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Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

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Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#91

Post by sillysaurus3 »

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 exponentially increase was wrong

Greed is a powerful motivator.

It's easy to smile at this[1] but it will only take a couple more 10x increases before people stop laughing.

What happens when governments start putting money into Bitcoin because they don't want their economy to be left out? It'll only make the price go up even further.

It might be a good idea to take a step back for a moment and stop thinking "Can I get rich?" and start thinking "Before this reaches a point where we should worry, what should we do?"

I'm aware that this has roughly a 0.1% chance of happening. But if you'll suspend your disbelief for a few minutes and accept "What if it might be true?" then you'll find it's an interesting question worth thinking about.

It's starting to feel like no one really has a plan for this contingency. It will be a relief if the price crashes back to $1k, but Bitcoin defies belief. How many of you have parents that are seriously talking about getting in? Everyone wants to become rich. And if that infectious mindset spreads to the whole population, we might get an uncontrolled upward spiral.

Is there a way to prevent that?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1lfobc/i_am_a_time...

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#92

Post by celticninja »

nvusuvu wrote: post #66
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

Bitcoin cash, a hard fork from the original Bitcoin. Super low fees, and the community that supports Bitcoin cash considers themselves the Bitcoin for the people. There are apps/wallets to use them. Coinbase will support Bitcoin cash by Jan 2018.

Litecoin

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#94

Post by Klathmon »

blibble wrote: post #76
Klathmon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>cardholders are not liable for unauthorised transactions by merchants

Assuming they are really fraud and aren't just a "free trial" expiring, aren't a contractually-agreed upon price increase hidden in fine print, or that the cardholder saw the fraud and reported it within 60 days.

Not to mention now the cardholder is now unable to use the card if fraud is found, and needs to wait for a new one to be sent via mail. It would suck if the credit card thought getting gas out of state was fraud, and they canceled your credit card on the first day of a week long trip (happened to me, I had to borrow thousands from a friend for the length of the trip...).

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#95

Post by nicky0 »

Domenic_S wrote: post #47
Klathmon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Possibly much, much longer, but it could be returned in 14 days if it's too low and never makes it out of the mempool. That's where traditional electronic payments have a huge edge -- instant, incredibly cheap guaranteed verification.

Bitcoin transaction are never "returned" - they are simply either confirmed or not yet confirmed.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#96

Post by eterm »

dmm wrote: post #27
Animats wrote: post #10

$20 transaction fee. Bitcoin for small payments is dead.

Here's a recent transaction with a $2 fee: https://blockchain.info/tx/704b0c6c19c8cfe1d16093552d5196a8f... For that $2 a transaction is forever recorded on thousands of nodes in a worldwide consensus network, secured by a huge number of miners. Blockchains are not going to scale to visa level numbers of transactions without huge blocks and de facto centralization. The reasonable alternative is a second transaction la…

Or a second transaction layer, like a bank or VISA?

At which point, why not use those same layers over USD instead of over bitcoin?

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#97

Post by Klathmon »

prepend wrote: post #89
Klathmon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s possible that merchants could charge you whatever they like for however much they want. But it’s unlikely. And if they did, you would get all your money back and the merchant would pay a fine. The privacy info is valid, but BTC isn’t private either and people are connecting identities to purchases all the time. Not to mention 99% of the time I must give my info to the merchant so they can mail me whatever I purc…

It's not the privacy info that's the problem, it's that credit card are "pull" by nature. You give your information to a merchant, and they decide how much and when to charge you.

Vs with bitcoin it's push. You decide how much you are sending to the merchant, and if it's not enough, they don't deliver the goods/services.

But this has completely gotten away from the issue I was talking about (i'm in a shitty mood today and let myself get sucked into internet arguments).

Bitcoin has problems, and those problems aren't going to be easy to solve, but it's ability to change over time means they can be solved, and I really believe that it's a better way of sending money online.

The "pull" method that banks have used for years is a mess, and I truly believe that the core of bitcoin is valuable and useful over the traditional system.

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#98

Post by [deleted] »

m3kw9 wrote: post #90
janoc wrote: post #30

Earlier 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…

If you treat it like gold(store of value) then having a service that makes it liquid is just a bonus. Is like expecting to be able to purchase something using stock.

[deleted]

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#99

Post by simpsond »

Klathmon wrote: post #53
bigtunacan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

When you make a bitcoin transaction, it gets put into a "mempool". Basically you send your TX to a node, that shares it with other nodes on the network, and they all hold it in memory. Once a block is found, the miner that found the block will pull as many transactions as possible from the mempool and put them into that block and sign it on the blockchain forever. Since TX fees go to miners, they are incentivized to…

I don’t understand why miners wouldn’t include all pending transactions in their block. Seeing as how pow is a guessing game, there are plenty of permutations of the Merkle tree to generate plenty of roots. I guess to dissencentivize free loaders so miners can continue to make money once Coinbase txns are no longer a thing? It’s certainly not free to mine!

Re: Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

#100

Post by always_good »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #42
always_good wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

right, so to get confirmed within 10 hours, I can set the fee to $0.19, according to this website.

May be, it's not just a matter of waiting long enough which seemed to be the question.
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