Maybe they should have just switched to dogecoin instead of turning off crypto payments.
Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
71–80 of 412 posts
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
The volatility alone wouldn't be a huge problem if the transactions were quick, apart from having to constantly re-price the goods (not a big deal with an automated system selling digital downloads, even though it is a real PITA for the accounting afterwards!). 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 trans…
Serious question: even if a currency is only good for exchanging for other currencies, doesn't that still make it a currency? In other words, even if you can't go buy clothing or games or hosting with BTC, doesn't the fact that you can exchange it for $LOCAL_CURRENCY (which can be used to buy those things) give it value? Basically, a meta-currency or currency of currencies, if you will. Edit: I realize we are saying…
That makes it a security. By definition, currency is something you can exchange for goods or services, while securities are financial instruments that hold value (i.e. can be exchanged for currency).
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The volatility alone wouldn't be a huge problem if the transactions were quick, apart from having to constantly re-price the goods (not a big deal with an automated system selling digital downloads, even though it is a real PITA for the accounting afterwards!). 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 trans…
Serious question: even if a currency is only good for exchanging for other currencies, doesn't that still make it a currency? In other words, even if you can't go buy clothing or games or hosting with BTC, doesn't the fact that you can exchange it for $LOCAL_CURRENCY (which can be used to buy those things) give it value? Basically, a meta-currency or currency of currencies, if you will. Edit: I realize we are saying…
Stocks are a thing because no one thinks of them as liquid assets. Steam is making the same argument about bitcoin essentially.
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#74Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#75It'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.
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meanwhile, Visa is about 1.5-2% plus $0.10 flat interchange. To break even with BTC against Visa, we're talking an average transaction of over $200. That's not feasible for the vast majority of merchants. Not to mention that the currency's extreme volatility means that when you sell it to convert it to greenbacks (the currency your investors actually care about) it probably won't be the same amount you were paid for.
Yes, but at the same time Visa requires you to hand over your payment information to each and every merchant you transact with, and they are able to pull as much money from your card as they want, and they are able to charge you multiple times at any point in the future. But there are some really cool solutions being worked on right now for this problem in bitcoin that can make it scale to a similar way to Visa. But…
cardholders are not liable for unauthorised transactions by merchants
any merchant that commits that sort of fraud repeatedly will have their account terminated
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#77why 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?
Because there is not enough of space for transactions in mined blocks, you can't fit all which means people that pay more will have higher chance to get their transaction into the block.
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Exchanges don't ban users for exploiting arbitrage, every trade is money to the exchange and it benefits them to enable arbitrage to take place. No idea where you pulled that claim from.
It's also not impossible to trade via bitstamp and bitthumb, sure it may take an hour or so to get your btc from bitstamp to bitthumb but that's not the bottleneck. Once you sell on bitthumb for USD you need to get that USD back to bitstamp. So you have to get it from a Korean Bank to your own account and then to bitstamps European bank account. Best case scenario that route takes 5-10 working days so the BTC network taking an hour or so to confirm is the least if your problems.
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How are these transaction fee amounts even determined? With something like credit cards, PayPal, or EFT the fees are deterministic. With Bitcoin it seems fees are both ridiculously high, plus I can't even tell what I am going to be charged?
The fee is chosen by the person making by the transaction.
Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin
#80So 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
How about 0 fees?
Try Steem (almost Steam lol), it's meant to do that https://steemit.com their site is a social network where people get pay on Steem that isn't trying to phish for your personal data.