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Steam Ends Support For Bitcoin (polygon.com)
Valve is ending support for Steam purchases made with bitcoin, the company said today, citing "high fees and volatility" in the value of the cryptocurrency. In a statement, it said: "In the past few months we've seen an increase in the volatility in the value of Bitcoin and a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the Bitcoin network," Valve said in a post on Steam. "For example, transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week (compared to roughly $0.20 when we initially enabled Bitcoin). Unfortunately, Valve has no control over the amount of the fee. These fees result in unreasonably high costs for purchasing games when paying with Bitcoin. The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically."
Only complete morons would have ever thought this would replace money.
They're no longer accepting BTC so that they're not stuck holding the bag after the bubble pops-- which will be any day now it looks like.
Why does a transaction take so long and why does it cost $20? If someone is only transferring $5 American dollars worth of bitcoin would it still cost $20 in transaction fees?
Is the real value in Bitcoin the easy use of it in everyday transactions?
Or is it that an intrinsic value for whatever reason has been imputed in it,
it is now very (comparatively) expensive to make and may be regulated because of energy consumption,
it looks like it may go up or stay the same over a long period,
and it can be transacted but the # of transactions will be low but the value in each transaction will be high?
I.e. is it virtual Gold instead of currency?
Currency should have a stable value compared to the rest of the goods in the marketplace. We typically see currencies fail due to rapid inflation. Where the currency loses value rapidly compared to the rest of the goods in the marketplace. This may be the first time we see a currency fail due to rapid deflation.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Then use Dogecoin! It's been nearly worthless for most of its existence and paying a fee of one coin per transaction is more than fast enough.
#DeleteFacebook
stock market with no government regs and insider trading is ok if you can get to over 51% cpu power.
Now how am I going to afford to play Battlefront now...?
Is there actual commerce happening with Bitcoin? That is, the exchange of goods and services for Bitcoin? Or is it all about mining a speculation? As in, it's valuable because people want it and people want it because it's valuable?
Cryptocurencies may be the futute, but bitcoin is not.
At worst, bitcoin is a pyramid scheme that consumes vast ammounts of energy, at best, it may take a role similar to the gold igntos in the vaults of the central banks of the world.
Currently, (anonymity and "decentralized control not withstanding") bitcoin is useful for the narrow use case of a bank wire transfer. Around $20 per transaction, and a response time of 12 days (but wasting lost of energy per transaction). To pay for a Latte, or an amazon or steam purchase, as you can see, not.
As I said, maybe another cryptocurency will solve the issues (Volatility, Transaction fees, Transaction time, Energy consumption and decentralization), but bitcoin, not much.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Litecoin is a drop in replacement for Bitcoin and has super fast confirmations.
Maybe the riches of Bitcoin can be used to fund Universal Basic Income
The entire premise of Bitcoin is that it doesn't rely on a central authority/government to operate. But the price of that ability is incurred daily with high transaction costs, long transaction times, deflationary economics, and the resulting value volatility and susceptibility to speculation. I can't see why the general public in stable countries would accept those daily downsides to guard against a Black Swan of extreme government malfeasance.
Bitcoin is essentially solving the problem of government/bank malfeasance that occurs extremely rarely (for someone living in a stable country), using methods that requires negatives that occur very, very frequently. Stable countries have made the government/bank malfeasance problem rare via other means: voting/elections, some amount of government oversight, some amount of regulation, peaceful transfer of power, etc. I'm not saying that these things are perfect, but I don't think we need to suffer the daily consequences.
The bitcoin market will drop, and like the Great Depression, many will jump from windows. Most of those will find it difficult to jump from the windows in their mother's basement.
In the early days of bitcoin, blocks were cheap and easy to mine, and they saw that someone could cause problems for the network by mining huge blocks of junk transactions, just to cause problems. So they put a limit on the size that a block could be. Once mining became too expensive and hard for it to be done just to cause problems, this limit would be increased or just removed.
The problem is, they didn't write the increasing of this limit into the code when they created it. Later on, some people, for reasons that are intensely debated and possibly malicious, decided that this block limit should not be increased, and fees should be allowed to skyrocket. These people also gained control of the main bitcoin client software, bitcoin core, and most of the communities communication forums, like the bitcoin subreddit and several major forums. Then, with various tactics, they have prevented the increase of the blocksize.
