I ran a web hosting business. We had a word for people who wanted to pay for servers with an untraceable currency: criminals.
'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
291–300 of 333 posts
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#292What a pointless fluff piece.
How did they know the payments were fraudulent?
Yes there are a ton of pitfalls and shams and bad things happening in the crypocurrency world, but this "article" is the media equivalent to the garbage projects in the crypto world. It is designed not to provide something useful, but rather to make money with questionable promises.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI the answer in that link is from 2013, not sure how much it's changed since then but I doubt it's the same today.
A feature of bitcoin is it’s stubborn system stability and resistance to change :) One of the odd benefits of this is that old forum posts and discussions have a good chance of being relevant. Although I will say lots of progress has been made in p2p message propagation (since this isn’t directly a part of consensus) which could definitely prevent orphan blocks, so you may be on to something in this case.
Yeah, the biggest effects on the number of orphaned blocks should be the number of distinct mining pools and the latency between them. I could see some of those numbers changing enough to matter since 2013, but I'm not all that sure.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not supposed to be using an exchange for payments, you are meant to have a wallet, ideally a non-custodial one.
I worry about malware finding my wallet or my drive dying and losing the wallet more than using an exchange.
Malware on your PC can take control of your exchange account as much as it can a normal wallet. The drive dying is why you're supposed to backup your wallet or at least record the seed.
On an exchange you're vulnerable to compromise both from your end and on the exchange's end
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#295Context 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…
> The bitcoin community moved away from accepting '0 conf' transactions pretty much everywhere because of this reason.
They moved away from 0 conf because of the high fees, making payments sometimes get stuck for days or weeks, making 0 conf much less trustworthy.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
You let the user do it twice then ban them from using bitcoin payments?
They already answered this question in their previous post... The fraudster scales up their account creation. You ban then after 2, they switch to a new account... which you ban after 2, and they switch to another new account, which you ban after 2... and so on, ad infinitum.
But then what? Someone downloads and plays a game for an hour, gets banned, then goes through the whole process of having to do all that again?
Doesn't seem like a good user experience. All to get a free hour of gameplay?
There are easier ways of pirating games. The only possible usecase for this kind of fraud would be if you can buy digital items, transfer and then sell those digital items.
But even then, that might be difficult to do all in 10 minutes.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in the UK we had "cheque guarantee cards" - essentially a debit card without a live connection to the bank. When you wrote the cheque the shop took your card details as well and that meant the bank guaranteed to cover the value of the cheque if it bounced (up to a maximum amount). If your cheque bounced your account went into an overdraft for that amount plus a hefty fee. It meant shops didn't need to worry abou…
The US banks I worked with would just overdraw your account (up to an amount), then, overnight, reorder the transactions so the big ones came first and all the little ones came “after” the account went negative and hit you with hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees. I don’t miss the early 2000s.
Don't they reorder transactions even when not overdrafted? I thought my bank did.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Literally nobody offers a service to check if specific coins were bought with a stolen credit card. I know what a chargeback is, and those are utterly irrelevant here.
I literally had to approve with my bank to verify payment of a relatively large sum. My credit card got into a locked state for a while every month, when Vulture did a approved monthly charge. There are plenty of systems that verify things out of the ordinary. It's not because you haven't encountered it, that they aren't there. Additionally, stolen credit cards can be marked as stolen. Which would block any future pa…
You don't understand what people are saying.
The BTC that someone is sending you, isn't being charged back. You can't chargeback BTC. That doesn't make any sense.
> There are plenty of systems that verify things out of the ordinary.
There is no system that checks if the BTC is out of the ordinary, no.
> It's not because you haven't encountered it
Feel free to point to anywhere at all, that is doing a verification on the BTC. Not your credit card. Instead the BTC.
> stolen credit cards can be marked as stolen
A credit card can. But BTC is not a credit card.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#299Context 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…
>Steam back in the day used to accept 0 confirmation bitcoin spends This is ridiculous. 1 block confirmation would've prevented near-all transactions from being retracted.
Correct, but why to deal with this at all considering the % of all BTC TXs compared to fiat.
Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
You let the user do it twice then ban them from using bitcoin payments?
They already answered this question in their previous post... The fraudster scales up their account creation. You ban then after 2, they switch to a new account... which you ban after 2, and they switch to another new account, which you ban after 2... and so on, ad infinitum.
Making new accounts isn't trivial. You can add friction from suspicious attempts like requiring a phone number or making them wait some time. Some determined attackers might slip through but at the end of the day all you are losing is some bandwidth.