As of today, Steam will no longer support Bitcoin as a payment method!

[CryptosapienZA]

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.

[harrypotter1229]

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.

[icanscript]

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

[eternalgloom]

Should've posted the source: 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.

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:

At this point, it has become untenable to support Bitcoin as a payment option. We may re-evaluate whether Bitcoin makes sense for us and for the Steam community at a later date.

[Maxiim]

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

[hatshepsut93]

From the blog post:

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.

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

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:



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.

[RealJoshuar]

I added funds to my Steam wallet once and it wasn't that bad. Transaction confirmed quite fast and the fee wasn't too high. It's funny that they blame Bitcoin instead of BitPay and other big companies which still haven't introduced SegWit support. Fees are much lower and faster when you send transactions between SegWit addresses. I can't wait to see Bech32 addresses being actually used. Electrum has already introduced support for them instead of legacy compatible SegWit addresses (the ones that start with 3).

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

[kahc]

From the blog post:

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.

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

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:


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.

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.

[hndrk10]

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?

[AltcoinAuthority]

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.

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.

[bonesparka]

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.

[Queen12]

What will they accept instead? 

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

[Herbert2020]

What will they accept instead? 

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/

[Butmayselche]

What will they accept instead? 

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

[OptimusFries]

Hmmm are they going to use DGB instead?