Bitcoin Forum

What will they accept instead?  ???

This is really a sad news. Steam had done a great job by accepting Bitcoin as a payment. But times have changed now. Bitcoin hasn't been a reliable payment option lately. Longer confirmations timings, Higher transaction fee isn't what Bitcoin was actually meant to be.

Last year everyone wanted to buy things with Bitcoin as it was almost free to send it and magical. But now its a store of value used to make you rich instantly:(

Totally understandable, given how volatile BTC is and has been the past weeks.

Steam was one of the very few major merchants left still accepting BTC.

BTC's usage among merchants seems to have been going gradually backwards since the start of the year, with Fiverr dropping it in February and some of the groups that people claim accept Bitcoin not actually doing so or doing so indirectly.

Just goes to show that speculators and an increasing price don't make BTC better. 

It is so sad to hear of this news. The transaction fee is really too high to make sense to pay in BTC for smaller transactions.

Well understood of steam intention.

Just checked, It is true.. I could not believe it, I hope the price stops moving so much so Steam could accept it again.. There are still third party sites that accept Bitcoin and I hope they stay with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is my only way to buy games, I hope I can continue buying them..

Should've posted the source: http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1464096684955433613 (http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1464096684955433613)

From the business point of view of Steam, it's understable how Bitcoin isn't viable to be accepted as payment method yet, there's too much room for complaints from customers, though I think they are exaggerating with the 20$ transaction fee.
I'm ok with them putting on hold the use of cryptocurrency (BTC in this case) for the time being. Hopefully the Lightning Network is going to sort this out and Steam will accept btc again.

Well if you look at it from a positive point of view its not such a bad news :)

The fact that steam decided to call off payment through bitcoins means that people are now into holding bitcoins! Yes they have been through a lots of ups and downs through the time but now they are exceptionally shining being in a phase where there are 6 hard forks ahead of ypu and big whales and CME investing there is nothing that cqn go wrong now thus steam is accepting that people are treating it as an investment also bitcoins were never meant to be used as a fiat or to replace it, I think its perfect as an investment strategy..its a little risky but yes you can expect huge returns.

Thus lets accept this news and hold onto our bitcoins :)

Read the title of the whitepaper:  "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

One of satoshi's primary aims for Bitcoin was to prevent the high fees caused by trusted third parties, and the fraud that ensues.  With high transaction times and/or high fees, it no longer serves this purpose.  To claim that it was "never" intended for this purpose, though, is ridiculous.
I imagine that they'll just continue to accept fiat and give up on crypto altogether for now.

Gaming communities have always had a huge following and with this news its a blow to bitcoin and other digital currencies and if am not mistaken steam was also one of the first and few gaming places you could pay with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, and if they pull out now when cryptos are going mainstream it does not send a good message.

It is fine, people were usually paying more than five or six bucks just for transaction fees, and that was not fair.. If you wanted to buy something worth $6 in steam, you must pay the fees.

I have a friend who bought a game that was at a discount, and he paid $2 for the game + $6 for the fees, and that is INSANE.

I dont know what is happening with the fees, i sent out 0.25 out of my hardware wallet a few hours ago, and i had to pay $18 worth of fees for that transaction.. It is pretty high, i hope that it will be fixed soon.

I'm not really surprised. As it is now, Bitcoin is not a good option for payment services.. the tx fees are ridiculous and confirmations take too long. Even banks do "instant" transactions nowadays, so a solution needs to be found for this.

They are starting to compare Bitcoin to gold, which at the moment is a more accurate analogy investment-wise, if you ask me.

The game has changed and bitcoin can no longer be used for everyday transactions ones even totally $50 because of the high fees. I won't move mine around anymore unless I have to or the fee is justified by the amount I am moving around. It does suck that this has happened maybe it can be used as a wake up call to the devs to get the fees lower. I know that may not be number one priority but it should be up high on the list if you ask me.

From the blog post:


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.

I call bullshit. Banks do it only between accounts within the same bank. You can't have an instant transaction between different banks and you can't have money sent during weekends and at nights. I have been doing it for many years and my last transaction sent on Monday needed over 24h to appear on the account of my friend in a different bank within the same country. My another transaction that was sent on Saturday arrived on Tuesday (!) because they don't work in the evenings, nights, on Sundays, and it takes up to 48 hours anyway.

Understandable really. They should accept Litecoin instead. Much more suited to the smaller transactions.

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. 

Really? They will remove bitcoin as a payment method on steam? That is very sad though i am the one who pays/purchases that item in steam using bitcoin. I think the reason why steam remove this is the price is rising rrally fast right now and it will be risky for losing money them if they continue this. Why did they do this  now how can i purchase an item/ a new costume if bitcoin payment is stopped

I think we'll be seeing new options for crypto and games very soon...  ;)

The game we are making is integrating a wallet, tokens and purchasing into the game.  https://youtu.be/GhLwvuBieOI

Not the same as being able to use it on Steam, but, my point is I think we'll be seeing some major changes in the near future.

