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Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

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Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#171

Post by bigtunacan »

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…

So how does one make money as a miner via processing these fees? Is this money being taken by pools, individual miners? Who is the middle-man that is actually taking this profit?

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#172

Post by pera »

thinkloop wrote: post #158
pera wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Valve really needs more than 0 confirmations? double-spending doesn't seems like a big issue for them since Steam is DRM and they have some level of control over the software people have in their libraries (and total control in the case of online games). If the concern is whether some people would just download games, double-spend before getting one confirmation and then keep Steam offline forever (or copy the g…

The problem with zero conf now is that the transaction may never get through. Blocks are full so often that if the fee isn't high enough the tx might stay stuck in the mempool for weeks until the machine is rebooted and the tx is lost forever.

Extremely low tx fees may never get into a block, but I just checked the the current price for a target of 24hs max (the same window time that fiat users currently have for returns) and it shouldn't be more than $0.35 USD for a simple 1 to 1 transaction (14 sat/byte). I know that this still isn't good, specially when you may be sending just $5 for some cheap game, but it's not that terrible either in my opinion...

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#173

Post by aitrean »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #91

I posted this as an Ask HN, but this might be interesting here. It's sort of off-topic, but in this case there's not much to say about Steam dropping Bitcoin anyway. Maybe it'll hover near the bottom: What should we do about the destabilizing potential of Bitcoin? There are two facts about Bitcoin worth worrying about: 1. There is no upper bound on the price 2. Everyone who thought the price won't continue to exponen…

1. There is an upper bound on price, same as any other asset. The upper bound has yet to be determined, however.

2. Everyone who thought the price wouldn't* continue to exponentially increase was wrong. So far. But this statement totally forgets the fact that shit changes. Anyone who said Yahoo was overvalued before 1999 was proven dead wrong. But after 1999, they were pretty much dead on.

Everything else you said has a 0% chance of happening. Objectively speaking, Bitcoin will probably never become legitimized by any government. We're just testing how big a bubble gets.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#174

Post by querulous »

Klathmon wrote: post #97
prepend wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible that merchants could charge you whatever they like for however much they want. But it’s unlikely. And if they did, you would get all your money back and the merchant would pay a fine. The privacy info is valid, but BTC isn’t private either and people are connecting identities to purchases all the time. Not to mention 99% of the time I must give my info to the merchant so they can mail me whatever I purc…

It's not the privacy info that's the problem, it's that credit card are "pull" by nature. You give your information to a merchant, and they decide how much and when to charge you. Vs with bitcoin it's push. You decide how much you are sending to the merchant, and if it's not enough, they don't deliver the goods/services. But this has completely gotten away from the issue I was talking about (i'm in a shitty mood toda…

with pin + chip cards debit/credit cards are 100% push for physical transactions. for online transactions almost every single provider offers one time use card numbers

the push/pull problem has been solved for a decade, and not by bitcoin

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#175

Post by ftlio »

jordigh wrote: post #87
spmurrayzzz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However, getting the transaction confirmed can take many hours at the times of high demand and then it still fails because thanks to the volatility, the transaction fees have gone up in the meantime. That is creating unsustainable problems for the customer support and makes BTC unusable for actual payments. This is precisely what Lightning aims to solve, and at least anecdotally so far, has done so in the case of LT…

Having used bitcoins as money, I really want the confirmation times and transaction fees to go back to what they were a year or two ago. I keep hearing that this mythical lightning will fix things, and I sure hope it does. I want internet money. I want to be able to send money to anyone, anywhere in the world, at the drop of a hat, as easy as email. I don't care about speculation or getting rich or avoiding taxes or…

You can create a scarce token with all the qualities you desire in like 5 minutes. Creating 'internet money' with a stable value and network of potential transactees probably looks exactly like Bitcoin's development though.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#176

Post by rhino369 »

Klathmon wrote: post #59
Kelbit wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, Visa is about 1.5-2% plus $0.10 flat interchange. To break even with BTC against Visa, we're talking an average transaction of over $200. That's not feasible for the vast majority of merchants. Not to mention that the currency's extreme volatility means that when you sell it to convert it to greenbacks (the currency your investors actually care about) it probably won't be the same amount you were paid for.

Yes, but at the same time Visa requires you to hand over your payment information to each and every merchant you transact with, and they are able to pull as much money from your card as they want, and they are able to charge you multiple times at any point in the future. But there are some really cool solutions being worked on right now for this problem in bitcoin that can make it scale to a similar way to Visa. But…

>Yes, but at the same time Visa requires you to hand over your payment information to each and every merchant you transact with, and they are able to pull as much money from your card as they want, and they are able to charge you multiple times at any point in the future.

Sure but that is Visa's problem not mine.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#177

Post by mohamedmansour »

Finally! This was caused by my complains, I paid $32 for a $25 dollar game, and I it didn't go through since txn fees were not right 4 cents less. And BitPay refunded me just $17.

I am so thankful Steam did it right, meanwhile BitPay still blames the customer!

Here are the different threads of where the complain went viral. The internet wins at the end, removing the shady business of BitPay.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15768303 http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/3183345176714... https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7e7wsq/shad...

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#178

Post by openasocket »

nicky0 wrote: post #104
openasocket wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a finite number of bitcoins, fewer and fewer bitcoins are being produced over time by design. There can only be 21 million bitcoins, and the majority have already been mined. So the reward just for completing a block (not including the transaction fees) has been steadily decreasing, and that's not even taking into account that more and more miners means it's harder to get that reward. Thus the trend is going…

That's not really the answer. The answer is that there are more transactions being broadcast than there is space in the blocks to accommodate them. Thus creating fee pressure.

That's certainly a major factor, that I neglected to mention, but not the only reason.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#179

Post by dclowd9901 »

cgmg wrote: post #137
Havoc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

> What value? $13K of value, and counting.

Here's a question: if a single bitcoin can be infinitely divided, does the price of a single bitcoin actually mean anything? If I spend $13 on .001 of a Bitcoin, I've, in essence, bought a $13k BTC, have I not, but without any real skin in that figure...

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#180

Post by Klathmon »

bigtunacan wrote: post #171
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…

So how does one make money as a miner via processing these fees? Is this money being taken by pools, individual miners? Who is the middle-man that is actually taking this profit?

It's pretty clever.

Whenever you make a transaction in bitcoin, you point to the previous balance you have from a previous transaction, then you say how much you are sending to what address.

The "fee" is the difference between the amounts.

So if I have 1 Bitcoin, and I send .9 to you, the fee is .1

If you want to make sure you keep some Bitcoin, you just send it to yourself.

So 1 have one, and I send .1 to you, and .8 back to me, the fee is .1

Then when a miner mines a block, any unspent money is now theirs, and they claim it via the address they liked for.

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