Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Halts Bitcoin Transactions Because It's An 'Unstable Currency' (bleepingcomputer.com)
Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for BleepingComputers: Microsoft has stopped supporting Bitcoin as a payment method for Microsoft products, Bleeping Computer has learned. A Microsoft support staffer has told us the move is temporary and cited the unstable state of the Bitcoin currency. Microsoft added support for Bitcoin in 2014, and has previously temporarily stopped supporting Bitcoin in the past.
When a currency can quickly gain or lose half it's value with no apparent reason and no apparent cause, many people won't want to take them for fear they will lose money on the deal.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
If you bought 1 btc for $15,000.00 c and then the price went down to $10,000, you would care about stability too. As a retailer, they would be constantly buying and selling btc and so the stability of it is important to maintain revenue.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I hate cryptocurrency and everyone that likes it. I love the US Dollar and the banks holding on to my money for me. Generic response about a bubble and how I don't want responsibility in my life. I'd rather someone else do it for me, blah blah. :)))))
This is good news for Bitcoin.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
No one saw this coming.
It's just not stable enough do to the inability to scale it. The number of bit coin in existence is capped and we're feeling those repercussions as transactions are mere fractions of btc now.
I don't read AC
No spin needed - if MS says its screwed, you should probably bet your shirt on it!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
When a currency can quickly gain or lose half it's value with no apparent reason and no apparent cause, many people won't want to take them for fear they will lose money on the deal.
The cause of the volatility is obvious. Fear Of Missing Out combined with greed which is what drives most asset bubbles.
Microsoft ultimately has to convert all transactions to dollars for financial reporting. They hold many currencies (global company) but it's a bad idea to hold particularly volatile ones since they will have to convert those to dollars at least on their financial reporting statements. They can take the risk since in reality bitcoin is basically a rounding error to them but they aren't going to take a loss on it either.
No spin needed - if MS says its screwed, you should probably bet your shirt on it!
They didn't say it is screwed, they said it is unstable, which, at least at the moment it is. How can you use a currency to price things when the value changes dramatically daily, even hourly? You can't. At least whilst it is this volatile it can't be used as a currency for most purchases usefully.
Give it time, with banks moving in, and professional investors coming in, and no doubt- automated algorithms being place on trading computers, it will probably stabilize. Of course, then you have to deal with the transaction fees, and times next.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Actually, it is about 96% and that is over 100 years. In that same amount of time, pay and the CPI have gone up as well.
Bitcoin has gained, lost, gained, and lost again up to 30% of it's value over the last month. Did the amount you pay for gasoline, electricity, bread, etc fluctuate like that? No, they did not. If you bought a $1.00 product on December 14, on December 19, that product had cost you $1.30. If you sold a product on Dec 19 for $1.00, on December 30 you have only $0.65 for that product, but what you are paying for the material to make that product hasn't changed.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
They didn't say it is screwed, they said it is unstable, which, at least at the moment it is. How can you use a currency to price things when the value changes dramatically daily, even hourly? You can't.
Not quite, as you can use it easily.
It's just the risk that is on you if you accept it.
It may risky or stupid to do, but you can.
bickerdyke
It's the speculation related to the market dynamics of blockchain currencies being treated as commodities in a market that is currently causing any instability, either perceived or otherwise. That is a completely different issue than any cryptocurrency's intrinsic *technical* stability.
Did Microsoft actually hold Bitcoins, though? I thought that most people who took Bitcoin for payment used a payment service like BitPay, that converted it to USD almost instantly.
No it won't. It will be blamed for the collapse of the Dollar and other things. A Central authority will then declare them all illegal but will give you an option to conver to their own crypto of which the central bank WILL have FULL control over.
If they want to tax you at 99.99% there will be nothing you can do to stop it.
If they want to prevent you from spending outside your state, there will be nothing you can do to change it.
If you decide to run, they will be able to track every place you stop for gas, food, shelter, medicine.
if you decide to rebel, they will prevent you from buying guns, ammo, supplies, and they will know exactly where you are at.
Avoid Crypto's at ALL costs.
If they did use BitPay, then they might have stopped due to higher fees that BitPay would charge due to instability.
Notice they only made this decision now that bitcoin is down.
It's not really down though. It's oscillating between 14k-15k for a while now. It's down 4% since last month, hardly dramatic.
Ethereum for some reason never really went down and has been on mostly a steady climb for some time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Then it would not really matter if BTC increases or drops by 10% in a few hours.
Yes it would.
As a buyer paying in bitcoin, if I can anticipate the value increasing by 10% in an hour then I will wait an hour to make my purchase. If I anticipate the price rising significantly in the future at all, then it's in my best interest to spend as little of it as possible.
As a seller accepting bitcoin, instant conversion makes things a bit easier but there is a similar dilemma in that it might not pay to convert immediately. But if you are converting BTC to USD immediately, and presumably pegging the price in BTC to the price in USD, then why bother with the extra headaches and just use USD to begin with? There's little incentive to accept a form of payment that customers are reluctant to use.
=Smidge=
"Believe me, I'm a very stable currency!" - Donald Nakamoto
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
bitcoins fees and transaction time are to high for most day to day things.
Good observation. Have you seen any of the literal hundreds of other coins out there that ARE feasible for consumer use?
To be able to purchase goods and services online, you would need:
a) (Close to) Instant payments
b) (Close to) Instant conversion to USD
c) (Close to) Zero fees
It is my understanding that a) and c) are coming soon (eg Lightning Network).
Unfortunately, your understanding is wrong. Lightning Network allows you to squash an arbitrary number of transactions with another party into two on-chain transactions. It's worse than useless for one-off transactions. If you do less than 3 transactions with the same person in a short period of time, Lightning Network offers no benefit for that.
