Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin • Hacker News Board

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#201

Post by DSMan195276 » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 9:25 PM UTC

donarb wrote: post #182

DSMan195276 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Not really, this is an intended feature of Bitcoin, not a bug.

Every so many blocks, the number of new Bitcoin handed to the miners is halved, and eventually it will drop to zero. When that happens, the only incentive for miners to continue mining (And thus keep Bitcoin going) is the fees collected from the transactions. So required fees are only going to go up.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#202

Post by paulgb » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 9:26 PM UTC

lifty wrote: post #163

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's better than being on a trajectory where BTC hitting $1m is a real possibility. That world will be terrifying, and it's important for us to think about ways of mitigating or stopping it.

Can you go into more detail as to why that world would be terrifying? Is it because the implications predicted by orthodox monetary theory?

One that comes to mind: it would be profitable for miners to burn through $12 million dollars every 10 minutes for the block reward alone.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#203

Post by jondubois » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 9:26 PM UTC

mdotk wrote: post #187

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

Sounds obvious but maybe it explains why Bitcoin's scalability problem doesn't seem to have any effect on its price.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#204

Post by empath75 » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 9:29 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #29

nlperguiy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They've printed a billion dollars worth of tether in the past few months with nothing backing it. They fixed something anyway.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#205

Post by gulperxcx » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 9:31 PM UTC

divbyzer0 wrote: post #169

lev99 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currency exchange is a great bitcoin usecase.

The original idea was that one would exchange local currency for BTC only when needed, then transfer. The person receiving the BTC would then immediately exchange into their local currency. The result would be that either party would hold BTC for such a short period of time, BTC fluctuations would be negligible. It should be a medium of exchange, but for now its a speculative gamble.

What's the benefit of this over doing a direct exchange. ie. Local currency foreign currency?

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#206

Post by Laforet » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 9:33 PM UTC

spmurrayzzz wrote: post #68

janoc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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…

>This is precisely what Lightning aims to solve, and at least anecdotally so far, has done so in the case of LTC.

Which LTC wallet support LN in production?

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#207

Post by ionwake » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 9:34 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #25

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.

ouch

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#208

Post by tdb7893 » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

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 always been told gold isn't a good place to put your money so proponents of bitcoin comparing it to gold is concerning to me

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#209

Post by Laforet » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

pera wrote: post #172

thinkloop wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Problem is that the minimum fee for 24hr target could change a lot in an hour or less because some news story happened or simply when enough people noticed a lull in fees and decided to move their fees when it's still cheap. In that event 24hrs coild easily turn to days.

Wallet developers and payment portals gets a lot of flak for overcharging fees, but ultimately it is still preferrable to using a conservative estimate and deal with the likely support call when the payment fails to confirm, and there is nothing they can do but watch it get bounced between nodes.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#210

Post by XR0CSWV3h3kZWg » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 9:40 PM UTC

testvox wrote: post #24

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.

I've had to pay tx fees of ~$5 twice recently. The second $5 fee was to move my coins to a segwit address. Now the fees are under $1 again, i.e. actually viable for many real world txs again.