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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."
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.
Yes, that's always been one of many fatal flaws with the bitcoin pyramid scheme, errr, blockchain.
The recommended fee is 0.000339 BTC or about $4.41 at current values [1]. Fee are the same if you are transferring less than a US penny or more than a million dollars. For any transaction, you can use less fee and wait (much) longer or a larger fee have a shorter transaction time.
Fees have really been the driving force behind the recent Bitcoin forks. Some argue that bitcoin should be a store of value (not me) rather an a tool for transferring money. Independent of your opinion on the fork Bitcoin Cash, I believe they are doing it right with transaction fees [2], which currently is about $0.15 per transaction, again independent of transaction amount.
1. https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/
2. https://bitinfocharts.com/comp...
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=
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".
Bitcoin miners perform the processing required to process transactions. When a bitcoin transaction is submitted, it is submitted along with a "bid" for how much the person is willing to pay for the transaction. Miners then prioritize incoming transactions based upon how much is bid. If the bid is too low, it will end up at the end of a long queue and might take hours to finish (if ever).
The optimal bid amount, then, is determined by the computing power of the Bitcoin network combined with how much processing power it actually takes to process each transaction and how many transactions there are. Right now, bids above about 150 Satoshis per byte (which works out to just under $5 per transaction on average at current prices) finish relatively quickly (typically under 30 minutes). Bids below that take an increasingly long time to commit.
This high transaction cost is a function of the poor scaling of the Bitcoin algorithm to large numbers of transactions. It's one reason among many why I think Bitcoins are an absolutely abysmal medium of exchange, and why I question the entire concept of a blockchain-based currency system.
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.