Not only does the price fluctuate, but the price to settle a transaction is about $20, and as high as $35 in the last few weeks. This is the amount that you pay regardless of the amount you are sending....
Kinda hard to pay for something worth $25, when you have to pay $20 to send it.
Accepting bitcoin payment is similar to accepting payment in terms of commodities, frozen concentrated orange juice ("Sell 30 April at 142!") or pork bellies. Or, at best, a foreign currency with a very volatile exchange rate. So there is no surprise, nor real news in this announcement.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When a currency can quickly gain or lose half it's value with no apparent reason and no apparent cause, many people won't want to take them for fear they will lose money on the deal.
There is a cause, wall street speculation. Bitcoin's price rose 65x as wall street speculators were joining the pre-existing home based speculators.
And now you know why Canadians don't want to order things from USA websites. The shipping costs are crazy expensive. I've seen a seller asking $100 shipping for a $40 solar panel.
#DeleteFacebook
It won't be stable until the people that matter control it xx
Requiem for the American Dream
If you want to get in on the cryptocurrency mining scene ...
Stop yourself, don't do it. Take either of these two paths:
(1) You were going to buy a GPU anyway for some non-mining reason. Go ahead, buy the GPU. Maybe, **maybe**, buy a model up one level of performance/price from what you would have otherwise bought, if its a low to midrange model. Say if you were otherwise planning on a GTX 1050 Ti 4GB ***maybe*** get a GTX 1060 6GB, ****maybe****. If you were otherwise getting a high performer, say a 1070 Ti for that 4K monitor, do *****not***** go up a level to a 1080 Ti. Then let the GPU mine when you are not using the machine. Use a watt meter to determine the total power consumption of your machine to determine power usage, do *not* trust online references that say your GPU uses so many watts. When your GPU is mining other parts of the computer are also drawing power, especially the CPU which may also be mining. You want to know the total system power and make sure your mining proceeds exceed that amount. Be sure to use above baseline residential power rates in your calculations, do *not* just look at your current bill and expect the current rate. If it is not profitable to mine do *not* fall into the trap that "the coin price will eventually rise and make it profitable", that is a losing game. Instead, take whatever money you would spend on power and just buy the coins directly, you will have more coins that way if the price rises. But above all else, do not get into the mindset of joining the mining scene, that is a path to losing money. Stay in the scene "the GPU I have anyway can make some coin when I'm not using it".
(2) Take whatever money you were willing to spend on a GPU for mining and just buy coins with that money. You will likely do better that way if the price rises. Many miners fall into the trap that they are profitable and pat themselves on the back. They do not consider the opportunity cost of the alternative of just buying coins directly. The following are very rough estimates but the point will nonetheless be clear. Lets say you spent $500 on a GPU last summer and another $500 on a GPU last fall. At above baseline residential power rates maybe you have about an extra $1,000 after factoring in power. Congrats your GPUs are now paid. However your friend bought $500 worth of bitcoin in the summer and another $500 in the fall and now has $3,000 worth of bitcoin. You are at net $0, he is at net $2,0000. If you are willing to gamble on increasing coin prices you may be better off just buying coins directly. Things are not as simple as a mining rig being profitable, the opportunity cost of the just buy directly must be considered. Many other things must also be considered before joining the mining scene.
...who will even pay in bitcoin with a $20 fee?
Depends on what you're buying. For some of the products that bitcoin is popular for, expensive overhead is less important than anonymity. $20 on top of a $80 software license? Pay with a credit card. $20 on top of a $300 sheet of LSD? Pony up the $20.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I guess that was a "No".
Do as you will, but I'm looking at the data and it's inherently obvious to the most casual observer that "unstable," is accurate.
BITCOIN PRICE (BTC - USD)
Trade Time 12:25PM
Daily High 17,180.3496
Trade Date 1/8/2018
Daily Low 13,971.2598
Open 16,193.3301
52-week High 19,843.1094
Prev. Close 16,182.3096
52-week Low 766.5300
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
So block chain is the mark of the beast? A fun hypothesis.
This comment is an exercise in having only one hair and trying to turn it into two. I could also price my product randomly. It will be somewhere between $1 and $100. Neither you nor I know until after we both agree to do the transaction. You're right that there is a difference between something being impossible and simply being absurd. But you don't stay in business by doing too many absurd things, so in this context, the practical difference is pretty much non-existent. I think you would get along with my wife.
I think you would get along with my wife.
Well... if you knew....
*ducking for cover* :-)
bickerdyke
Microsoft isn't betting against it, they just aren't betting on it.
Sure it would. BTC don't free-float in the ether. Somebody owns them at all times. This means that, if somebody offers a service to convert between BTC and USD or Euros or Yen or something, they're going to have to have substantial amounts of BTC and USD (or whatever) on hand, if only to cover statistical variations. The BTC stock is a risk because of BTC volatility, and whoever's running the service will view that as a cost, and charge for it.
Suppose I make a $10K payment to my favorite drug dealer. I go to the service and buy $10K worth of BTC. I transfer it to my drug dealer. He needs to get out on bail, so it takes a few hours for him to get the BTC and sell them back. At that point, the value has gone up 10%, and the service pays my drug dealer $11K, losing $1K on the transaction.
Alternatively, the service determines that it needs to have $100K in both USD and BTC in reserves. The value of BTC goes down 10%, and the service now has $90K in BTC, and needs more BTC. The service can then buy more BTC on the market, costing money, or hold more BTC than it would normally need, which ties up capital and opens the service to larger losses should BTC value drop.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes