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Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

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Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#221

Post by fullshark »

patmcc wrote: post #215
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…

>>>2. Everyone who thought the price won't continue to exponentially increase was wrong So far. Want to bet on the price of bitcoin in 1/5/10/25/100 years?

I bet you one bitcoin at each time interval the price of bitcoin is above $30 USD.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#222

Post by canadaduane »

rb808 wrote: post #48

So one of the things I liked the idea of was micro payments - eg click to donate 5 cents to the author of an article. Are there any crypto currencies that work with negligible fees for micropayments? Is there a framework to use them? Thanks

A friend recently introduced me to IOTA. Its intended purpose is machine-to-machine transfer of value. It does so without fees by requiring each transactor to sign two other transactions. I kind of like how it turns the "ponzi" data structure into a useful workhorse, and pays for its own workload.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#223

Post by Jach »

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…

10 minutes isn't really the drop of a hat. But why do you need your first confirmation in approximately the next 10 minutes so badly anyway, especially when it shows up in the mempool pretty much immediately? I paid around 20 cents on an approximately $200 transaction a couple weekends ago, it got verified after about 4 hours but I was expecting longer, it would have been fine. In the last 24 hours, 36,332 transactions were verified with at most 30 cents in fees. (https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/) The estimated time bounds for a transaction in that pool are 25 minutes to 14 hours.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#224

Post by thaumasiotes »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #75
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.

Doesn't matter if value is appreciating or depreciating I'd say it does, but the thing is that if the value is rapidly appreciating today, it might as well be rapidly depreciating tomorrow.

The claim is that (1) if the value of a currency is unstable, it won't be useful as a medium of exchange, and that (2) whether it's unstable because it's rising or because it's falling does not affect the validity of (1).

The reason for (2) is that an exchange has two parties. If the value of your currency is cratering, it won't work as a medium of exchange because vendors won't accept it, which prevents trade from happening.

If, on the other hand, the value of your currency is rocketing, it still won't work as a medium of exchange because customers won't spend it. That prevents trade just as effectively.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#225

Post by thaumasiotes »

Balero wrote: post #219
dclowd9901 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

No you've bought .001 as you state yourself. The component parts of a bitcoin can be allocated. (I think the minimal is 1 "satoshi") It's a bit like buying one pen out of a very large pack of pens. You don't own the pack if you only buy one.

I think dclowd9901 was getting at a different question, which I'll present by analogy:

I incorporate with 1,000,000,000 shares of stock. I sell 20 shares of stock to my good friend for $50. Is my company now worth 2.5 billion dollars?

The answer to this worry is that the value of the good (bitcoins or stock shares, or anything else) is reliable in proportion to the total trading volume, not in proportion to the amount one person typically buys in a single transaction, or even the amount that one eccentric rich guy bought that one time when he was drunk.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#226

Post by mikekchar »

vertex-four wrote: post #197
runeks wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed there are clearing protocols on top of Bitcoin, which can reduce fee-paying to only occur upon depositing and redemption. But the Bitcoin blockchain is still limited to ~20 million of such transactions per month[1]. Only if we remove the withdrawal transactions from the equation, and start trading unconfirmed transactions as regular bitcoins (confirmed transactions), can we get around this limitation (such tha…

A Lightning Network transaction results in one of two things - a proof that a certain amount of bitcoins can be withdrawn at any time (minus some delay), or a proof of cheating. Surely a proof that you can withdraw a certain amount of bitcoins is more-or-less equivalent to that many bitcoins, and therefore any rational actor - including your suppliers - should accept it as such? This isn't equivalent to unconfirmed t…

In Japan, because debit/credit cards have historically not been readily available, a payment system around transit cards has been built up. People put money on to their transit cards and then can use those cards to pay for a variety of things from items in vending machines to MacDonald's, etc. In usage it basically works pretty similar to how the Lightning network will work and it's relatively popular.

However, I think the OP is correct that if it becomes mainstream, 20M transactions a month will not be enough. Lightning requires 2 transactions -- one to reserve the funds and one to settle up at the end of the period. The transactions cancel if you do not settle up, so setting that period of time is vital. If you set it to a month (probably reasonable), then you are basically limiting the service to 10M users (assuming the OP's estimate of 20M transactions a month is correct -- I haven't checked).

So I think it's pretty obvious that you are going to have to do something else

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#227

Post by prawn »

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.

Now US$14k. ;)

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#228

Post by prawn »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #179
cgmg wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

If you buy a cent/penny, you don't own a dollar. You have a particular fraction of that dollar.

If you're speaking of stock dilution, there is a hard-cap on the number of BTC in the wild and a hard-coded granularity (as I understand it) where a satoshi is a hundred millionth of a Bitcoin.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#229

Post by wyager »

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.

People didn’t want to touch the ZWD because it was going down, not because it was changing.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#230

Post by cgmg »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #143
cgmg wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be a 'relief' if the price crashes back to $1K?

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.

> That world will be terrifying

Why?

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