It doesnt mean that bitcoin is not volatile.

Maybe they are frustrated because all the bitcoins that they received are instantly converted to fiat amount (bitpay works by that way, they convert everything to fiat and then they send it to their wire account)


And yes, it is a shit, i dont know why a lot of services are using bitpay as intermediary, it is always converting btc to fiat and that is the only way that they could lose.


Probably if they kept those bitcoins, they could have much more money. But the fees are ridiculous high for the customers.

that's a sad story heard this , but it will not problem for bitcoin , because there are still a lot of

serves accepet bitcoin payment so dont worry about this

Will bitcoin cash replace it?

You can't compare the volatility now with the previous years, because of the huge price gap!
Major currencies average between 0.5% and 1.0%.

And this is the volatility of BTC in US dollars per 30 days in 2017. You see the "problem"?
https://i.imgur.com/LdAZLRY.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/LdAZLRY.jpg

A few months ago Bitcoin was not just a store of value but also a means to transfer fund but nowadays the price is just too volatile and the bulls are just running the prices up like crazy thus making Bitcoin an asset to hold and make people rich in a week or so. The transaction cost has gone just way up making it unsuitable for small transactions like buying a game.

Is it good news I think, because they accept major cards and there are plenity that can be loadad with btc instead.

So true man, I just wrote something similar in another thread. You speak out of my heart. People need to remember what Bitcoin was born for. It should be used as a digital currency and not be looked at like a commodity that grows in value. Unfortunately many people forget this nowadays.

Good thing you don't have to use your checking account to buy games from Steam, you can just use a debit card.

Bitcoin can not be gold if it loses its utility. Gold/Silver became store of wealth because they have huge amount of utility in jewelry and industrial.

This is a really bad news.
Regarding volatility, I suppose bitpay integration would solve it, fees would not be a problem as they are paid by the customers.

Evidently, they were not making huge profits with all this btc hardcore holders...

bitcoin this days is more like the mother asset in the crypto domain. People buy it to convert to fia, trade for other tokens, or stay in a safe value like the digital gold because it will eventually be more expensive than the current price.
sendings payments is not the use we do this days for butcoin... any altcoin will do that much better.

this is bad news to crypto community whom expecting a widespread payment options with bitcoin or else crpyto currency.
I'll definitely choose another platform which prefers BTC or other cryptocurrency accepting in payment..

I have never purchased anything on Steam paying with Bitcoin. I considered is a waste of my bitcoins, I don't use Steam much anyway. However, I don't understand this decision. They should have left Bitcoin as a optional method of payment for people who don't want to exchange their bitcoins to fiat. That's quite surprising because Bitcoin value is very likely to increase in the next years. Is there anything we don't know?

I'm pretty sure it is due to fees and not volatility. Bitcoin isn't really a viable method of payment for small transactions as most game purchases on steam are. Bitcoin is a great asset but it won't be feasible for smaller transactions until real scaling solutions come online.

Well btc has changed its structure and aims to be the new gold of a new era. The transaction fees are risen and transfer time has been longer recently. It s a normal thing to not accept.

I read announcement and like I suspect its all about fees. High fees are killing us, 20$ fee for a game that cost 10$? I bought counter strike on steem long ago, sending bitcoins was OK, we could even claim faucets and make few dollars here and there now due fees that is not waste of time its totally useless. We can just hope that fees will be lower in the future, much lower and stable. Many people wait that.

I hope this reality check will help to bring back the community to planet Earth...

The major currencies tend to fluctuate within a certain range (which quite gradually decreases over time).  Bitcoin, on the other hand, doesn't have any range - it could be $500-1000 one year and over $10,000 the next. 

To Steam, they look at this and even if they receive fiat money for a flat fee from BitPay (I doubt that they hold much or any of the BTC that they receive), they wonder what will happen to their customers if the range moves downwards rather than upwards.  Would they be afraid?  Would they blame Steam or complain to them?

You can imagine that it's a lot of uncertainty to them, especially when only a fairly small amount of their payments would be in BTC anyway.

That is why Bitcoin is extremely volatile, there exist non other major currencies that have a standard deviation of monthly returns of over 3%. So it is indeed wise of Steam to remove Bitcoin until it has stabilized a bit.
The worst part is if the buyers request refunds after the BTC price rise 20% or decrease 20%, either way Steam have to cover the differences.

It must have taken them a while to arrive at this decision but with immediate effect is the concern here that they didn't even give their users the right amount of notification in other to prepare themselves another alternative to use or made available. Its really an unfortunate thing at this time though.

