distinction.

No, it is a meaningful distinction for some. For those of us hoping to avoid the overhead of payment processors by using bitcoin, it puts the two methods on equal footing instead - there's still a middleman taking a (likely nontrivial) cut from our purchases.

Also, I imagine CNY -> USD conversion is probably done on an exchange instead of through a company like BitPay, so the comparison might not be very accurate.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#275

Post by ryanlol »

matt4077 wrote: post #261
ryanlol wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I know you can't make a purchase without having valid payment data. What is "valid payment data"? How do they validate this data? >Bitpay is definitely subject to KYC / AML compliance. Why is that relevant?

Steam uses Bitpay. "KYC" means "know your customer". "Customer" is the guy/gal trying to use Steam to launder bitcoin. Relevance elucidated?

No, Valve software is bitpays "customer". The guy/gal trying to use Steam to launder bitcoin is a customer of Valve Software.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#276

Post by easuter »

stegosaurus wrote: post #141

I find the vitriol towards Bitcoin kind of odd. If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'. What gives? Are there forums in which people have this sort of reaction to, I dunno, HTML5? From some of the posts here you would think that it's IED control software.

For me, I have "bitcoin fatigue" regarding all the usual topics pro-bitcoin evangelist start spewing whenever the topic comes up. The usual "bitcoin is the second-coming of christ" crap.

There is a complete lack of acknowledgement of bitcoin's ineptitude as a replacement for current payment methods, what with its 2TX/s limit (on a good day) and the ridiculous size of the block-chain which effectively negates all the advantages of it being a distributed system since you have to rely on third-parties to use it on you phone or embedded devices for example. Not to mention the monopoly that chinese miners have on the network...it's a joke.

IMHO bitcoin is an interesting experiment, but that's all it is. It will be replaced by something better some day, another fact that evangelists refuse to concede.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#277

Post by lmm »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #267
lmm wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a technology for allowing money to bypass the rule of law. By design it concentrates power in the hands of property owners, and allows them to undercut democratic rules against activities with negative externalities - and since it's more expensive than currency, those are the only use cases that make sense; prime use cases would be things like drugs, smuggling, tax evasion, child porn, terrorism. I think IED con…

Are you talking about Bitcoin, or cash?

Cash isn't quite as bad because it's less practical, but yes both are primarily useful for crime and antisocial activity. I would be suspicious of someone who paid a large bill in cash (or used gold, or bricks of drugs); wouldn't you?

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#278

Post by easuter »

joosters wrote: post #23

So you buy bitcoins with dollars, Bitpay exchanges the bitcoins back into dollars, and then they hand the dollars over to Steam. And this is meant to be a good thing?

Of course it's a good thing. Cyber criminals can purchase TF2 without having to use Paypal or a credit card now!

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#279

Post by ryanlol »

mbmott wrote: post #273
ryanlol wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I know you can't make a purchase without having valid payment data. What is "valid payment data"? How do they validate this data? >Bitpay is definitely subject to KYC / AML compliance. Why is that relevant?

What is "valid payment data"? How do they validate this data? You need to have a valid payment method. I'm not sure how better to explain this... a credit card or paypal account etc. It's validated when the payment clears. Both of these have strong identity data linked to them. KYC (Know your customer) / AML (Anti Money Laundering) compliance means validating the identities of those you do business with. That means,…

>You need to have a valid payment method. I'm not sure how better to explain this... a credit card or paypal account etc. It's validated when the payment clears. Both of these have strong identity data linked to them.

No, paypal doesn't do ANY identity verification for customers beyond fraud scoring and AVS.

For cards, you can just get a prepaid. And most cards outside of the US don't even support AVS, so there's no way for valve to validate any of the information you give them besides the PAN and CVV.

>KYC (Know your customer) / AML (Anti Money Laundering) compliance means validating the identities of those you do business with. That means, using Steam to launder money isn't possible. This should be pretty obvious.

I don't think Valve is covered (or considers themselves to be covered) by either of those, and they certainly don't appear to be doing any of the typical KYC stuff.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#280

Post by statoshi »

easuter wrote: post #276
stegosaurus wrote: post #141

I find the vitriol towards Bitcoin kind of odd. If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'. What gives? Are there forums in which people have this sort of reaction to, I dunno, HTML5? From some of the posts here you would think that it's IED control software.

For me, I have "bitcoin fatigue" regarding all the usual topics pro-bitcoin evangelist start spewing whenever the topic comes up. The usual "bitcoin is the second-coming of christ" crap. There is a complete lack of acknowledgement of bitcoin's ineptitude as a replacement for current payment methods, what with its 2TX/s limit (on a good day) and the ridiculous size of the block-chain which effectively negates all the…

I find it less and less likely that Bitcoin will be replaced given the amount of investment (both time and money) put into the system. If Bitcoin was remaining stagnant, I'd be pessimistic as well, but there are a multitude of improvements that will be deployed over the course of the next year.
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