
Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases - StavrosK
https://blog.bitpay.com/load-your-steam-wallet-using-bitcoin/
======
stegosaurus
I find the vitriol towards Bitcoin kind of odd.

If I posted an article about Linux 4.1 or something, I wouldn't expect to see
comments saying 'meanwhile, I used Windows yesterday, and played GTA5, and it
was good'.

What gives? Are there forums in which people have this sort of reaction to, I
dunno, HTML5?

From some of the posts here you would think that it's IED control software.

~~~
vectorpush
I'll offer a controversial explanation: bitcoin enthusiasts have exhausted
most of the oxygen in the room with regard to rational bitcoin discussion.

The never-ending adulation of bitcoin as the greatest invention since the
internet, the hyperbolic claims that bitcoin will do things like revolutionize
payments, end global war, eliminate the need for banks, liberate the people
from bondage, the litany of bitcoin and blockchain companies making
extraordinary claims while consistently under-delivering or outright scamming
customers, the warped world-view where communities of impoverished people who
can barely meet their daily needs and have markedly poor computer literacy and
limited access to computers and internet will be lifted out of poverty by
banking with bitcoin, the constant dismissal of bitcoin skeptics as "not
understanding" bitcoin, the self-aggrandizing elevation of satoshi and bitcoin
programmers as programming prodigies, the condescendingly absurd notion that
detractors, the banks and the governments are _afraid_ of bitcoin or afraid of
the bitcoin money revolution, the tone-deaf advocacy of bitcoin as a safer
method of payment than credit cards, the general refusal to acknowledge
bitcoin's practical challenges as real problems (non-technical people being
scammed or permanently losing their money due to data-loss, theft,
misconfiguration of software, sending bitcoin to the wrong address,
downloading a scam wallet), the oversaturation of the underwhelming "x but
with bitcoin" formula that pops up every couple weeks... and much more.

As heated, vitriolic and personal as linux discussions can get, its taken for
granted that everyone is at least operating in the same objective reality
(systemd vs upstart, gnome vs unity, mir vs wayland, even windows vs linux),
but a large swath of bitcoin enthusiasts look at bitcoin as something that
eclipses every other technical topic in importance to the point where it comes
off as quasi-religious.

~~~
digi_owl
You get this because the properties of bitcoin attracts two kinds of people.

Goldbugs, because of how bitcoin is "mined" and is inherently deflationary.
And gold is the one true currency, m'kay.

Cypherpunks, because it is built around cryptographics. And cryptographics
makes anything double plus good.

Never mind that both kinds have a strong anti-establishment streak.

That said, if they could get away form their anti-inflation fanaticism, and
find some way to speed up the ledger processing, then the distributed ledger
part of bitcoin may have a future.

This because while inflation can be bad when it runs riot (though money
printing in itself is rarely if ever the cause) it is better in the long run
than deflation, as that allows some entity or other to corner the market.

And in the end, all currencies are tokens of account. Meaning that they exist
in the end to make sure nobody double spends. But to be effective in doing so,
the token material must the worth less then the face value. If not, people
will have an incentive to hoard. And that will drive an economy into the
ground.

~~~
oppositelock
The incentive to hoard, also often called the "deflationary spiral", is a
theory proposed by neo-Keynesian economists, which doesn't appear to be as bad
as they say.

People have finite lifespan, and so, they want to use their hoards to better
these finite lives, which leads them to spend. This preference, known as the
"time preference", strikes a balance with the tendency to hoard. It is
impossible to predict where this balance is, though, because it's subjective
to each participant.

Why do you buy cell phones or laptops today, knowing that future ones will be
better or cheaper? Why buy some food today, when you know your purchasing
power will be greater next month? Why pay for housing when prices are falling,
knowing your contract will be cheaper in five years?

~~~
digi_owl
> Why do you buy cell phones or laptops today, knowing that future ones will
> be better or cheaper?

Direct practical utility.

> Why buy some food today, when you know your purchasing power will be greater
> next month?

