Bitcoin Forum

When Steam announced that they are not accepting Bitcoin as a method of payment, they said that it is temporary untill Bitcoin gets stable. Bitcoins price has been pretty stable for a longer period, so why not start accepting again? Did they announce anything?

It's pretty stupid of them because now I am forced to buy from third party sited and Steam doesn't support that but they don't want to support Bitcoin either.

I haven't read any announcements personally but I don't think we need them anymore. If you want any game, you could get it at a cheaper price in G2A or Kinguin (both accept bitcoin) and If you want skins ofr any game, you could use BitSkins, once again, at a cheaper price and assuming that whatever you need is not found on these sites, you could try Bitrefill.com

But why had he stopped accepting bitcoins against his every interest? He should have continued to support it and not refuse it.

For businesses like Steam taking up a very volatile payment option like Bitcoin is a very risky move. Even though they have supported Bitcoin as a mode of payment in the past it doesn't mean they can't pull out from it, as the risk involves is really high and it is meant to potential losses on their part. Just think of it this way one of your customers bought the game with 59.99$ worth of BTC but once the payment has been processed BTC's value dropped big time and your customer's payment is in BTC is now worth 45$, will you be happy as a business owner?

I think we all know the price of bitcoin and its friends all follow the exchange market. And if for that reason, I don't think this is right. Because there is a good reason for them to get profit if prices change, Is not it ...? ...?

i think you are mistaken about this. first of all they never said "they will stop until ....", they just said they stopped "because...". at least that is how i remember it.
additionally the reason had nothing to do with bitcoin volatility. bitcoin has always been volatile and if anything its volatility has decreased, even in 2017 that looks so volatile it was actually less volatile compared to early years for instance.
the reason was high fees. in case you have forgotten during that time fees had gone up to $30-$50 and that is (in some cases) 10 times the value of a game on their platform! IIRC the most expensive game was about $50 without expansions,...

will they change? i don't think so. not anytime soon. fees have been low but the blocks have also been full and sometimes it goes up again. maybe with LN they do it in the future.

ps. steem was using BitPay for payments so they didn't care about volatility at all.

Oh so there was a time that Steam accepted bitcoin as payment before? That's new to me. I hope that they will bring it back as I am frequently using steam now :) love to play games!

But the most important question is will bitcoin remain stable like that all the time.Because bitcoin is very volatile when volume grows but now market volume is very low.It will be good if they accept bitcoin again but it is very unlikely.

If they decided to use BitPay again, I would rather continue paying with fiat on their platform. BitPay does not support the Lightning Network (since it's pro Bitcoin Cash) and has enormous "network" fee which is basically their markup. There wouldn't anything wrong in this if they called it something like service or conversion fee. BTCPayServer is a free and open-source alternative which supports both Lightning Network and on-chain transactions. However, I doubt that they are going to accept Bitcoin anytime soon again.

I think no, but idk about how about them in future. But, if you want to buy steam wallet, you can use steamgamesbtc.com for that. Their ANN thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=96426.0

That site looks real sketchy. If it wasn't for the ANN you linked, i would've definitely written it off as a scam.


I think it was a little bit of both, looking at their blogpost about it, they state the following:


And

Which definitely indicates that they thought volatility was a big issue. Not necessarily for them, but for their customers.. (Which seems a little bit odd if you think about it. I'm pretty sure most users understood what they we're dealing with..?) Seems a little over-protective of them if you'd ask me.

As per https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1464096684955433613

I used that site too many times bought games and steam wallets, though as you can see the site looks dull but I can really say that its a legit site and can be trusted unless the owner changed the way he managed the site.

That was my initial plan as well, but if you think logically, that's exactly what Roger Ver wants you to do. It provides him all the 'evidence' he needs to show that statistically Bitcoin isn't being used as cash, and I'm not going to let him do that. The best is to keep using BitPay and signal merchants that we are willing to spend our coins.

Regardless of the name or purpose of the fees payment gateways deal with, it's not the problem of the buyer and thus they shouldn't be the one that's paying the bill. Bitcoin's fees have been extremely low in the last couple of months and they still charge that extra fee, which is a clear sign that it's just a way to troll Bitcoin.

Seriously, centralized crypto payment gateways are just as bad as traditional banks, maybe even worse.

I know that I can buy from third party sited, I personaly use HRK game or instant gaming, they're pretty cheap and accept Bitcoin. But I like Steams Summer and Winter sales, they give games even cheaper than other sites.

Yes, they have accepted Bitcoin for quite a long time. But when Bitcoin started being unstable and very volatile with high fees and long confirmation times they stopped accepting it, that was around a year ago.

People generally use G2A if they want to buy games online using Bitcoins. It is speculated that steam will start accepting Bitcoins again when it is less volatile.

Steam had shown a good reason to stop accepting Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoin is very unstable. Though it is unlikely, but only time can tell if Steam will satrt accepting Bitcoin again or not.

Yes, though they stop accepting bitcoin payments directly there are 3rd party services that we can use but problems are occurring though deposits are confirmed. They are worried about the fees before but I hope they will notice this suggestion from the bitcoin community of gamers since the fees were down and stable again.

Yes, they did.

Possible if the bull run comes, when bitcoin will be echoing again and hope that the fees by that time won't hurt everyone including their business which can be a factor of their decision to get back with bitcoin again because they are worried with its volatility and fee.

I think they don't have a plan to continue accepting bitcoin again since there are many 3rd party website right now that you can use to buy credits.

