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Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

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Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#181

Post by Klathmon »

querulous wrote: post #174
Klathmon wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If there is an option for pull transactions, it will be abused.

Even if I push my money to you, you have my address that you can pull from later if you want.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#182

Post by donarb »

DSMan195276 wrote: post #116
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?

I think it's easiest to think of Bitcoin TX fees as a bribe to the miners to include your transaction in a block sooner then other transactions that have a lower fee attached. You get to choose the fee that you provide to the miner. The problem is that there are now so many transactions that are attempting to get through (And there is a maximum number of transactions that can be placed in a single block) that miners…

Looks like we need some form of "block neutrality".

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#183

Post by Epenthesis »

nlperguiy wrote: post #7
Epenthesis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hearing this a lot, but what does it actually mean ? Isn't the most important thing you want from a store of value stability? Ie, that it'll store the value that you put into it? Bitcoin certainly doesn't have that property. And if that's not the desired property implied by "store of value", what is?

Main source of instability is price manipulation by big players and market inefficiency (not easy enough to arbitrage between exchanges). It would be interesting to see them do the same thing if BTC market cap is in couple of trillions. For example, if you're on any exchange that lists the total amount of orders in BTC, you can easily catch when the manipulation starts by seeing out of the ordinary sums (triple the a…

Right, but given that that's true today, what makes BTC a store of value?

Or should I be parsing the phrase to mean "It's not anything today, but in the long term, once the market cap is large enough, it'll be a store of value"?

(I'm not being snarky; I'm legitimately confused by what people mean by the phrase.)

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#184

Post by jondubois »

Bitcoin is not meant to be used for small transactions. Bitcoin can scale indefinitely in terms of dollar value of daily transactions but it is limited when it comes to number of transactions.

I don't think that the lightning network will offer a solution. In engineering, problems are always better solved at the root. As clever as it might be, the lightning network is a bandaid patch on top of a suboptimal solution... There are many cryptocurrencies that scale better than Bitcoin in terms of number of transactions.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#185

Post by openasocket »

Sargos wrote: post #102
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…

... so bitcoin is doomed as a real currency as the prices are only going to get higher and people are not going to pay a $5 transaction fee for a $10 product. How is the bitcoin community rationalizing this seemingly inescapable mathematical failure?

The transaction fees won't grow forever. Generally speaking, they just need to be high enough that miners can turn a profit. What that amount is, I don't know.

And the fact that there's a limited number of transactions that can be processed in a single block, and competition between miners to validate transactions as quickly as possible, complicates things.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#186

Post by djhworld »

Angostura wrote: post #168

I'd venture to guess that the unspoken issue here is that when Valve originally announced it was accepting Bitcoin, Bitcoin was cool and exciting and trendy. Just accepting it made Valve seem and the leading edge - part of the future . That’s really not true any more and so a large part of the value of accepting it has simply disappeared. Really, why should they bother any more?

Valve introduced bitcoin payments back in the days when people used to use Bitcoin as a currency

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#187

Post by mdotk »

jondubois wrote: post #184

Bitcoin is not meant to be used for small transactions. Bitcoin can scale indefinitely in terms of dollar value of daily transactions but it is limited when it comes to number of transactions. I don't think that the lightning network will offer a solution. In engineering, problems are always better solved at the root. As clever as it might be, the lightning network is a bandaid patch on top of a suboptimal solution..…

any blockchain that doesn't set a limit on the value of one single transaction can scale indefinitely in terms of dollar value

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#188

Post by makomk »

janoc wrote: post #30
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.

The volatility alone wouldn't be a huge problem if the transactions were quick, apart from having to constantly re-price the goods (not a big deal with an automated system selling digital downloads, even though it is a real PITA for the accounting afterwards!). 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 trans…

It's actually impossible to reliably get a transaction confirmed in the 15 minutes that BitPay (who they used) is willing to lock in an exchange rate for, regardless of load on the network. The earliest a transaction can confirm is on the next block, and there's about a 25% chance no block will be mined by then.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#190

Post by celticninja »

nlperguiy wrote: post #84
celticninja wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exchanges don't ban users for exploiting arbitrage, every trade is money to the exchange and it benefits them to enable arbitrage to take place. No idea where you pulled that claim from. It's also not impossible to trade via bitstamp and bitthumb, sure it may take an hour or so to get your btc from bitstamp to bitthumb but that's not the bottleneck. Once you sell on bitthumb for USD you need to get that USD back to b…

Some exchanges offer fee-less withdrawals (like Bitstamp), which makes arbitrage more profitable. I'm pretty sure they'd ban you ASAP if you're withdrawing like crazy (they are paying your fees in BTC). As for transfer times for BTC not being a problem, 1 hour is a gamble in cryptocurrency world.

They won't ban you for withdrawing. If you withdraw lots then you have purchased lots, the exchange makes a cut each time you buy. BTC fees are minimal and exchanges can craft more efficient transactions too, so they are not going to ban anyone for making too many withdrawals.
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