Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well then please explain what is difficult here. You initiate a purchase with bitcoin, valve instantly grants you access, then few hours later valve checks if the transaction has been confirmed in the blockchain or not. If it hasn't, then the entitlement is removed. What's not simple about it?
What about people who do this 10x a day to play free games forever?
'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
261–270 of 333 posts
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s really not, the idea of laundering cryptocurrency through Steam is ludicrous. It works the other way around, people launder funds from steam into cryptocurrency. Either by buying items with stolen credit cards or by stealing steam accounts.
I don't see how that's ludicrous. There's a lot of dirty money on both sides. One could easily imagine a scheme where items or accounts loaded with games bought with dirty BTC are sold for now cleaner fiat or crypto.
Terrible rate of return, but the rate of return doesn't matter that much if you can't spend the money otherwise.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#263Context on what I believe they mean by "fraudulent". Steam back in the day used to accept 0 confirmation bitcoin spends. This means that the transaction has been gossiped on the bitcoin p2p network but had not yet been mined into a block and thus had minimal finality guarantees. Steam could see that they were going to receive a bitcoin payment (when the transaction was mined into a block) and would credit the users a…
I was imagining it was something on the line of drug cartels and human traffickers laundering money through trading game assets.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well then please explain what is difficult here. You initiate a purchase with bitcoin, valve instantly grants you access, then few hours later valve checks if the transaction has been confirmed in the blockchain or not. If it hasn't, then the entitlement is removed. What's not simple about it?
What about people who do this 10x a day to play free games forever?
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
BCH is trying to keep 0-conf alive by eliminating the artificial block space constraint, removing RBF (which is really dangerous when you have an RBF-flagged grandparent tx that maybe your wallet is t looking for), and implementing double spend proofs to warn tx recipients as soon as a double spend tx appears on the network. It’s obviously impossible for an unconfirmed Bitcoin tx to be guaranteed secure, but the risk…
With no RBF how will you prevent TX's from getting stuck in a high fee environment? I know BCH thinks block space should be unlimited which means TX fees will never get high but i don't think the economics works out there.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this is about zero confirmation transactions because I know people who were deliberately double spending on Steam. > Zero-conf itself is fairly reliable, it certainly doesn't account for 50% transactions being fraudulent Of course it does. Someone using this to spend the same bitcoin multiple times will generate many times more transactions than a regular user.
You’re right and I take it back. If Bitcoin didn’t have replace-by-fee, then maybe it would have been a more accurate statement.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#267Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how that's ludicrous. There's a lot of dirty money on both sides. One could easily imagine a scheme where items or accounts loaded with games bought with dirty BTC are sold for now cleaner fiat or crypto.
Drug dealers in the UK used to use inveterate gamblers addicted to fixed-odds betting terminals to launder cash in high-street betting shops. Terrible rate of return, but the rate of return doesn't matter that much if you can't spend the money otherwise.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
With no RBF how will you prevent TX's from getting stuck in a high fee environment? I know BCH thinks block space should be unlimited which means TX fees will never get high but i don't think the economics works out there.
Miners can set their acceptable minimum fee levels and orphan the blocks of miners who accept transactions with fees that they think are too low. This is essentially cartel behavior with an incredibly strong enforcement mechanism. There should never be a “high fee environment” due to an artificially low block size cap.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absolutely not what happened. Why come up with such crazy theories when this just comes down to double spends of unconfirmed transactions?
> Another thing was that the vast majority of those transactions, for whatever reason, were fraudulent, where people were repudiating transactions or using illegal sources of funds and things like that. Seems like it was multiple things and "fraud" is just a catch-all term and Gabe didn't bother to list everything that they considered to be fraud.