I don't eat, i starve, i die.

> Why pay for housing when prices are falling, knowing your contract will be
> cheaper in five years?

Now there you get into something interesting. Though the five years view is
comically long.

~~~
oppositelock
You just demonstrated the concept to which I'm alluding. There is a balance of
time preference versus saving preference for absolutely everything in an
economy based on the subjective desires of all participants. For some people,
this will be cell phones, or cars, or fancy shoes, or little purse dogs. They
won't save forever, living just to get by, for some uncertain future when they
can have more stuff. There is no deflationary spiral, there's a balance point
where it stops.

This dangerous idea has been used to justify all forms of crazy economic
intervention since Keynes formalized it. The notion of a currency having to
depreciate is a direct consequence of these policies, all based on a fallacy.
No matter how counterproductive these policies are, they're still applied.
Look to Japan and Switzerland as recent examples. Japan has massive stimulus,
the Yen is dropping, are people spending more, no, they're saving for the
future, knowing that their savings will be worth less, so they need more of
them to get by - no spending on unnecessary items. Switzerland is paying
negative interest rates on savings accounts, so people have to save more to
offset that.

There are lots of things to dislike about Bitcoin, but its value increasing
over time isn't one.

~~~
digi_owl
What you are doing is conflating a commodity with a currency.

Anyways, why the Japanese is saving is that even 2 decades later they have a
private debt overhang from the 80s boom.

Expect Europe and North America to follow much the same pattern (already a
decade in shortly).

------
StavrosK
I was really surprised that the announcement that Steam _may_ support Bitcoin
made waves a while ago, yet the announcement that it actually does did not.

I used it to buy a (horrible) game last night, and it worked beautifully.
Contrast with PayPal, with which Steam is always confused about where I am and
whether it should charge me in GBP or EUR. I'm never not using Bitcoin again.

~~~
Grue3
What about refunds? With Paypal you know you're getting the same amount back,
in the same currency, as if you haven't bought anything at all. Given the
fluctuating nature of Bitcoin, surely that's not possible?

~~~
krisdol
Can you ever take money out of steam?

~~~
Ntrails
Buy hats with steam credit, sell on a third party marketplace. Lose n% in fees
and price differentials.

It is done completely legitimately - you're just not getting money _from_
steam

------
ChemicalWarfare
Cool. This type of market is perfect for Bitcoin:

1\. worldwide - which gives them large customer base without access to other
methods of payments (unlike US where it's really hard to convince customers to
use BTC instead of Credit Cards);

2\. Digital goods with licenses that can be revoked - so the merchant doesn't
have to worry (too much) about confirmations/double spends and is able to
"ship the goods" instantly. They obv have to factor the potential case of tx
not going through into their flow to catch these but it can be done without
impacting their users whose txs do get confirmed.

~~~
seanalltogether
Does steam have to worry about transaction confirmation? I would've assumed
that bitpay guarantees the funds to their partners regardless of any potential
bitcoin shenanigans.

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
Looking at bitpay's docs (this is a pretty typical setup), merchant is getting
IPNs (aka Webhooks) with invoice statuses based on what is happening with that
payment on the Bitcoin network - [https://bitpay.com/docs/invoice-
states](https://bitpay.com/docs/invoice-states).

So yes, as a merchant it's up to you if you want to wait until the funds are
there (invoice status == 'Complete') or ship as soon as the payment is
detected ('Paid' status).

