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'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

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Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#201

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #133
andai wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on vacation in Croatia and my Spotify Premium expired. I tried to renew it with my Dutch card and was rejected, so I had to use a VPN set to Amsterdam...

I’m visiting Macedonia. I changed the email address on my Capital One account (migrating off Gmail) and they froze all 4 of my cards. To unfreeze them, I had to provide my drivers license, social security card, and proof of residence in the USA & then wait two weeks. There was no process for accelerating the timetable. #expatlife

Is that #expatlife or #donotusegmail ?

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#202

Post by beardog »

ipaddr wrote: post #185
doomroot wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried lightning network its extremely fast and cheap and pretty reliable these days. Many great mobile wallets support it now, Blue wallet, Muun, Phoenix. Hell even Cash App supports outgoing lightning payments now. Scan a QR code few seconds later done, final, irreversible.

I haven't I'm use to having an account on an exchange and moving money directly to the account. Is there a way I could use the lightening network directly if my exchange doesn't use it behind the scene?

You're not supposed to be using an exchange for payments, you are meant to have a wallet, ideally a non-custodial one.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#203

Post by anonporridge »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #199
anonporridge wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it's always been absurd to believe that standard retail purchases would be regularly done with layer 1 base chain transactions. You can't even say that you're ok with waiting for 1 block confirmation, because the time between each block is only an average of 10 minutes, with high variance. It's fairly common to experience over an hour between blocks, or as little as a minute. The security and confirmation…

> The only model that makes sense for bitcoin is the layer one base chain is a settlement network, with payment networks build on top that aggregate many transactions into one on chain transaction. Think OSI model for networking. Do you think this applies to cyrptocurrencies that has faster confirmations/block generation? Or is only important when there is a lengthy confirmation?

The only thing that really matters is how much work has been built up on top of the transaction. Shorter block times doesn't change that function at all. In a version of bitcoin with 1 minute block times, the security guarantee of 60 blocks is identical to the current security guarantee of 6 blocks, because it would be exactly the same amount of energy going into mining to create immutability.

The amount of work (hashes) represents a real world cost (electricity and mining chips) that can't be undone without massive commitment of these real world resources.

This is the foundation of why bitcoin works.

So basically, people who say their blockchain with shorter block times is "faster" are either fools who don't understand what's going on or conmen trying to pump and dump their bags. Layer one transaction confirmation is about settlement finality, not how fast you can pay for coffee.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#204

Post by AniseAbyss »

anonporridge wrote: post #183
doomroot wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything where the buyer doesn't leave 15-30 mins after making the payment or the purchaser is id'd.

This is why it's always been absurd to believe that standard retail purchases would be regularly done with layer 1 base chain transactions. You can't even say that you're ok with waiting for 1 block confirmation, because the time between each block is only an average of 10 minutes, with high variance. It's fairly common to experience over an hour between blocks, or as little as a minute. The security and confirmation…

Instantaneous payments exist, I use them several times a day, with traditional banking. I never quite understood what problem bitcoin was supposed to solve beyond anonymity.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#205

Post by delusional »

aasasd wrote: post #158
doomroot wrote: post #143

Context on what I believe they mean by "fraudulent". Steam back in the day used to accept 0 confirmation bitcoin spends. This means that the transaction has been gossiped on the bitcoin p2p network but had not yet been mined into a block and thus had minimal finality guarantees. Steam could see that they were going to receive a bitcoin payment (when the transaction was mined into a block) and would credit the users a…

> and you don't trust you customers Seeing as “remember the password” does about nothing in the desktop app on my own machine near which only I ever come—Steam's attitude toward the users is crystal clear, and I'd say it's weird that they lived almost two years with that arrangement.

In the same era steam stored your password on disk if you used "remember my password".

