Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

pcgamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 333 posts

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#101

Post by nmilo »

pfooti wrote: post #96
abi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you're a Ukrainian fleeing refuge and you want store your life's savings somewhere safe. Pretty damn useful there. If you don't want to deal with the price fluctuations of BTC or ETH, buy stablecoins instead.

there's also banks.

But which bank are you trusting in a time of war? We've seen countries have the power to subvert savings accounts, e.g. Greece limited bank withdrawls to £5000/month. Do you trust these banks more than a distributed ledger? This is a question that needs real thought and evaluation, and crypto might be a useful option. Diversification is important.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#102

Post by IgorPartola »

abi wrote: post #80
IgorPartola wrote: post #15

At this point is BTC a good idea? Does it actually provide any damn value at all at a macro level?

Say you're a Ukrainian fleeing refuge and you want store your life's savings somewhere safe. Pretty damn useful there. If you don't want to deal with the price fluctuations of BTC or ETH, buy stablecoins instead.

Right so other crypto is just as good if not better for this?

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#103

Post by httpsterio »

rosndo wrote: post #88
lokar wrote: post #82

There seems to be a basic misunderstanding on the part of the pro-btc ppl here all saying "how is that fraud?" or "how is that steams problem?" If you run a business that can be used in a money laundering scheme, even if you are not a victim, you have a legal responsibility to try to limit/prevent that actually. The crypto crowd may not like that, but it's not up to them.

The basic misunderstanding is on your part. “Money laundering” wasn’t mentioned by anyone but you. Stop inventing things. This is about valve getting fucked because they were accepting bitcoin payments with zero confirmations.

I think assuming money laundering was a fair assumption as the article only describes fraudulent activity and nothing else on the matter.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#104

Post by Duralias »

rosndo wrote: post #86
Duralias wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money laundering I'd imagine. Criminal creates shit game, buys game using crypto and gets paid out in fiat because *very* few developers would accept being paid in crypto.

This does precisely nothing to “clean” the money as it doesn’t eliminate the direct link between you and the dirty bitcoins.

Forgive my ignorance, but does, for example, ransomware payments in, for example, bitcoin make the bitcoin "dirty"?

The only context I have heard "dirty" coins in is if they have been stolen from a crypto platform, or I think stolen by a influential crypto bro.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#105

Post by devit »

How can a Bitcoin transaction be fraudulent?

They are irreversible and if the Bitcoin is stolen that's not the merchant's problem.

The whole point of Bitcoin is to eliminate the possibility of chargebacks and thus the need for merchant to care about whether the buyer is in good faith and whether the money is stolen.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#106

Post by esosac »

pfooti wrote: post #96
abi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you're a Ukrainian fleeing refuge and you want store your life's savings somewhere safe. Pretty damn useful there. If you don't want to deal with the price fluctuations of BTC or ETH, buy stablecoins instead.

there's also banks.

i don't know about ukraine, but i live in venezuela and i can't do an international wire transfer here. so some people can't rely on banks, but i probably can rely on someone around here wanting to take my cash or car or house and give me bitcoin if i needed to go away. i use localbitcoins a lot of buy local currency in exchange for bitcoin... and i'm not a "crypto person", but it happened to be super useful for me here in that way

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#107

Post by doomroot »

ipaddr wrote: post #63
IgorPartola wrote: post #15

At this point is BTC a good idea? Does it actually provide any damn value at all at a macro level?

It provided a great way to buy weed before it was legalized and transaction fees skyrocketed. Bitcoin at $5,000 a coin was extremely useful for transactions. Bitcoin at $50,000 make it less useful because of scaling issues.

Have you tried lightning network its extremely fast and cheap and pretty reliable these days. Many great mobile wallets support it now, Blue wallet, Muun, Phoenix. Hell even Cash App supports outgoing lightning payments now. Scan a QR code few seconds later done, final, irreversible.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#108

Post by rosndo »

felipellrocha wrote: post #93
rosndo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic misunderstanding is on your part. “Money laundering” wasn’t mentioned by anyone but you. Stop inventing things. This is about valve getting fucked because they were accepting bitcoin payments with zero confirmations.

Why take it personally? They brought up an important issue.

I’m not taking anything personally, just calling him out on his strawman.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#109

Post by rosndo »

lokar wrote: post #94
rosndo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic misunderstanding is on your part. “Money laundering” wasn’t mentioned by anyone but you. Stop inventing things. This is about valve getting fucked because they were accepting bitcoin payments with zero confirmations.

Did you even read the other threads? It comes up almost every time.

So what? That’s completely unfounded speculation by those commenters supported neither by the article nor the actual facts.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#110

Post by dehrmann »

Beltalowda wrote: post #75
janandonly wrote: post #2

Unfortunately no details were given about what makes 50% of all bitcoin transactions “fraudulent” ? What does that even mean? * did someone try to send something other then bitcoin to a ₿ address? * did a client claim he payed and did the payment seem to fail on his end? * did a client not realise that you as payee also pay for the network fee? Nowadays these kind of problems would be easily prevented by using bitcoi…

Steam marked me as a "fraud" because I used my European Revolut card to try and make a purchase when I lived in Indonesia. I get that they don't want European people to pay Indonesian prices through a VPN or whatnot, but I was living in Indonesia and living off a local salary; I thought marking me as a "fraud" was rather harsh; with the increased ease of international banking there are loads of cases where this is pe…

I used to work for a company that does this sort of fraud detection. Using a credit card from a rich country in a developing country for an online transaction screams stolen credit card number. Fraudsters often use services like Steam where you can buy something fairly cheap to test the card number, then they go to the effort of trying a bigger transaction.
Post reply on HN