Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

blog.bitpay.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 447 posts

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#311

Post by arnarbi »

xkarga00 wrote: post #293
vectorpush wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll offer a controversial explanation: bitcoin enthusiasts have exhausted most of the oxygen in the room with regard to rational bitcoin discussion. The never-ending adulation of bitcoin as the greatest invention since the internet, the hyperbolic claims that bitcoin will do things like revolutionize payments, end global war, eliminate the need for banks, liberate the people from bondage, the litany of bitcoin and b…

I never considered myself as a bitcoin enthusiast but I am enthusiastic about digital cryptocurrencies in general for most of the reasons you mentioned. Bitcoin (and all other cryptocurrencies) is not there yet but most of those are problems that cryptocurrencies target to solve. An example: you could never move money over the wire anonymously before crypto came in. Well, except if you had a fake identity, which is i…

> you could never move money over the wire anonymously before crypto came in. Well, except if you had a fake identity, which is illegal. Now you can.

As obvious as it may seem that is a positive thing, keep in mind that a lot of people will not think so. Even more people can just don't appreciate it and could be convinced either way. If everyone thought anonymity was so good, fake identities wouldn't be illegal.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#312

Post by VMG »

Forbo wrote: post #296
VMG wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the PoW serves any other purpose than mining bitcoin, it can't be used, since there won't be any opportunity cost in mining on the most recent chain.

I'm not sure I follow what you mean. I didn't mean that this be used for mining bitcoin, but rather that there are other cryptocurrencies that have useful by-products. Am I misunderstanding your comment?

These other cryptocurrencies are less secure than bitcoin.

For them, the cost of attacking the network by mining on an orphaned chain is lower, because by definition the PoW has a useful by-product.

The more useful the byproduct, the less secure the coin.

Edit: to illustrate, imagine a PoW that computes cures for cancer. Somebody can now mine on whichever block of the chain he wants forever, since he's producing a cancer cure anyway. The incentive of a block reward (within the currency) is not primary. Thus there is diminished incentive for the network to create a linear blockchain, where everybody mines on the most recent block. Without that, you cannot order transactions.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#313

Post by explorer666 »

digi_owl wrote: post #310
vectorpush wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll offer a controversial explanation: bitcoin enthusiasts have exhausted most of the oxygen in the room with regard to rational bitcoin discussion. The never-ending adulation of bitcoin as the greatest invention since the internet, the hyperbolic claims that bitcoin will do things like revolutionize payments, end global war, eliminate the need for banks, liberate the people from bondage, the litany of bitcoin and b…

You get this because the properties of bitcoin attracts two kinds of people. Goldbugs, because of how bitcoin is "mined" and is inherently deflationary. And gold is the one true currency, m'kay. Cypherpunks, because it is built around cryptographics. And cryptographics makes anything double plus good. Never mind that both kinds have a strong anti-establishment streak. That said, if they could get away form their anti…

> And that will drive an economy into the ground

A consumerism-based, Earth-killing economy. But it will give raise to more sustainable economies.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#314

Post by homero »

dragontamer wrote: post #247
gruez wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitpay (steam's payment processor) accepts 0-confirmation transactions

Doesn't that open Bitpay up to double-spending attacks?

They watch the network for red flags, good propagation fights new transactions

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#317

Post by cortesoft »

wyldfire wrote: post #152
stegosaurus wrote: post #141

I find the vitriol towards Bitcoin kind of odd. If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it was good'. What gives? Are there forums in which people have this sort of reaction to, I dunno, HTML5? From some of the posts here you would think that it's IED control software.

It's really polarizing because it forces us to question what we think of as currency. Is it sufficient for it to be scarce, durable, verifyable and fungible or should it have some independent utility or backing? Some of the vitriol is backlash against the zealots who feel that Bitcoin can/should enable elements of anarchy.

There is one important property of currency that you are missing in your list: accepted. Currency that is not accepted as payment for things has little use as currency. It is easy enough to create something that meets all of your requirements, but unless people are willing to accept the currency in exchange for goods and services, it is useless.

