Steam To Stop Supporting Bitcoin Transactions

[schmidtbag]

I'm glad I never bothered getting into Bitcoin, specifically because of moments like this.

[newwen]

Right-o! At the moment we're close to $10 for a transaction. That's just ridiculous for a currency which was meant to be a replacement for money.

In spite of the fact that blockchain is a good idea, bitcoin as a replacement for money is actually a bad idea, expensive and an energy hog. Absolutely unsustainable. Compare it to the cost of each electronic transaction with a credit card.

[sarmad]

Wise decision. Bitcoin will eventually collapse. The only way for anything to rise 10x in value in less than a year is by becoming a giant bubble.

[squash]

Were they handling BTC themselves? If so, that was dumb and that's why they're stopping. If you're not a "bitcoin company", you would use a payment processor just like you do for credit cards. Bitpay, for example. You set your prices in fiat (USD), and your bitcoin payments are immediately converted. There's no risk, no effort, no reason to have dumbass announcements like this.

[planetguy]

Were they handling BTC themselves?

Bitpay's website has a little Steam logo at the bottom, so I'd guess they were handling that for Steam, rather than them doing it themselves.

[reavertm]

This is worrying for me since it was the only anonymous/pseudonymous way to pay for games... (until they decide to support a different coin, which would be great)

Anonymous money transactions are good for criminals and scammers. Everyone else should prefer transparent, traceable transactions.

[jKicker]

reavertm: can we add cameras to your house and get your phone/PC messages and history since you don't have anything to hide?

[marek]

Care to explain?

From article:

By whom? By how much?

All bitcoin transactions have a fee, which is given to miners for processing the transactions. The transaction fee is part of the revenue from mining. All bitcoin transactions must specify the fee, then the transaction request goes to a mempool. Miners read the mempool and process transactions with the highest fee first.

[Helios747]

Were they handling BTC themselves? If so, that was dumb and that's why they're stopping. If you're not a "bitcoin company", you would use a payment processor just like you do for credit cards. Bitpay, for example. You set your prices in fiat (USD), and your bitcoin payments are immediately converted. There's no risk, no effort, no reason to have dumbass announcements like this.

They used a third party.

[mmstick]

In spite of the fact that blockchain is a good idea, bitcoin as a replacement for money is actually a bad idea, expensive and an energy hog. Absolutely unsustainable. Compare it to the cost of each electronic transaction with a credit card.

Ethereum's blockchain, on the other hand, does not require much energy, nor is it expensive, because it's not based on mining hardware anymore. Rather than Proof-of-Work, it is using Proof-of-Stake.