Bitpay will obv guarantee for the funds to be there when status moves to
'Complete' otherwise they are risking to get hit with a double spend.

~~~
the_rosentotter
A transaction would have to be worth thousands of dollars to be worth the
effort of setting up a successful double spend attack. For the vast majority
of use cases this concern doesn't enter into the picture at all, and an
immediate 0-conf transaction is fine.

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
Double spends are actually not that difficult, much easier to implement than a
fraudulent Credit Card transaction for example.

In addition to double spends there are also things like volatile mainnet
confirmation times etc.

Which is why bitpay won't fund the merchant until 6 confs on the bitcon
network.

------
mbmott
I could see this as Steam testing the Bitcoin waters. Steam games created an
entirely new market of digital items changing hands for real world money, and
this is done globally across all currencies--bitcoin would be an ideal fit. I
could also see value in using bitcoin to reward content creators (modders).
Obviously this is crazy speculation, but seem to be solid use cases.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I don't think this was done for any political or idealistic reason. I imagine
bitcoin makes it a lot easier for purchases in countries with unreliable
banking, high levels of fraud, etc. Try transfering a non-trivial amount of
money to Eastern Europe, Africa, Russia, Brazil, etc. Steam deals with this
millions of times a day with fraud credit attempts, legitimate credit cards
being turned down, etc. Legitimate buyers can just use bitcoin and not worry
about credit card shenanigans.

The "omg futurist" brownie points are just a side-effect. Steam/Valve isn't
terribly progressive. Heck, its only recently that they put in a refund policy
and started putting in common sense limitations on trading to stop fraud.
Someone did a cost/benefit analysis here and it simply worked out. I guessing
this is part of a larger anti-fraud initiative at Valve.

~~~
mbmott
That was pretty much my point. Bitcoin has a solid use case (being a global
currency) and Steam is exploiting it.

~~~
MichaelGG
It's not that it's a global currency. It's that there's zero buyer protection.
Or phrased positively, zero risk fit the merchant. Anyone offering that in any
currency would be useful.

------
hypron
So many bitcoin haters in these comments... we'll see who's wrong in a decade
or so.

~~~
clemensley
I've always wondered why hackernews hates bitcoin so much. Can someone
explain?

~~~
coldtea
It's because it's not just comprised of tech people, who are excited about its
theoretical underpinnings, but also by business savvy people, who know that it
will hardly fly for numerous reasons (and if a similar technology ever catches
up, it will have so many government imposed regulations as to be totally
different), plus old jaded tech persons who know a marginal at best tech
and/or snake oil when they see it.

Aside for people excited by the tech (and its potential applications to other
fields), the core of bitcoin believes are either get-rich-quick types who buy
into the pyramid scheme, tin-foil crackpots (similar to gold hoarders), and
stick-it-to-the-man true believers (with a freeman-of-the-land [1] mentality)
naive enough to believe it can trump regulation and disrupt "the system".

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemen_on_the_land](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemen_on_the_land)

~~~
Cyph0n
I'm sorry, but you're looking at Bitcoin from a narrow viewpoint. There are in
fact people who actually need Bitcoin in their day-to-day.

My home country Tunisia for example has very strict currency controls in
place, which means that it is _impossible_ to purchase any goods from outside
the country or even transfer money overseas.

The government now provides rechargeable card with a 1000 TND (~500 USD) limit
that can be used for online purchases. However, these are only issued to
software developers and entrepreneurs to allow them to subscribe to online
services, such as hosting, domain names, etc.

Bitcoin provides a quick and easy way to circumvent that: convert your TND to
BTC, and use that to purchase online goods or to transfer money outside the
country.

I'm actually thinking of setting up a MVP to test out this idea, but I'm
struggling to come up with a solution that is completely transparent for the
end-user. In other words, I don't want the user to have to _understand_
Bitcoin or buy/sell it manually. I'd prefer instead for the system to use BTC
under the hood.

Another example I read about recently is Argentina. People are using Bitcoin
there for daily transactions and for their savings due to high fluctuations in
the local currency.

~~~
coldtea
> _I 'm sorry, but you're looking at Bitcoin from a narrow viewpoint. There
> are in fact people who actually need Bitcoin in their day-to-day._

Well, perhaps, but

(a) these people are a very small amount compared to "first world" bitcoin
champions

(b) they would be better off pushing for actual policy change regarding their
problems, instead of using a technological workaround who (depending on the
whims of those in power) can land them in jail/money loss at any time...

~~~
Cyph0n
Actually, I'd argue that the potential for Bitcoin lies more in third world
countries than economically developed ones. First world countries usually
don't suffer from unstable currencies or financial controls, which is what
makes the utility of Bitcoin seem quite limited.