Here, from my country, we have coins.ph where we can buy steam wallet code for bitcoin and 3 other supported coins. So, I think steam will never accept bitcoin again anymore except if the bitcoin become stable as USD.

I don't give a shit. It's better for users not to be buying frivolities with BTC anyway. If they really want to there are places like Bitrefill where you can buy vouchers.

Their volatility thing made no sense. They had zero exposure to it. The only thing I can think of is they had masses of customer complaints about Bitcoin fees which isn't their problem either, it was Bitpay and Bitcoin itself.

Bitcoin has been stable for some time but the market volume is low. It will be a great news for the gamers if Steam accepts bitcoin again. But we might not see it happen until the bitcoin value increases.

Steam would raise popularity of bitcoin if accepted it, but Valve doesn't see any benefit of it.

Well, they did start to accept Bitcoin right before those massive spam attacks on the network.
You really can't blame them for disabling Bitcoin at that time, since the amount of time and money they were spending on resolving support requests was far exceeding the additional revenue they were getting from accepting Bitcoin.

It just made a lot of sense to disable Bitcoin payments, if we're really being honest here.

I'd really like to see them accept Bitcoin again, but I also understand that they need to be 100% sure that something like that won't happen again.

Interesting to know! I wanted to buy some skins for LOL a year ago, but I didn`t bother to search can I do that with bitcoins. I bought few games with bitcoins on steam but since than nothing, maybe its time for me to try g2a they are here for a long time. Thanks for this, winter is coming, cold days, it will be nice to have some nice games to play.

I honestly don't think it makes sense to disable their Bitcoin payment option. Businesses are out for that extra customer exposure, and with how Bitcoin keeps gaining popularity, they are missing out big time.

What do you think people will do when the price starts to increase again? People not wanting to bother with KYC/AML exchanges will look for ways to spend their coins as alternative.

Don't forget that Bitcoiners love to pay with Bitcoin, regardless of how high the fees are. What happened last year isn't ideal, but it was a one time event if you take into consideration every single factor.

Everything that could go wrong last year went wrong.

I havent heard about such possible options to be back again since steam remove bitcoin.I miss those days where they do accept it to credit up your steam wallet. Bitcoin would never been stable and Steam is surely
looking into that one, when they do talk about stability then they would really mean about having similar features such as fiat thats why i dont really expect that it would be accepted sooner due to
their terms it would still took long time or wont really be possible again at all.

even then, valve isnt in the crypto business, and as far as they're concerned, bitcoin integration was a semi failed experiment. of course, the network congestion of last year was the primary factor affecting this, but taking that into account, it doesn't make sense for valve as a business to try it again knowing the risks of what could happen again. besides, they don't really need any 'extra exposure,' they're by far the biggest PC gaming platform, and i dont think they're missing out on too many sales to warrant risking what happened last year.

Remembered last year that they integrate bitcoin payments and we do remembered that the fees into those days are quite high plus the network congestion which do add up on their
pending issue for those users who do make use of BTC payments,i agree on what you have said that they dont need extra exposure yet that integration is just a testing phase to see
if it can contribute convenient top up but it does failed.

Being the biggest gaming platform doesn't mean you can just sit back and relax.

They could very easily partner with CoinGate, which allows its merchants to accept Lightning payments. It doesn't only combat the on-chain congestion and fees, but you are also doing something revolutionary others aren't doing yet. It's a pretty damn good way to get yourself in the spotlight as business, especially with how people here appreciate progress in terms of Lightning adoption.

It doesn't cost you a penny as merchant if no one uses the Lightning option. There is no confirmation bs, no fee bs, instant settling transactions, etc.

I completely forgot about Coingate's recent announcement that they enabled their merchants (over 4000) to accept payments over the lightning network, thanks for pointing out.

I don't know exactly how well distributed their banking side is to pay merchants in fiat (BitPay and Coinbase are market leaders), but it shouldn't be a problem at all for Steam to give Coingate a try in case it's all well set up.

Their main concerns were fees and volatility. Fees is understandable, but the volatility is straight nonsense. Bitcoin has never been really stable, and they didn't think it was a problem when they started accepting Bitcoin.

There's an interesting balance to be found. I'll assume no one buys BTC to buy something else. All BTC merchant business is from existing holders. Many will be sitting on huge gains so may well be up for a pile of discretionary purchases which games certainly are. It's no skin off their financial nose.

Since Valve can't be arsed to bring it back it's clearly more trouble than it's worth right now. I wonder if they monitor how many third party voucher sales are through crypto. Perhaps there'll be a certain level that'll trigger them thinking about bringing it back.

no of course not, but as a company as big as they are, bitcoin integration is a secondary concern, one that has failed then in the past previously. the way I see it, they have other concerns that come far before reconsidering bitcoin payments. not saying I wouldn't want it to happen, but just trying to see things from what I think to be valve's perspective.
as far as the lightning network and coingate goes, I've been away from the forum too long as I'm out of touch, I don't want to say something without knowing what I'm talking about.

Some people may have problems with G2A and how some the codes sold on the site are acquired fraudulently through many ways, and they can be possibly revoked at any time; in fact, some game devs absolutely detest G2A and actively deactivate any activation codes sold through the site. G2A also pushes their subscription-based Shield service whenever you visit your cart, and it's somewhat difficult to cancel once they manage to get you to start subscribing to it. I personally haven't had too many issues with the site besides shield in two years, but it's safest to use actual Steam Gift cards to purchase games, from sites like Bitrefill.