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Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

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Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#391

Post by dclowd9901 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #225
Balero wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 amoun…

Thank you; you explained this much much better than I did.

But your answer, I don't think is sufficient. Just because total trading volume supports the figure doesn't mean that it's valid. If I've invested a small amount of money into the currency (as I suspect most of its buyers have), I've essentially bought into an insane price for little or no "skin". In other words, the price could be high simply because there's no risk to it being that high for most of its investors.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#392

Post by tbabb »

JBSay wrote: post #368
tbabb wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is not set up to ever be "stable" by any definition. Real currency has a federal reserve to balance supply against demand and keep the value steady. BTC has entirely demand-driven value-- which is precisely as steady and predictable as the human mind.

I wonder how real currencies existed before central banks...

They weren't stable.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#393

Post by patrickk »

emj wrote: post #381
patrickk wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, at least in the SEPA area (EU, plus countries in the EU orbit): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area#Cove... As a means of payment in the SEPA region, Bitcoin is far worse on cost (free vs $5-10 in my experience), and sometimes worse on speed (1 - 1.5 business days for SEPA to clear). So in this geographic area, Bitcoin is literally losing to a combination of the legacy banking system, and a h…

That is still an EU payment system, which has improved a lot since the start of Bitcoin. I just need to transfer money to strange places and banks are pretty often crappy at that stuff, best solution I have is to send my credit card around the world.

> That is still an EU payment system, which has improved a lot since the start of Bitcoin.

Which shows how pathetic the main development team behind Bitcoin is (the core team). The fact that they haven't managed to fix problems that are years old and steadily getting worse is inexcusable. It should be a walk in the park for them to out compete a massive, political entity like the EU and the traditional banking sector.

I hear you on the "strange places", that was where BTC was supposed to shine. It hasn't made any inroads into underserved markets that I'm aware of, e.g. less well-off countries and unbanked people. That is a pipe dream as long as the fees are so high to move funds around.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#394

Post by sliverstorm »

cgmg wrote: post #254
sliverstorm wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's what it is today. But if BTC has no fundamental value, you might argue the price fluctuations are the price-discovery function of markets screaming "there is no correct price because there is no actual value", or something like that. All other fiat currencies have some fundamental value. In the past they were backed by gold. Most common today, you have to pay your taxes using them, which means for exampl…

> You might argue the price fluctuations are the price-discovery function of markets screaming "there is no correct price because there is no actual value" That makes no sense. If the market were really 'screaming there is no actual value', the price would be around $0, not $14K.

It makes sense to me in a divide-by-zero sort of way. I'm not saying the market confidently believes bitcoin has no value. But such wild fluctuations might suggest that even after five years, the price discovery function still has no idea what bitcoin is worth. Now what does that mean? We can only speculate, of course. But to me I wonder if 1) there is no identified fundamental value today and 2) no one knows what the fundamental value will turn out to be

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#395

Post by tlrobinson »

zodiac wrote: post #326
tlrobinson wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if they don't do so they cannot use the "money" the received from you to pay someone else (eg their lawyer). They certainly can if their lawyer is also on the Lightning Network. Eventually all Bitcoin wallets should support on-chain and Lightning Network transactions, and seamlessly pick one or the other depending on the transaction amount.

No, they really can't. They have to open a payment channel with their lawyer (or open it with someone who has a path of channels to their lawyer), and that requires them to own cryptocurrency on-chain to use as stake (what LN calls the funding transaction)

Hence “if their lawyer is also on the Lightning Network“

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#396

Post by zodiac »

tlrobinson wrote: post #395
zodiac wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they really can't. They have to open a payment channel with their lawyer (or open it with someone who has a path of channels to their lawyer), and that requires them to own cryptocurrency on-chain to use as stake (what LN calls the funding transaction)

Hence “if their lawyer is also on the Lightning Network“

No, even if their lawyer is on the LN, Steam cannot pay their lawyer via payment channel, unless Steam owns some cryptocurrency on-chain to use as deposit

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#397

Post by Havoc »

nickonline wrote: post #310
Havoc wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of which is speculative & counting on a future where BTC usage will be more prevalent. And how exactly will it become more prevalent when it can't be used for transactions.

> All of which is speculative Just like Gold, coloured beads, or stocks > can't be used for transactions. Gold is a pain to use for transactions, and so are shares, but they still store value and people continue to speculate on their future worth?

Gold is tangible and definitely has real world applications. Shares are backed a legal system tying them back to the real world corporation and it's assets.

BTC in the absence of transactions has not tie-back to anything.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#398

Post by Havoc »

Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote: post #218
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?

You exchange it for whatever currency you desire to make smaller transactions with. Even with slow scaling, it should remain suitable for large transactions. As a store of value, it has many desirable properties. There is a fixed supply, it can be used anywhere with internet access, it is secure, and it is very inexpensive to hold. Gold, for instance, has a large potential supply, is very difficult to move and secure…

>You exchange it for whatever currency you desire

Exchange how? Your entire argument assumes a functional BTC eco-system (and exchanges with willing counter-parties).

Without usefulness in transactions BTC's only value is whatever is agreed on. And in the absence of a use that is worse than fiat currency - at least that has legal backing rather than just agreeing that BTC has value as a value store.

It's the essence of circular logic: BTC has value since it is a store of value and since it's a store of value it has value...

>If you accept that there is a demand for such a store of value, then you must recognize the value of cryptocurrencies.

I do - just not BTC. Anyone sane will store their value in something that has an actual shot of being grounded in real world transactions. So ETH or whatever is a far better bet.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#399

Post by colordrops »

MarkMc wrote: post #384
colordrops wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly have they meddled with it?

By threatening to send people who trade Bitcoin to jail: https://www.coindesk.com/bangladesh-outlaw-bitcoin-jail/

That's meddling with the person, not the transaction. The protocol is unassailable. Anyway, if you really want there are mechanisms for anonymous transactions over BTC.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#400

Post by runeks »

phaser wrote: post #192
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…

I agree that Payment Channels is a good step forward but there's the hard limit on how many channels can be open. I'm confident that there will be proposals similar to Poon et al. [1] to create a third layer for networks of payment channels where a Blockchain tx can be used only in case of uncooperative channel counterparties. [1] https://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/a20a865ce40d40c8f942cf206a7c...

I’ve read that paper, and I don’t quite understand how it would work when you need multiple clients to cooperate for a single client to make a payment. I.e. if the funds of 100 clients is at some multi-sig address, you’d save blockchain space, but payment from any of these 100 clients would require simultaneous cooperation from the remaining 99 clients. I have a hard time seeing how this would work in practice.
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