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Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

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Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#401

Post by hartpuff »

azernik wrote: post #400
hartpuff wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is, unlike with Bitcoin, people with Euros do not have any significant ideological opposition towards dollars, or acquire Euros because they believe it is superior to or will one day replace dollars. > That's still good for the viability of the euro as a currency, because it can be easily exchanged for goods and services, even with a middleman. So it's good for Bitcoin in exactly the same way that it's good…

> The point is, unlike with Bitcoin, people with Euros do not have any significant ideological opposition towards dollars, or acquire Euros because they believe it is superior to or will one day replace dollars. And that's why it's a bit silly to have ideological positions about currencies :-P I'm just arguing that it is actually good for Bitcoin the currency, not that it's good for the bitcoiner ideology. > So it's…

> And that's why it's a bit silly to have ideological positions about currencies

Indeed. I think Bitcoin would be given the time of day by a lot more people if there was a lot less political whackjobbery surrounding it, and more sane, informed discussion from people such as yourself.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#402

Post by Natanael_L »

bildung wrote: post #392
oppositelock wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentive to hoard, also often called the "deflationary spiral", is a theory proposed by neo-Keynesian economists, which doesn't appear to be as bad as they say. People have finite lifespan, and so, they want to use their hoards to better these finite lives, which leads them to spend. This preference, known as the "time preference", strikes a balance with the tendency to hoard. It is impossible to predict where t…

>* Why do you buy cell phones or laptops today, knowing that future ones will be better or cheaper? Why buy some food today, when you know your purchasing power will be greater next month? Why pay for housing when prices are falling, knowing your contract will be cheaper in five years?* The deflationary spiral is not about consumption of non-durable goods. Thats why all of your examples don't really work as reasoning…

So, still just the kind of stuff where you get more for your money over time even despite inflation, thanks to technology developments. Why would the impact of messing with the money supply outweigh that of the technology in any other way that forcing a change in scheduling? And how is inflation beneficial for those who need to save money for a long time for large investments?

Inflation would only really make sense in a model where everybody already have access to all the funds they need to purchase what they want, but where they postpone all purchases to see if the can get more, AND where it is these delays that hurt the market by making it hard for the makers of these goods to survive. And this effect has to be the single most dominant one.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#403

Post by Natanael_L »

ascorbic wrote: post #389
digi_owl wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get this because the properties of bitcoin attracts two kinds of people. Goldbugs, because of how bitcoin is "mined" and is inherently deflationary. And gold is the one true currency, m'kay. Cypherpunks, because it is built around cryptographics. And cryptographics makes anything double plus good. Never mind that both kinds have a strong anti-establishment streak. That said, if they could get away form their anti…

Well, there is a third, rather significant type of bitcoin user: people who don't particularly care about the cool crypto or sticking it to the Fed, but do like the ability to make anonymous payments. And let's not be coy about who many if not most of these are: criminals.

All ~1% of them. As stated by plenty of lawyers, prosecutors and researchers who know that those groups prefer physical cash.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#404

Post by [deleted] »

azernik wrote: post #400
hartpuff wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is, unlike with Bitcoin, people with Euros do not have any significant ideological opposition towards dollars, or acquire Euros because they believe it is superior to or will one day replace dollars. > That's still good for the viability of the euro as a currency, because it can be easily exchanged for goods and services, even with a middleman. So it's good for Bitcoin in exactly the same way that it's good…

> The point is, unlike with Bitcoin, people with Euros do not have any significant ideological opposition towards dollars, or acquire Euros because they believe it is superior to or will one day replace dollars. And that's why it's a bit silly to have ideological positions about currencies :-P I'm just arguing that it is actually good for Bitcoin the currency, not that it's good for the bitcoiner ideology. > So it's…

[deleted]

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#405

Post by Natanael_L »

CJefferson wrote: post #232
gnaritas wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not to mention that Bitcoin is explicitly anti-environmentalist: it's built on vast amounts of wasted electricity. That like saying Tesla's are anti-environmentalist, it's built to waste vast amounts electricity. It's quite literally non-sense. Point at any other nations currency that consumes less energy than Bitcoin; you think printing bills and minting coins doesn't use energy? You think moving giants piles of c…

But the whole bitcoin network does a tiny, tiny number of transactions compared to any of those other systems. The cost per transaction (of the system, not to the user) of bitcoin is comparatively huge.