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#206

Post by anonporridge »

AniseAbyss wrote: post #204
anonporridge wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it's always been absurd to believe that standard retail purchases would be regularly done with layer 1 base chain transactions. You can't even say that you're ok with waiting for 1 block confirmation, because the time between each block is only an average of 10 minutes, with high variance. It's fairly common to experience over an hour between blocks, or as little as a minute. The security and confirmation…

Instantaneous payments exist, I use them several times a day, with traditional banking. I never quite understood what problem bitcoin was supposed to solve beyond anonymity.

These are instant payments, not instant settlement.

Your bank abstracts the underlying inter bank settlement complexity and aggregates all the minor transactions and transfers that individuals do to a small number of larger settlement transactions, likely on the SWIFT network.

When you make a payment, that transfer of money isn't instantly settled. The instantaneous feeling is a service that the bank provides you, but it's an illusion. There are similar experiences being built now on top of bitcoin, like http://strike.me, although the lightning network that Strike and CashApp are building upon actually is instant finality, unlike Visa/Paypal.

This is why comparing bitcoin to Visa or PayPal is fundamentally flawed, since those are both layer 2/3 networks on top of SWIFT.

The proper comparison is with other settlement networks that create finality, like SWIFT. Where SWIFT may take days to create final settlement of a transfer, bitcoin takes ~1 hour depending on how much confidence you want. Where SWIFT is secured by nation state monopolies on violence and global banking gatekeeping, bitcoin is secured by the most powerful computer network on the planet that no single nation state has the power to disrupt. Bitcoin is open and permissionless and anyone and everyone can join. SWIFT is tightly permissioned because it relies heavily on exclusive networks of humans who trust each other.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#207

Post by Beltalowda »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #201
devoutsalsa wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m visiting Macedonia. I changed the email address on my Capital One account (migrating off Gmail) and they froze all 4 of my cards. To unfreeze them, I had to provide my drivers license, social security card, and proof of residence in the USA & then wait two weeks. There was no process for accelerating the timetable. #expatlife

Is that #expatlife or #donotusegmail ?

Capital One froze the cards. I don't think gmail has the ability to freeze someone's cards. Has nothing to do with gmail at all, just the change of email address in Capital One.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#208

Post by LanceH »

doomroot wrote: post #143

Context on what I believe they mean by "fraudulent". Steam back in the day used to accept 0 confirmation bitcoin spends. This means that the transaction has been gossiped on the bitcoin p2p network but had not yet been mined into a block and thus had minimal finality guarantees. Steam could see that they were going to receive a bitcoin payment (when the transaction was mined into a block) and would credit the users a…

You say wait 3-6 blocks -- which makes sense for large transactions, but are there cases where 1 blocks have been getting reversed? Is this happening now because some parts of the network are on stale or diverging info?

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#209

Post by smolder »

AniseAbyss wrote: post #204
anonporridge wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it's always been absurd to believe that standard retail purchases would be regularly done with layer 1 base chain transactions. You can't even say that you're ok with waiting for 1 block confirmation, because the time between each block is only an average of 10 minutes, with high variance. It's fairly common to experience over an hour between blocks, or as little as a minute. The security and confirmation…

Instantaneous payments exist, I use them several times a day, with traditional banking. I never quite understood what problem bitcoin was supposed to solve beyond anonymity.

Bitcoin only gives you a pseudonym wallet ID. I'd say it's less anonymous than cash, since everyone has the ledger.

Re: '50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

#210

Post by Beltalowda »

robocat wrote: post #165
andai wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on vacation in Croatia and my Spotify Premium expired. I tried to renew it with my Dutch card and was rejected, so I had to use a VPN set to Amsterdam...

Are they getting stricter? I've never had that problem, including when travelling to all ex-yugoslavia countries some years ago. I'm a New Zealander. Reminder to self: organise VPN before leaving for overseas.

There's loads of services that are very anal about it. I also couldn't order a charger for my ThinkPad when I lived in New Zealand because the Lenovo website didn't accept my euro card, even though the shipping address was to New Zealand. I contacted support: nothing they could do. Had to use a friend's Kiwi account.

Stuff like this is why I just started keeping the accounts around as I move about instead of closing them.

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