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Steam Ends Support For Bitcoin (polygon.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the up-next dept.

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."

3 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. Questions by SmaryJerry · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Questions by Train0987 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yes, that's always been one of many fatal flaws with the bitcoin pyramid scheme, errr, blockchain.

    2. Re:Questions by vossman77 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Based on my limited understanding, the block size is fixed at 1MB and each transaction is around 226 bytes. A block occurs every 20 minutes, so bitcoin can only have about 232 transactions per minute, and transactions are (some how) prioritized by age and fee. It is well known the miners will flood the transaction back log to increase the fees, because the miners claim the additional fees.

      SegWit, which went into effect in August (?), I think was supposed to reduce the transaction size, but keep the block size the same. SegWit also allows some sort of Lightning Network, which is basically a service that will confirm transaction off of the block chain faster for a higher fee. The Bitcoin Cash people rejected this as being too proprietary and hence their fork.

      The fork Bitcoin2X a.k.a. SegWit2X increased the block size to 2MB.

      I am not sure what Bitcoin Cash did, but as stated they rejected SegWit, and must have increased the block size, but they are handling the increased transaction volume fine.

      AFAIK, all other Bitcoin forks (Gold, Platinum) are money grabbing schemes.