Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin • Hacker News Board

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#21

Post by djrogers » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:48 PM UTC

Epenthesis wrote: post #5

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.

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?

The term gets used to contrast with 'medium of exchange', as the reality is that for most people, most of the time, bitcoin is not very liquid.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#22

Post by coldtea » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:51 PM UTC

zython wrote: post #9

Good heavens. The steam dev team is alive ? What a miracle, I thought valve was run by two interns and a coffee machine.

>I thought valve was run by two interns and a coffee machine.

No, that's the average bitcoin exchange

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#23

Post by 659087 » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:51 PM UTC

benjaminjackman wrote: post #14

Animats wrote: post #10

$20 transaction fee. Bitcoin for small payments is dead.

And don’t forget nail #2 long confirmation times with high price volatility .

Who wouldn't want a "store of value" that might be worth +/- 20% by the time your transaction is complete?

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#24

Post by testvox » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:51 PM UTC

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.

It seems like the main issue is transaction fees are close to $20, so even simple operations like refunding users for a incorrect or incomplete transaction is infeasible.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#25

Post by modeless » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:52 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #18

I wonder how many bitcoins Steam has, and how many of those they've even cashed out on.

I think they used BitPay, so they likely had BitPay convert to dollars instantly for every transaction and never received Bitcoin themselves.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#26

Post by danielhooper » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:53 PM UTC

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.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#27

Post by dmm » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:53 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #10

$20 transaction fee. Bitcoin for small payments is dead.

Here's a recent transaction with a $2 fee: https://blockchain.info/tx/704b0c6c19c8cfe1d16093552d5196a8f...

For that $2 a transaction is forever recorded on thousands of nodes in a worldwide consensus network, secured by a huge number of miners. Blockchains are not going to scale to visa level numbers of transactions without huge blocks and de facto centralization.

The reasonable alternative is a second transaction layer, the lightning network.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#28

Post by falcolas » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:56 PM UTC

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.

It could be as simple as “the hassle was not worth the benefits”

There’s just a lot more steps in converting bitcoins into something they can pay their bills with.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#29

Post by gruez » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:59 PM UTC

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…

>not easy enough to arbitrage between exchanges

doesn't tether fix this?

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#30

Post by janoc » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 7:01 PM UTC

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 transaction fees have gone up in the meantime. That is creating unsustainable problems for the customer support and makes BTC unusable for actual payments.

I think this is what will ultimately bring Bitcoin down (and with it the entire cryptocurrency goldrush, even though the problems are mostly with BTC). Once the currency is impossible to exchange for actual goods or other currencies due to being more trouble to handle than it is worth, it stops being a currency. What good is that one BTC is $12k+ now if you can't actually buy anything with that? People pouring money into this today and talking about BTC being a "store of value" are being seriously nuts ...