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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."
It replaced my money with much more money, I suppose thatâ(TM)s something.
Luckily there is never a shortage of complete morons with money to fleece. Tulips anyone?
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?
The only people pushing tulip comparisons are bank shills like Chase CEO.
You're right, it's a dumb comparison.
Bitcoins are more like Beanie Babies.
=Smidge=
No, the people comparing it to the Tulip Panic have read history. The same people who predicted the collapse of the housing bubble years before it happened. But by all means ignore history and put all of your savings in bitcoin.
If you saw this coming 5 years ago, buying in was wise. Now selling is wise, soon all will be moot and it will finally return to being a currency, not speculative asset.
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No, Beanie Babies were made by one company. In comparison, anyone can mine Bitcoins. Or at least these days, fractions of it.
#DeleteFacebook
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
So says the rubes who buy in the ponzi scheme mid way through and probably wont get out in time before the collapse.
stock market with no government regs and insider trading is ok if you can get to over 51% cpu power.
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?
Until you sell your bitcoins and put that money into a more stable retirement vessel then you have not earned an early retirement. If you have then I would consider you lucky and wise.
I am no more jealous of you then I would be toward a gambler at a casino who won. Bitcoin, as an investment, is a gamble at best. If I'm wrong then you're set for life and that's great. But I still won't regret my decision because I still consider the investment too risky.
It's not a scam, it has no head, it used to be decentralized
FTFY
It's not a scam, it has no head, it's decentralized.
I agree it's not a scam (although whether or not something is a scam has nothing to do with whether or not it's decentralized).
It's pretty much just straight-up gambling.
Except, to be useful, you have to be able to make a profit as a company that isn't mining, but is instead accepting it as payment.
Let's run through a couple of hypothetical examples:
As a miner, you spend $20 to mine and you get $100 as currency. You've gained $80 profit. (I give this only as an example. The estimates are closer to 2x that ratio, with $1000 of mining getting you $10k in bitcoins.)
As a merchant (like Valve), you spend $20 to get a transaction processed, and you get $5 as currency. You've lost $15, merely by accepting bitcoin as payment for a five dollar game. Even if the game is sixty dollars, you still don't make nearly the margins that the miners do, with only a 1:3 ratio of actual transaction processing cost to revenue, which completely ignores the fact that a sixty dollar game isn't A) common or B) all profit after the clearinghouse costs.
Trading beanie babies that could be sold for money would, in fact, be potentially more profitable for a merchant in Valve's position these days. Bitcoin is a racket dressed up as a libertarian dream.
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!
Yeah, but have you actually tried using Bitcoin recently as it's intended purpose of a currency? It sucks! It takes 15 minutes for a transaction to confirm now, during which time the actual value of the currency could have gone up or down by 2 or 3%. And, like Steam is complaining about, the Bitcoin transaction fees that made sense back when the currency was $100 are completely asinine now that it's around $11,000.
Yeah, I might be a bit bitter that this "currency" completely defied logic and got this overvalued, but that doesn't mean that I'm not right. Bitcoin (as it currently works) IS stupid.
Maybe the riches of Bitcoin can be used to fund Universal Basic Income
yup, I laid a NASDAQ composite graph for 1990's to 2000 over a current BTC graph... Pretty awesome match.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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.
Those who get into - and out of - a Ponzi scheme early generally profit from it. At the expense of the fools who jump on the bandwagon later.
Is the stuffing inside edible?
it will never "return" to being a currency.
It will enter a recurring cycle of pump and dump(*), until there aren't enough suckers left to take the bait.
This will probably be a very long time, given that there are people still being suckered by 419 scams even though just about everyone in the world should know by now that there's no such thing as a Nigerian prince or whatever wanting to give you a hundred million dollars.
(*) or, as the boosters and true believers put it, "growth and profit-taking"
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"?
So did tulip bulbs for those who got out in time, but tulip bulbs weren't any good as a currency either.
You made yours, so fuck everybody else, eh? I'm not sure you're any better than a "bank shill", yourself.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
At least if you bought a Beanie Baby, you had a stuffed animal.
Have you read my blog lately?
Of course I'm jealous, but that's neither here nor there. Bitcoin has fulfilled it's promise as an investment, it has failed it's promise as a currency.
You can't use it's success as an investment to argue that transaction costs of 20 fucking bucks and a throughput counted in one or two digits per second don't make it completely useless as a currency, Lightning network isn't a solution either because the limitations and lack of transparency will be very hard to explain or justify to normal users.
If it continues its run as an investment and criminal transaction method for a while longer, bully for you. That makes it no more useful for commercial trade such as Steam, it will have still failed as a currency.
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
Have no fear, according to a recent news report the run up in value from $100 to $11k was due to the winklevoss twins buying $65million worth of bitcoin probably constituting more than half the coins in circulation. When they sell those coins the value of bitcoin will crash the other direction if for no other reason than it would take the twins more than 6months at the full daily trading volume to unload that many coins. Put that many coins back in circulation and value of the coin will crash back down to $100. The only reason the value is so high is that "investors" have bought and sequestered so many coins at this point that the number circulating is greatly reduced.
Are you aware that banks have trojaned BTCcore and are currently turning it into a centralized commodity?
Also, people with coins have all the right to call on every clueless jelly that comes left and right, they took the risk and they got the profit.
Is crypto haters the ones that have to worry more about what they'll say to their kids if by any change this shit ends up being world currency and your kids have to start from scratch, and believe me, GP's attitude is nothing compared to general attitude of hardcore crypto followers.
tl:dr if you dont invest in crypto for you kids, be sure to invest on kneepads instead because they are going to need them.
Is neither. Is an atavista or Yahoo. Good for a first comer but ready to be replaced by new coins with fresh ideas and teams not owned by "institutional money" into becoming centralized.
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.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I'd rather invest in railroads.
-- Cheers!
Those who get into - and out of - a Ponzi scheme early generally profit from it.
Not just those who get in and out early. Also those who short it at the top.
Next Monday will be interesting, when CBOE launches bitcoin futures and the big guys can start playing for real. I wonder which way they're going to bet...
Also, I hear more and more stories about regular people borrowing to buy bitcoin. Looks like a perfect storm to me.
Not making any judgements on Bitcoin itself, by the way. Just the latest pricing action.
Of course I'm jealous
Why? What's there to be jealous about? Speculation in bitcoin is no different than any other high-risk speculation. You might make a million, but you might also (and almost certainly will, if you don't get out at the right time) lose your shirt.
I'm no more jealous of people who've made real money from bitcoin than I am of someone who won big at the casino. I'm happy for them, and I'm also happy that I didn't take the same risk.
Also, I hear more and more stories about regular people borrowing to buy bitcoin.
Buying bitcoin if you can afford to take a loss isn't stupid.
Borrowing to buy bitcoin (if you can't pay off the loan immediately with other resources) isn't just stupid. It's insanely stupid.
Yep, but it's exactly what happens near the top of a bubble, and it's happening now.