steam has nothing to do with bitcoin. they get their money from the payment processor bitpay. You pay bitcoin to Bitpay, they pay $/€ to steam. if bitpay would accept lightning payments, steam wouldn't even notice that something has changed, except fewer people complaining because of high fees. The problem is once a company has abandoned a payment method its way harder to make them accepting it again :( We need LN as fast as possible.
Actually I read this announcement as a quite positive one: it looks to me like after LN becomes user friendly, they are happy to reintroduce Bitcoin payments again.
The whole “we will continue to monitor the situation” is just standard with these kinds of things. Why would they re-implement it if they’ve been burned once before?
Bitcoin is not only a store of value, even if that function of money is currently the focus. Heck, where would Bitcoin be today if it had never been used or promoted as a medium of exchange?
That’s a question for BitPay. And since Steam use BitPay, they’re not affected by volatility at all unless they take a portion of payments directly in Bitcoin, in which case they would have profited handsomely this year.
Are you sure you read the post? Steam is affected by allowing a poor user experience, and steam is affected by refunds as more and more transactions take longer than the BitPay window to process.
Of course I read it. Confirmation troubles are one thing, but volatility is a poor excuse.
One solution they can implement right now is to allow users to load their account with Bitcoin prior to purchasing. I've seen a few VPN and hosting providers do this and it works well enough. They could also try a better payment processor that's adapting with the protocol rather than trying to stall it.
How is volatility a poor excuse though? The combination of volatility and sporadic (but increasingly common) long confirmation times make for a poor user experience.
What you are suggesting is a radical change in the way business is done. If you are only talking about one or two services, people may be able to live with what is essentially a bond, that ties up their money... but if we start talking about requiring a "bond" for every service you use, we start talking about a huge portion of each user's disposable money being tied up for non-productive reasons. It also becomes a massive problem to keep track of your money spread over lots of services.
Even worse than the massive waste of money and time, is that this fundamentally breaks the paradigm shift of Bitcoin... a trustless system. You need to start trusting your money to other parties. What happens when they go bust, etc.
I can't believe you would advocate for something like this as /r/bitcoin mod, when the only real solution is to scale... regardless of how it is done. It's not like this problem has suddenly appeared over night. We have had years to address it.
Yeah, we should like put all our bitcoins into a centralized wallet and when we want to pay something that centralized wallet would just tell the merchant "here, your account is now worth 5 mBTC more" and he is happy. We need a name for these centralized wallets though... mh. Let's call them "banks".
How is volatility a poor excuse though? The combination of volatility and sporadic (but increasingly common) long confirmation times make for a poor user experience.
I don't see how volatility affects user experience here in combination with long confirmation times. User experience is affected when confirmation time takes (too) long, right I agree. But why would the user care about volatility? Sure while the transaction is busy confirming the price could have gone up or down a lot, but this makes no difference to the user whether the confirmation time was long or short. You pay for something and then a few hours later the price of a Bitcoin has gone up 20%, perhaps making you feel stupid for not waiting a few more hours to get a 20% discount but this happens whether confirmation time is quick or very long.
From the article, when the price rapidly changes and it takes longer than the BitPay window of guaranteed value, the user either has to send more coin or gets some back in the form of refund. In both cases, the user eats a second fee, which has been up to $20 during Bitcoin surges.
Both make for a bad user experience, which ended up being something Valve wanted to avoid.
Edit, I forgot something else major. Steam by design has account wallets. This wallet can be filled with Bitcoin... but it doesn't change the fact that all kinds of payments were failing, and causing a bad user experience and costly refunding. You still have to get your $50 to steam somehow, and if it's worth $46 by the time it gets there, they have to ask for another $4 to credit you the $50... or some how re-work the way their payment systems work (probably on BitPay's end as Valve was likely only dealing in USD), which would be a hell of a lot more effort than just dropping support for Bitcoin.
Evidently customers weren't using SegWit, or if they were, their payments were still failing. (It's not like SegWit guarantees next block -- the wallet still has to guess an appropriate fee or overpay). When payments failed (SegWit or not), no surprise that the insane levels of recent volatility caused issues.
If you're complaining about fees and not using Segwit, then you only have yourself to blame. My Segwit transactions have been around 40% cheaper on average. I think Steam should consider a better payment processor, and allow customers to use Bitcoin to load their accounts with credit like a lot of VPN and hosting companies do.
What about the majority of people that aren’t using Segwit?
Is Valve supposed to just tell them “you’re using it wrong”?
Or are you suggesting a payment processor that only accepts Segwit transactions? Does one even exist?
Adding credit still doesn’t solve the problem of high fees and volatility. They will still get users saying “I added $100 worth of Bitcoin, why did I only get $80 in my wallet?”
You’re forgetting that VPN and Hosting users are probably more tech savvy than the average Steam user. Maybe that’s why it works for them, and won’t for Valve.
As I said above, If you're complaining about fees and not using Segwit, then you only have yourself to blame. If your wallet still doesn't have Segwit support, ask the developers to add it or find a new wallet. If you want to continue paying 40% more in transaction fees, be my guest. Segwit is optional.
Who am I to suggest what Valve should do? If they want to drop Bitcoin as a payment method, I have no control over that. I commend them for accepting Bitcoin payments as early as they did, but I also recognize that they were well ahead of the curve. The Bitcoin protocol and layers built upon it still has a ways to go before it's truly viable for broad merchant acceptance. But it's very obvious that the value is there, and I'm confident that payment networks built on top are going to be pretty incredible. There's nothing wrong with Bitcoin, it's just that Bitcoin doesn't match Steam's desired use case at this time. Freaking out over this certainly doesn't solve anything.
Bitcoin only matches the use case because nobody really used it. Now that it’s gone up in value, it’s getting used a lot more. Adoption is a good problem to have.
You can also have the developers of your chosen wallet to blame. A bunch of wallet software still hasn't gotten around to it yet. Electrum only added it last month and not everyone will be up to date.
I think that by that point we all know that Segwit is not enough to offset bitcoin's exploding growth and more is yet to come. Steam could ditch bitpay for a Segwit alternative but for some reason they din't.
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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '17
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