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Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

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Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#121

Post by Klathmon »

simpsond wrote: post #99
Klathmon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you make a bitcoin transaction, it gets put into a "mempool". Basically you send your TX to a node, that shares it with other nodes on the network, and they all hold it in memory. Once a block is found, the miner that found the block will pull as many transactions as possible from the mempool and put them into that block and sign it on the blockchain forever. Since TX fees go to miners, they are incentivized to…

I don’t understand why miners wouldn’t include all pending transactions in their block. Seeing as how pow is a guessing game, there are plenty of permutations of the Merkle tree to generate plenty of roots. I guess to dissencentivize free loaders so miners can continue to make money once Coinbase txns are no longer a thing? It’s certainly not free to mine!

As the other commenter said, there is about 1 MB of room in each block, and almost always >1 MB worth of transactions in the "mempool" (actually it's often >12MB for the most part, because people will make tons and tons of transactions at 1sat/byte and not really care if they take forever to go through).

And you are correct that bitcoin's ultimate goal is to have mining income come solely from transaction fees eventually. But by that point the hope is that "second layer" systems will take the brunt of the transactions and the actual core blockchain will only be a settlement layer where a $500 fee is no big deal for 2 banks settling hundreds of millions of dollars directly on the blockchain.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#122

Post by Klathmon »

darpa_escapee wrote: post #115
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully we have nice companies like equifax which help secure our details /s.

Online wallets and exchanges are similar points of failure. Many users have uploaded their picture IDs, banking and tax information to sites like LocalBitcoins.

But you can choose your online wallet or exchange, you can't choose your "equifax" (you can't even opt out of equifax)

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#124

Post by blibble »

Klathmon wrote: post #94
blibble wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cardholders are not liable for unauthorised transactions by merchants any merchant that commits that sort of fraud repeatedly will have their account terminated

>cardholders are not liable for unauthorised transactions by merchants Assuming they are really fraud and aren't just a "free trial" expiring, aren't a contractually-agreed upon price increase hidden in fine print, or that the cardholder saw the fraud and reported it within 60 days. Not to mention now the cardholder is now unable to use the card if fraud is found, and needs to wait for a new one to be sent via mail.…

in most civilised countries small print like that would treated as sharp practice and you'd easily be able to force a refund under consumer protection law

in the UK I can walk into my bank branch and have my card replaced on the spot, so I don't really see that as a problem, unless you're abroad (and if you're abroad with only one card you should probably know better)

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#125

Post by seanwilson »

Klathmon wrote: post #53
bigtunacan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are these transaction fee amounts even determined? With something like credit cards, PayPal, or EFT the fees are deterministic. With Bitcoin it seems fees are both ridiculously high, plus I can't even tell what I am going to be charged?

When you make a bitcoin transaction, it gets put into a "mempool". Basically you send your TX to a node, that shares it with other nodes on the network, and they all hold it in memory. Once a block is found, the miner that found the block will pull as many transactions as possible from the mempool and put them into that block and sign it on the blockchain forever. Since TX fees go to miners, they are incentivized to…

> Once a block is found, the miner that found the block will pull as many transactions as possible from the mempool and put them into that block and sign it on the blockchain forever.

Might be a nitpick, but you mean the miner puts as many high value transactions as they can fit into a block and then searches for a valid hash?

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#126

Post by ceejayoz »

Klathmon wrote: post #46
niij wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did $4.30 transaction fees become even close to acceptable. I thought high TX fees was one of the things Bitcoin was purported to solve.

I'm not saying they are acceptable, i'm saying that $20 fees per average transaction isn't true in all cases except once in the history of bitcoin.

Is there reason to believe that sort of congestion won't reoccur?

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#127

Post by disordinary »

danielhooper wrote: post #26
vxNsr wrote: post #3

It's for the same reason that no one wanted to touch zimbabwe dollar back in 2007, if the value of the medium of exchange differs from breakfast to lunch it's not really a good medium of exchange. Doesn't matter if value is appreciating or depreciating, currency needs to have a reasonably stable value to be useful.

But this was true when Steam decided to start accepting bitcoin. There has to be some kind of profit motive behind making this decision at this point in time. I could only guess that they've forecasted a significant decline in bitcoin's value, whether it be the value of the coin itself or the costs of doing business with it.

They don't hold the bitcoin, they use a payment gateway who processes it into dollars instantly.

They stay clearly why they're not supporting bitcoin, it's because the time that it takes to mine the blocks means that often the transaction is processed after the payment gateway times out. And the mining fee is too high to make it viable for consumers.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#129

Post by roywiggins »

nostrademons wrote: post #72
epicide wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: even if a currency is only good for exchanging for other currencies, doesn't that still make it a currency? In other words, even if you can't go buy clothing or games or hosting with BTC, doesn't the fact that you can exchange it for $LOCAL_CURRENCY (which can be used to buy those things) give it value? Basically, a meta-currency or currency of currencies, if you will. Edit: I realize we are saying…

That makes it a security. By definition, currency is something you can exchange for goods or services, while securities are financial instruments that hold value (i.e. can be exchanged for currency).

See also: the European Currency Unit. Not a currency, but sort of acted like one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Currency_Unit

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#130

Post by Havoc »

eqmvii wrote: post #2

Makes business and technological sense. Even the true believers have largely switched to advocating the store-of-value/digital gold model of bitcoin. We're absolutely in a bitcoin/cryptocurrency mania. Unfortunately, stating that is much easier than predicting what will happen next.

>Even the true believers have largely switched to advocating the store-of-value/digital gold model of bitcoin.

Which is absolutely insane. What's the point of a currency if you can't use it for transactions? Store-of-value? What value?

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