So everyone who wants to send a transaction has to compete for space in the 1MB blocks, which are created approximately every 10 minutes. And the only way they can compete is to put a higher fee on their transaction than the next guy.
There is a dead simple answer to this problem - just allow bigger blocks. The network can take it. Their continued refusal to even consider this lead to the creation of 'Bitcoin Cash', which firstly bumped the blocksize to 8MB, and then resumed the development of the protocol to better support arbitrarily large blocks, as them become necessary.
If Steam wants to allow people to purchase things using cryptocurrency, the Bitcoin Cash fork is ready and able to support them.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
posting to fix accidental mod.
Switch to Bitcoin Cash, the true vision of Bitcoin. Almost no fee and instant transactions
The Bitcoin economy, to the extent that it exists, might be mirroring gold-standard economies of the past. During the Depression, the incentive to hoard hard currency in the form of gold was regarded as a major dynamic of the economic contraction. Why invest or spend when the value of currency rises, and the corresponding prices of goods in that currency decline?
Economic managers during the Depression went off the gold standard, but WW2 intervened before we could really see if that would stimulate the global economy effectively.
Unlike the Central bankers, BTC has no option to "print", so we get to see an interesting experiment in economics here. It's exciting, and I'm on the record as being an observer with no regrets as opposed to a participant.
If BTC is truly resistant to any kind of "printing", we'll get to see what happens to an economy and a currency when the money supply is fixed. The decline in trade due to a preference for hoarding seems to have precedence. The total inability to increase money supply doesn't seem to have any precedent, or maybe I'm missing something.
I have no idea how to rationally value a fixed money supply, other than by the market which is currently telling us "it goes up now". It's the *demand* side of the supply and demand that's the wildcard, IMHO. What happens to demand when people say, "you know what? $1000/day isn't going to keep happening". Nobody knows. I'm not buying BTC. I'm buying popcorn. It's the only sane move, IMHO.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
FZ (almost) said it best:
I might be movin' t' Mongolia soon
Just to mine me up a crop of
Crypto Coins
Minin' it up
Cashin' it down
In a little white box
That I can sell uptown
By myself I wouldn't
Have no boss,
But I'd be minin' my lonely
Crypto Coin
Minin' my lonely
Crypto Coin
Well I just might grow me some bees
But I'd leave the sweet stuff
For somebody else...but then, on the other hand I would
Keep the cash
N' melt it down
Mine some coin
N' hash it aroun'
I'd have me a crop
An' it'd be on top (that's why I'M movin' to Mongolia)
Movin' to Mongolia soon
Gonna be a crypto coin tycoon (yes I am)
Movin' to Mongolia soon
Gonna be a mental toss flycoon
I'm minin' the ol'
crypto coin
That's hashin' on the pc
Minin' the coin!
I mined all day an' all nite an' all
Afternoon...
I'm ridin' a small tiny hoss
(His name is MIGHTY LITTLE)
He's a good hoss
Even though
He's a bit dinky to strap a big saddle or
Blanket on anyway
He's a bit dinky to strap a big saddle or
Blanket on anyway
Gold backed printed money. Hybrid of both problems. A fake money (paper) that represents a fixed money which is in reality (gold) Bitcoin is in reality; mathematically real despite not being physically real and it is fixed. The fact bitcoin is SLOW and not cheap to process does not mean anything more than it does for GOLD; which has to be processed to verify it too.
I see people making lots of new coin pyramids but I've not seen any think about the 2-tier system we had with money for most of history in creation of something new.
Futures trading ideally levels out crazy markets (it has bad sides too) but in this case it's even more valuable because bitcoin doesn't scale or really work... like gold does. Bitcoin is like markets worried about price flux-- except it is more than just a worry and it impacts everybody while oil price flux is not a big issue unless you are a big buyer like an airline or something.
So, you end up with middle men printing various kinds of money BACKED BY BITCOIN. They can inflate or whatever other scheme invented to create a futures contract like situation. So you print ... ByteCoins? which are made up of bitcoins (forget the name is the inverse of their value) and you promise their value in bitcoins like a futures contract does. Make them move fast, etc. charge a middle man fee for the faster processing and the merging of bitcoin transactions to lower the overhead.
Bitcoin can be the bedrock for many attempted systems. stop trying to invent variations on the same pyramid scheme.
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