Yes, your second point is true, but sometimes the country itself is struggling
to stabilize its currency. Thankfully, that's not (yet) the case in Tunisia.

------
cwyers
Oh wonderful, now the world's two most popular all-digital currencies can be
used in the same place -- Bitcoin and TF2 hats. Russian criminals and Chinese
investors looking to get money out of the country can work together in a new
age of unity and togetherness.

------
johndevor
In other news:
[https://i.imgur.com/3ncet7I.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/3ncet7I.jpg)

~~~
StavrosK
What does "pocket medic" mean in the TF2 context?

~~~
ijks
It means a player playing the medic class will prefer healing you to other
players, and will stick around your position, i.e. stay in your pocket, hence
'pocketing.'

------
transfire
I thought Bitcoin had run into a fundamental problem that transactions were
now taking hours co complete. And that an internal battle among developers on
the fix remained unresolved. Did I miss something?

~~~
mbmott
The Bitcoin network works perfectly fine and always has. The issue you are
referring to was during a DOS attack on the network, which still wasn't an
issue if you paid slightly higher fees to prioritize your transaction. The
developer split on the blocksize increase was pretty heated for a while, but
has largely blown over due to Bitcoin still working and the sky refusing to
fall as some predicted. However, scaling is still a major issue that some very
smart people are working on.

~~~
sievebrain
If Bitcoin users were naturally making more and more payments or there were
more and more users, and then it ran up against the block size limit, how
would you know whether there was a DOS attack or not? Wouldn't it look like a
permanent DOS attack?

Did it blow over because the block size limit was increased?

~~~
mbmott
I call it a DOS attack because blocks aren't regularly full anymore and the
transaction data showed that the flood of transactions were "peeling chains",
meaning they mostly had the same source. There is blockchain data to back this
up.

The blocksize hasn't been increased yet. It blew over due to wallets improving
their fee support. If you are in a hurry and need quick confirmations you
increase your fee by 10 cents, but if the transaction doesn't need priority
you may wait for quite a while.

~~~
solotronics
Currently the calculations show that for your transaction to be processed
first it should have a $.06 fee. Transactions with fees down to about $.01 are
basically guaranteed to be processed but may take longer. Many 0 fee
transactions are processed but they have no guarantee.

The modern wallet softwares all calculate and offer different fees based on
the expediency of the transaction.

"The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 60 satoshis/byte, shown
in green at the top. For the median transaction size of 226 bytes, this
results in a fee of 13,560 satoshis (0.06$)."

------
aliakhtar
In other news, I live in Pakistan, and I used a debit card to buy a steam game
3 days ago and it worked instantly + frictionlessly, without having to worry
about confirmation times + exchange rates + getting scammed + getting on a
government list.

~~~
exo762
Steam/bitpay don't wait for transaction for put money into your steam wallet.
Also, no exchange rates are involved in any meaningful way. This offer is for
people who can handle few percent exposure on their 100USD "investment" into
BTC.

A lot of people don't have debit cards. A lot of kids can't own debit cards
legally. For them Bitcoin might be the only option.

~~~
aliakhtar
> Steam/bitpay don't wait for transaction for put money into your steam wallet

The guy who made the reddit announcement had to wait 1day+ because his txn
didn't get the 6 confirmations. Compared to that, my visa txn took
approximately.. 10 seconds? While I was in Lahore, Pakistan.

> No exchange rates are involved in any meaningful way.

That's a dishonest statement to make.

> A lot of people don't have debit cards.

That's what you think. Its trivial for anyone who wants to get one (and
doesn't have a criminal background) to get one.

If you mean people who don't know how to open a bank account, they're even
less likely to know how private / public key encryption works and use bitcoin.

> A lot of kids

Gift cards.

------
joosters
So you buy bitcoins with dollars, Bitpay exchanges the bitcoins back into
dollars, and then they hand the dollars over to Steam.

