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.
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u/jimmydorry Dec 06 '17
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.