Of course, currency has a very strong network effect. Its value is tied very closely to the number of people who use it.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#318

Post by xkarga00 »

arnarbi wrote: post #311
xkarga00 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never considered myself as a bitcoin enthusiast but I am enthusiastic about digital cryptocurrencies in general for most of the reasons you mentioned. Bitcoin (and all other cryptocurrencies) is not there yet but most of those are problems that cryptocurrencies target to solve. An example: you could never move money over the wire anonymously before crypto came in. Well, except if you had a fake identity, which is i…

> you could never move money over the wire anonymously before crypto came in. Well, except if you had a fake identity, which is illegal. Now you can. As obvious as it may seem that is a positive thing, keep in mind that a lot of people will not think so. Even more people can just don't appreciate it and could be convinced either way. If everyone thought anonymity was so good, fake identities wouldn't be illegal.

Anonymity is good not per se but because it implies privacy. Let's not argue if privacy is a good thing or not. Anonymity also supersedes fake identities.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#319

Post by easuter »

statoshi wrote: post #280
easuter wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, I have "bitcoin fatigue" regarding all the usual topics pro-bitcoin evangelist start spewing whenever the topic comes up. The usual "bitcoin is the second-coming of christ" crap. There is a complete lack of acknowledgement of bitcoin's ineptitude as a replacement for current payment methods, what with its 2TX/s limit (on a good day) and the ridiculous size of the block-chain which effectively negates all the…

I find it less and less likely that Bitcoin will be replaced given the amount of investment (both time and money) put into the system. If Bitcoin was remaining stagnant, I'd be pessimistic as well, but there are a multitude of improvements that will be deployed over the course of the next year.

I'll take all these improvements with a pinch of salt until they are actually in the wild.

Take the lighting network for example. The idea has been floating around for quite some time but in practice its still vaporware.

Yet, ask any bitcoin enthusiast what's being done to solve the scalability problem and the LN is trotted out as if it were already widely adopted. It's ridiculous.

Re: Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases

#320

Post by AgentME »

Forbo wrote: post #238
clarkmoody wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anti-environmentalist ... vast amounts of wasted electricity Ironically uses politically-charged language when discussing how bitcoin gets political. How about: "I'm concerned with the amount of electricity devoted to mining." Some of the bitcoin-is-going-to-take-over advocates could counter with, "That electricity cost is a lot better for the environment than the standing armies required to secure fiat money."

> "That electricity cost is a lot better for the environment than the standing armies required to secure fiat money." There are better alternatives to brute-forcing hashes and generating nothing but waste heat in order to mine cryptocurrency. At least those cycles could be put toward something useful, like the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). Gridcoin uses proof-of-research in BOINC as the…

Who would decide which BOINC projects work with Bitcoin? What if I made a BOINC project for calculating the number 4 and did it before anyone else noticed it was available? How much bitcoin should that be worth? There have to be ongoing decisions about what BOINC projects are accepted and how much they're worth. Who makes those decisions?

More realistically, what if I privately know a fast algorithm for an obscure type of protein folding, and then I push for a new BOINC project to be accepted that focuses on the specific type of problem? I'll be the only one that can mine it efficiently for a long time. If I calculated my expected profits, I would probably see that it's worth it for me to pay a lot of money to lobby the people in charge of the BOINC-coin decision process to get my project accepted. Unless BOINC-coin only uses a fixed set of projects over all time, or is only worth negligible amounts, then lobbying like this is going to influence what projects it accepts.

Even if BOINC-coin uses a fixed set of projects, then there's a problem of what work units are given out. I imagine many projects work like SETI@Home where some data is given out to users to process. If processing the data is worth money, then it might make sense financially for me to artificially construct datasets that I've already solved, and bribe the SETI@Home administrators to insert my dataset into the worker queue, which I will then quickly "mine" for BOINC-coin.

A BOINC-coin isn't fully decentralized. It requires trusted people to be in control choosing which projects are worth it and to secure the authenticity of the data sets. Bitcoin is about minimizing the need for trust in administrative systems like this.

Even if you solve the above problems, the proof-of-work system needs to be hard to compute but cheap to verify. Many BOINC projects' work units aren't cheap to verify. They just have several users redundantly recalculate the same work units to check that they get the same answers.

Post reply on HN