And this is meant to be a good thing?

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "So you buy bitcoins with dollars, Bitpay exchanges the bitcoins back into
> dollars, and then they hand the dollars over to Steam."

You don't have to buy bitcoins directly, you can mine them.

~~~
joosters
Then I'm converting dollars to bitcoin via my electricity bill, with even more
inefficiency.

~~~
apozem
> While ASICs represent the fixed cost of Bitcoin mining, the expense of
> electricity is the marginal cost; indeed, Bitcoin is, for all intents and
> purposes, the digital representation of electricity.

[https://stratechery.com/2015/21-inc-and-the-future-of-
bitcoi...](https://stratechery.com/2015/21-inc-and-the-future-of-bitcoin/)

~~~
stale2002
21 inc's ideas are a horrible scam. Why would you pay hundreds of dollars, to
buy an inefficient miner that is 10% as efficient, when you could just buy
hundreds of dollars of bitcoin.

------
taesu
Oh man, this is really good. Have about 4 btc just sitting there. Won't have
to spend money for games now.

------
coldtea
> _Steam now accepts Bitcoin for purchases_

Translation: cheap publicity in tech media and goodwill from some geek sites
with no impact whatsoever on its actual revenues and 99.999% of payments.

~~~
mbrock
Plus, uh, actual value for people who want to pay with Bitcoin.

> Valve reached out to us because they were looking for a fast, international
> payment method for Steam users in emerging gaming markets in countries like
> India, China, and Brazil. While more users are coming online in in these
> countries, traditional payment options like credit cards often aren't
> available.

~~~
coldtea
> _Plus, uh, actual value for people who want to pay with Bitcoin._

Yeah, there's always that, too.

------
justaman
Finally something to buy other than drugs.

~~~
timlyo
I've also bought some TF2 hats with bitcoin. Now we just need some things that
are less addictive :/

------
KON_Air
Do i get to sell my digital junk in community market for Bitcoins?

~~~
bdz
Nope. Legally you can't take money out from your Steam Wallet.

But there are 3rd party sites where you can sell your items for real money.

Tho you should only bother if you have valuable items.

------
magicfractal
How would the DRM zone controls Steam currently have work with this? Before,
you needed to have a credit card of the country you're buying the game from.

~~~
j_s
Sorry I don't have time to dig into their choice of implementation but one way
would be for Bitcoin to be a secondary payment option for those who have
already registered a credit card.

------
imrehg
Splendid! Been doing game purchases for Bitcoin through Humble Bundle, and
Kindle Books through Gyft, I hope more providers of electronic resources will
get onboard. It even works out better financially, as credit cards charge such
a high "foreign currency conversion fee" here in Taiwan.

------
shmerl
Humble Bundle did in the past, but stopped for some reason. GOG never did so
far.

~~~
iso-8859-1
The Hacking books Humble Bundle includes a Bitcoin book, and bitcoin is
available for payment also.

[https://www.humblebundle.com/books/no-starch-hacking-
books](https://www.humblebundle.com/books/no-starch-hacking-books)

~~~
shmerl
Interesting, but I don't see that option in the Humble Store.

------
sergiotapia
Does Valve cash out the bitcoins immediately because of it's volatile nature,
or is Valve large enough (or bitcoin purchases small enough) that they can
safely bear the changes?

~~~
verbify
Apparently they're using BitPay, so presumably they don't get any actual
bitcoins.

------
hannes2000
Does that mean Germans can buy uncensored games now?

~~~
Shorel
No, the actual price and restrictions are still local.

------
homero
Closed loop coming to fruition

------
j-pb
Seems like bitcoin won't die after all, which is a pitty. It's become a
centralised mess controlled by a few ASIC producers.

Worst part is that it continues eating it's own children, as long as bitcoin
is there, no other crypto currency will gain widespread adoption.

~~~
VMG
It's doing pretty well actually. It's still less centralized as all viable
alternatives.

~~~
bhaak
Some examples for viable alternatives?

~~~
richardwhiuk
Normal currency which is both less centralized and easier to use.

