$20 transaction fee. Bitcoin for small payments is dead.
Sounds like it. Shame, because micro-transactions was the only legal use case I could think of for it.
Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
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Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#32It'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.
The "$20 transaction fee" was an absolute top, and when that happened it was the single most congested the bitcoin network has ever been.
It's nowhere near that right now. The total cost for your "median" transaction right now (at 226 bytes) is about $4.30 USD (at 150 sat/byte). Even if you double that to 300 sat/byte you are still at ~$9.
Edit: I'm not saying even $4 fees are okay, just pointing out that it's not $20. I agree with steam's decision here, and it's something that Bitcoin needs to solve before it can really be useful as a payment system.
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#33$20 transaction fee. Bitcoin for small payments is dead.
but you could set transaction fee to 20 cents, it would just take much longer to get confirmed?
Kind of, if you set it too low it might never get confirmed at all, but for the most part you can set fees pretty damn low if you are willing to wait for confirmation.
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#34It'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.
BitPay handles the volatility for them by guaranteeing the conversion to dollars, so it's not an issue for Valve directly.
Volatility wouldn't be a big issue for payments if transactions were instant and free. The addition of slow transactions and high fees on top of volatility is what's causing problems for Valve's customers, which ultimately comes back to Valve as customer service issues. And there's nothing a retailer hates more than customer service issues.
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#35why are transaction costs so high? I thought one of the selling points was that the transaction cost is negligible because miners main incentive comes from mining new bitcoins?
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think most people are perfectly fine with the instability as long as the price doesn't go _down_.
Unless they're trading, in which case they're selling on perceived ups and downs, and in some cases making a killing - at least for now! The bullish trend with periodic pullbacks means profit for the bold / greedy.
Right, but the Bitcoin evangelists have changed their rhetoric in the last few months, claiming that the current price is justified because Bitcoin is a good store of value, since it's obvious to everyone that the transaction infrastructure is a total dumpster fire at the moment and it's difficult to argue that it's so useful as a currency that $12,000/BTC is reasonable.
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#37Earlier 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?
for arbitrage you want to move all currencies, not just one.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets
for example, bitcoin is now huge on bithumb, I'd buy it at bitstamp and sell it for 10% more, and repeat. given the slow transaction times, huge fees, large mempool, this is impossible to do.
exchanges also ban you for trying to do arbitrage too, so there's a risk of losing all the funds.
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#38Until segwit, lightning network etc. shape up and the wild bull/bear runs smooth out, BTC (and most other cryptos: see ETH and crypto kitties; or IOATA and their overrun nodes) don't really make sense for small transactions. I know LTC says they are the small transaction coin but I guess they'd hit scaling issues too if volume went up (and even if they didn't, speculators and crazy price swings would still make things tricky).
XRP seems less prone to wild speculation (much to the chagrin of some holders) but, afaik, Ripple are more focused on positioning XRP as a settlement layer for banks and big FX houses rather than as a day to day currency.
Personally, I think all of the above will eventually sort itself out. All the crypto currencies are still very young and the entire space is experiencing hyper growth. Teething issues, design flaws and bumps along the way are to be expected. One thing's for sure though, there's too much promise, money and interest in this space for everyone to give up and decide blockchain/tangle tech can't safely scale. It's just a matter of time before a winner emerges with the right formula.
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#39$20 transaction fee. Bitcoin for small payments is dead.
but you could set transaction fee to 20 cents, it would just take much longer to get confirmed?
No, because your fee is constantly competing to get into the block against future fees as miners sort the mempool by satoshi/byte to fill up the block.
Check out the asymptote: https://estimatefee.com/
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The "$20 transaction fee" was an absolute top, and when that happened it was the single most congested the bitcoin network has ever been. It's nowhere near that right now. The total cost for your "median" transaction right now (at 226 bytes) is about $4.30 USD (at 150 sat/byte). Even if you double that to 300 sat/byte you are still at ~$9. Edit: I'm not saying even $4 fees are okay, just pointing out that it's not $2…
When did $4.30 transaction fees become even close to acceptable. I thought high TX fees was one of the things Bitcoin was purported to solve.