The bold part is not really that part but because the value of bitcoin has greatly increased, that is why I would shout if .0008btc to pay as transaction fee today is close to 10$ compared to a little above $2 that it was not less than 6 months ago but we are all happy with the price of bitcoin not the fees that comes with it. Confirmation time is slow but its better compared to some time in the past.

You both have some valid points.

@darkangel11 I put "instant" in quotations, because I know they're not there completely yet. Banks in general don't work in the weekends and nights, but in my country if I send money from my bank to a different bank and it's made before 12 in the afternoon, the amount will show up in the other account the same day! I think it's a small step to achieving this all day and then weekends. Especially if they want to combat Bitcoin on that front.

@kokojie I do believe Bitcoin has some similarities to gold. I've seen it happen; when the stock markets dip, people move to gold and increasingly more to Bitcoin as well. In the crypto space, Bitcoin has a similar role of stability. People go back to Bitcoin to store profits or dampen losses. But you are right; if Bitcoin loses its utility, it will no longer be used as a store of value/wealth. It actually can never BE gold because BTC is what it is and gold can be refined as you said :)

I have a feeling they will pick other coins that are cheaper to transact with like bch,dash or litecoin.  Bitcoin is no longer a payment method.

I think the game website made the decision because the transaction costs caused, as we all know, now the bitcoin transaction cost is too high, if the game player on the site to buy props to pay high fees, usually this game will be inhibited, the need for a large number of members of the game is bad the.

Yes, bitcoin is increasingly becoming a means of accumulation. The high cost of payments throws it back from this market. I think the Lightning Network technology will solve this problem. Unfortunately, the developers do not report the specific timing of launching payments using the Lightning Network

After reading the announcement, I feel it is justified for them to disable Bitcoin payments due to high fees and volatility.
I'm guessing the volatility by itself wouldn't be such a big problem, but combined with the high fees it's probably going to cause many users complaining to Valve.

I am hopeful though that once lightning network is ready, they will enable Bitcoin payments again.

Quote from the announcement:

Now you have to pay Stim by credit card, for me it's less convenient.

There's no huge price gap, volatility is measured in percentages (just like on your chart) and not some flat differences in price.
And why did you choose such a small time frame, completely ignoring all historical data?
Here's how it actually looks like:

https://i.imgur.com/S1pYHhq.png

So, while volatility in this year increased in frequency compared to 2015 and 2016, it's amplitude is way lower than it was in 2010-2014, and it seems like the general trend is that volatility will be decreasing in upcoming years. And again, this is not a problem of Steam, because it's all handled by Bitpay, Steam was never receiving any BTC directly. And by the way, it means that not much has changed actually - people can deposit BTC to BitPay or Xapo accounts and spend those funds on Steam or any other place that accepts credit cards.

No average person knows what SegWit is. Get realistic, sending bitcoin was thought provoking enough, now segwit? I can see why Steam dropped it

Volatility is usually measured daily, monthly, annually and throughout the lifetime.
Is not as simple as looking at the % value and say it is more/less volatile.
You can't take the standard deviation of a fresh currency like Bitcoin and measure it yearly against a fiat(USD) , and say look btc was more volatile before because the amplitudes were higher.
As shown in your chart.

The higher the value of BTC/USD the more each % deviation count towards the weighted average . When BTC was 10$, a standard deviation of 10% monthly wouldn't have yield much to the weighted average.
However at 15000$, 3% volatility is way off the chart compared to when it was 10% at 10$.
Thats probably how Steam financial team based their decision on, and why BTC is extremely volatile now.

Actually I don't understand the decision that much. People pay with Bitcoin and they give the devs the amount of Bitcoin that was paid (minus the fees). What's wrong in that? They don't like profits?

Nobody really needs steam in order to get games with Bitcoins. There's a lot of retailers wanting to exchange their gift codes for BTC.

We can't blame the Steam community since Bitcoin is a bit slower nowadays. There are other payment methods you can use like Online Banking or Paypal, if ever you have one.

STEEM does not support bitcoin as a normal move, who would accept a currency that fluctuates so dramatically? :-[

first of all STEEM is an altcoin and a platform which as nothing to do with Steam which is a gaming platform owned by the company Valve.
and it has been accepting bitcoin for over a year and a huge number of people were using it during that time no matter what the fluctuations were. the only reason they stopped was the high fees which are a lot bigger than most of the games they are selling/

this is normally news bitcoin bitcoin is so unstable last days price moving fast and fee rising a lot.
some of exchange sites and others also apply more fee. people can’t just pay more and more fee with small gaining.
hope goode news happen fast

Hmmm are they going to use DGB instead?