Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: As of today, Steam will no longer support Bitcoin as a payment method!
by
darkangel11
on 06/12/2017, 19:57:22 UTC
From the blog post:

Quote
Historically, the value of Bitcoin has been volatile, but the degree of volatility has become extreme in the last few months, losing as much as 25% in value over a period of days.

Bitcoin had a plenty of 20-30% drops and spikes this year and the year before, it's simply not true that volaility has increased, unless they measure volatility in flat amounts, which is dumb.

I've personally used Bitcoin 2 times with Steam, and to those who don't know how it works, they actually have Bitpay as intermediary, and Bitpay requires transactions to be sent and confirmed within 15 minutes - so the chances of BTC dropping 20% in 15 minutes are actually extremely small, and all the volatility is handled by Bitpay. The real problem here is that customers have to use high fees to get their tx included in the next block, otherwise Bitpay will have to send their transaction back.



Yeah, to realistically have a transaction confirm in a hour, I had to pay equivalent of $5 in fees. Who the hell going to pay that to buy a $60 game? They can just use their credit card for free and get 2% cashback.

Steam is greedy as fuck. The same games games that you can buy on other stores or online (on humblebundle or simply ebay/amazon) cost at least 30% more when bought directly through Steam. Their policy where you are forced to accept that none of these games are actually yours but you are only allowed to use them for a certain time makes it a ripoff IMO. They are probably afraid that people will buy games cheaper due to the booming market and the bubble will pop before their people can make it to an exchange and convert to fiat.