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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?
Completely incoherent article. What does “fraudulent” even mean? Fraudulent credit card transactions for gift cards are common, because the gift card provides a way to cash out a stolen credit card number. But if a criminal has access to someone else’s Bitcoin, it’s already “cashed out”.
I feel like your comment is unjustified and incoherent. It is obvious to many of us what "fraudulent" mean here, it could be an array of: - previously flagged wallets moving through mixers - purchases and refunds to facilitate money laundering - converting to and from steam wallet to crypto etc. It is NOT at all ambiguous which is what you are insinuating as the basis for not reading past the headline and discouragin…
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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…
My comment was intended to point out that it's parent comment didn't bother to read the grandparent comment, which had clearly answered the question it was asking.
But then the parent comment author edited themself, I assume to avoid looking foolish. So I guess it's irrelevant now.
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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…
I don't care how well it would work, and I'm not arguing any of your points... I don't even understand why you people like these video games, so I'm the last person who should opine on what constitutes a good UX. My comment was intended to point out that it's parent comment didn't bother to read the grandparent comment, which had clearly answered the question it was asking. But then the parent comment author edited t…
Ok, so then I guess it isn't really a problem then. The whole just ban them "ad infinitum", is totally a reasonable solution to all of this.
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I don't care how well it would work, and I'm not arguing any of your points... I don't even understand why you people like these video games, so I'm the last person who should opine on what constitutes a good UX. My comment was intended to point out that it's parent comment didn't bother to read the grandparent comment, which had clearly answered the question it was asking. But then the parent comment author edited t…
> I don't care how well it would work Ok, so then I guess it isn't really a problem then. The whole just ban them "ad infinitum", is totally a reasonable solution to all of this.
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> I don't care how well it would work Ok, so then I guess it isn't really a problem then. The whole just ban them "ad infinitum", is totally a reasonable solution to all of this.
...or so say the guys sitting in the cheap seats. In practice, it may well be more complicated than that, and involve all sorts of other tradeoffs. It usually is.
No, its not. If an account gets banned after an hour, all that happened is that the user got is 1 free hour of playing a video game. There are easier ways of pirating videos games than that.
So really, thats good enough.
You tried to claim "The fraudster scales up their account creation". And I am telling you, that if a fraudster wants to play a video game for free, there are much easier ways of doing so. By just pirating the game, for example.
So that specific point is wrong.
> or so say the guys sitting in the cheap seats
Actually, it seems like you are the one sitting in cheap seats. Because you have already straight up admitted that you don't really know much about the industry. Whereas, people like me, who do work in the games industry, do know about what a good user experience is for people playing video games, actually know more about this than you do.
So, in other words, you actually should "care how well it would work". Because how well it would work, is integral to the attack vector.
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...or so say the guys sitting in the cheap seats. In practice, it may well be more complicated than that, and involve all sorts of other tradeoffs. It usually is.
> In practice, it may well be more complicated than that No, its not. If an account gets banned after an hour, all that happened is that the user got is 1 free hour of playing a video game. There are easier ways of pirating videos games than that. So really, thats good enough. You tried to claim "The fraudster scales up their account creation". And I am telling you, that if a fraudster wants to play a video game for…
> > In practice, it may well be more complicated than that
> No, its not...
You keep assuming that the information you already have is ALL of the relevant information about this issue. You're just a Monday Morning Quarterback, and you have no way to know whether the situation is more complicated than this. So you can't possibly make absolute statements about this... Unless you happen to work at Valve, on something that has given you actual experience with the Steam account system.
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What about people who do this 10x a day to play free games forever?
Are you suggesting that there may be a human being on earth who has the tenacity to enjoy games while creating new accounts, pulling off successful bitcoin heists every 1-2 hours and risking losing their save games? And doing that forever ? This website is just surreal.
Most of the “tenacity” parts implied there are automatable, so it's mostly about “can people enjoy the paid-for experience of a game with ephemeral rather than durable accounts”, which, well, really depends on the design of the game.
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They are not more liquid than BTC itself. Why not just sell the BTC directly?
I guess games and cosmetics sell easier than crypto scams.
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No, but I don't really have an example of a specific credit card chargeback, either. At least in the US, the police can seize the cash as evidence, and their duty is to return it to the rightful owner, not whoever happened to have it at the time of seizure.
There is plenty of evidence that credit card charge backs are a thing, I don't think anyone would challenge their existence. > At least in the US, the police can seize the cash as evidence, and their duty is to return it to the rightful owner, not whoever happened to have it at the time of seizure. They do this with cash found in possession of criminals or suspects but do they do this with third parties not involved…
The important thing to remember here is that possession of stolen goods or cash is a crime (cf for example https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2315), so if it becomes known to you that stolen cash is in your possession, you have a legal obligation to give it back. Given how fungible cash is, this probably won't be enforced if somebody uses stolen cash to pay their bill in a restaurant, but it probably would be if someone bought a car with cash that could be traced directly back to a bank robbery.
Since bitcoin is infinitely more traceable than cash, the argument of "but how do you know this particular dollar bill was stolen?" wouldn't really be applicable.