And yet the actual expense each transaction incurs is trivial, a boost in the number of transactions wouldn't increase the expenses of mining.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#406

Post by digi_owl »

Houshalter wrote: post #376
digi_owl wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No people do not hoard currency, but they do hoard commodities. As such, bitcoin is at present more a commodity (its setup pretty much use math to emulate gold) than a currency. And the situation will only get worse with time.

As I said in the parent comment, there's nothing different about bitcoin vs other commodities that people can hoard.

Except that everyone is trying to used bitcoin as currency.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#407

Post by ChemicalWarfare »

ryanlol wrote: post #382
ChemicalWarfare wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit card payment is a '2 phase' process. The second phase you are referring to as settlement - moving funds from the issuing bank to merchant's bank does take days. The first phase of the process - authorization, when successful not only makes sure the customer has enough credit on their account, it also reduces their buying power by the grand total of the auth thus guaranteeing the funds to the merchant. And it t…

Bitcoin works exactly the same, except settlement times are significantly shorter. You authorize (sign) a transaction, broadcast it and the network confirms it. Signing a transaction takes only a fractions of a second, and to the merchant it's a significantly stronger guarantee of settlement than a credit card authorization.

Credit Card authorization guarantees the funds to the merchant. Signing a bitcoin transaction and broadcasting it to the blockchain does not. Successful confirmation of the tx on the blockchain does, and to be on the safe side the rule of thumb is to wait for 6 confs on the bitcoin blockchain before considering the funds to be guaranteed.

Tx confirmation times are a known problem with BTC in terms of the payment acceptance flow, this is one of the hurdles preventing wider merchant adoption of BTC acceptance.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#408

Post by Natanael_L »

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…

Lightning Network is much much closer to going live now. That would be a federated (email/XMPP like) system to drastically boost the number of transactions per second that it can handle with retained security (a malicious LN server can at worst temporarily freeze funds and reverse only unsettled payments).

You don't need to trust third parties even with mobile devices, the Bitcoin Wallet app on Android uses the SPV protocol where a malicious miner has to outpace the rest of the miners to fool you. It uses the code library bitcoinj. Headers-first sync only made this easier to do with minimal resources.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#409

Post by Natanael_L »

ChemicalWarfare wrote: post #407
ryanlol wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin works exactly the same, except settlement times are significantly shorter. You authorize (sign) a transaction, broadcast it and the network confirms it. Signing a transaction takes only a fractions of a second, and to the merchant it's a significantly stronger guarantee of settlement than a credit card authorization.

Credit Card authorization guarantees the funds to the merchant. Signing a bitcoin transaction and broadcasting it to the blockchain does not. Successful confirmation of the tx on the blockchain does, and to be on the safe side the rule of thumb is to wait for 6 confs on the bitcoin blockchain before considering the funds to be guaranteed. Tx confirmation times are a known problem with BTC in terms of the payment acce…

Credit card chargeback fraud isn't that rare, and the merchants usually take the hit.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#410

Post by Natanael_L »

jcfrei wrote: post #147
vesinisa wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the largest put off with Bitcoin is the community. They seem to be very intolerant of criticism, to the appearance of a cult or ideology.[1] The problem lies in that unlike most open source projects, a sizeable portion of the community stands to make huge profits, giving rise to a permanent conflict of interest. Time and time again, the financial interest of the early adopters continue to stifle actual develop…

That's exactly my problem with bitcoin as well. I'm just elaborating Hearn's points here; but as it turns out the incentive for miners (in order to pay their mining) is actually a deflationary good (so the value of their mined coins keeps increasing). Unfortunately miners are also required for the confirmation of transactions. On the other hand a global payment system would require a currency which is at the very lea…

The value does not need to increase for miners to profit. Mining difficulty scales with the total mining power in order to keep the block rate stable. Increased value only gives an incentive for competition, increasing mining power and THEN increasing difficulty.

It works in the other direction too. Lowered value lowers mining competition which LOWERS difficulty. It stabilizes itself automatically.

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