~~~
deepnet
'Normal' currency has severe problems which are important current issues for
many and Bitcoin solves:

[1], Prevention of access - e.g. Nationwide Bank unserved queues & capped
withdrawl in the UK on the days sub-prime hit is often the case in recession
or bank runs.

[2], Censorship of payee - e.g. the inability to donate to Wikileaks by any
means except Bitcoin when 'collatoral damage' incited US Senators to
successfully pressure payment processors worldwide.

[3], Censorship of product: cash allows monetary civil disobedience like
purchasing medical cannabis under prohibition.

The idea that you can be prevented spending your money makes money fallible (&
as [1] just when you need it most).

If money has more power than ones vote this is wholly undemocratic.

Under Capitalism markets are unfree without freedom to spend one's wealth.

~~~
richardwhiuk
These are all also problems with bitcoin.

[1] Bitcoin is very difficult to keep safe, so most people will store it on
sites like Coinbase / MtGox. These sites will inevitably lend other people
money, which will lead to the same issues, in exchange for interest.

[2/3] Censorship of payee / Censorship of product. The perceived anonymity in
bitcoin is largely fictional - you can extract the details of who paid who for
what, and you can prevent someone exchanging bitcoin for fiat currency /
goods. At the moment authorities simply don't care because the value of the
transactions is insignificant in relation to hard currency.

None of these 'problems' (and society in general doesn't care about these
issues) are to do with the currency. The first one is endemic to the concept
of a bank which can lend more money than it has, no matter what currency it
deals in. The second two are social / regulatory problems which won't be fixed
by some new crypto-anarchist dream.

~~~
deepnet
Thought provoking, I mostly agree with the following caveats:

I see the complete transparency of Bitcoin as a strength, it is certainly an
antidote to the opacity of offshore / shell companies & tax dodging.

[2] & [3] they can't prevent payment using Bitcoins but one could be arrested
after the fact and detained without computer access.

[3] This is why I said civil disobedience for [3]. Bitcoins are a public act.

National Currencies like sterling are not implicity bad and actual cash notes
can be used for [2] but electronically Sterling et al. lack a lot of freedom.

[4] could be fees which currently dissallow national currency micro
transactions, which have great utility for instance in a post advertising
models & the micro-services revolution to come.

Snarky to say 'crypto-anarchist dream', crypto means something other than an
abbreviation for cryptography in that context e.g. crypto-fascism - which many
fear democracies are secretly becoming.

Bitcoin is not a dream it is a working implementation, usefully used daily.

With Open Bazaar now running, a free global market is enabled - without
freedom markets are unfair and not proper capitalism. Adam Smith best points
out the issues with crony capitalism & regulatory monopolies.

Bitcoin seems like healthy competition to me, national money is overly
regulated in some ways and under regulated in others. Arguably to the benefit
of the rich and powerful as most governments seem weak in the face of
corruption by lobbying these days. Electronic (national currency) transactions
are innefficient & overly costly, Bitcoin profoundly highlights this.

[1] Bitcoin is provably safe, the safety of ones possessions and computer is
the current issue of the day. The UK & US government are promoting breaking
encryption and making everyone unsafe.

It is good to have alternatives to help ensure regulatory over-reach can't
happen as easily as it recently has.

~~~
richardwhiuk
No, crypto is crypto-anarchy does mean cryptography:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-
anarchism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-anarchism)

'The "crypto" in crypto-anarchism should not be confused with the use of the
prefix "crypto-" to indicate an ideology or system with an intentionally
concealed or obfuscated "true nature". For example, some would use the term
"crypto-fascist" to describe an individual or organization that holds fascist
views and subscribes to fascist doctrine but conceals their agenda so long as
these doctrines remain socially unacceptable.'

The crypto in crypto-anarchism _is_ intended to signal a link with
cryptography.

~~~
deepnet
Yes you are correct, I was wrong, I had confused the term with Anarcho-
syndicalism, thanks for putting me on the right track.

