???
Is this confirmed somewhere? Also why is there no 'Booo' option?
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It's leaked, this means that isn't 100% sure (my definition of 100% sure is "official announced by Valve")
Those strings are probably coming by a steam translator (steam is translated by volunteers)
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Yeah, they are from steam translator server. And thus it's more than sure BitCoin will be added as payment option in near future.
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Wait, a rich company like Valve can not even afford professional translators?!
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If Volvo doesn't pay for a decent support I can't see why they should pay for professional translators :O
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They can. But why bother, when millions of people would translate it for free. That's thousands of dollars saved.
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I would bet the quality of the community-sourced, community-reviewed translations is better than what they could buy.
People who are passionate and knowledgeable about the material will probably do better at the spirit of the message in context. IMO.
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I don't even know how to get bitcoins or how do they work :D
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Same, plus this kinda thing rarely works in my country, anyway.
So voted "I don't care" :D
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What do you mean by this kinda thing?
Bitcoin shouldn't have any country restrictions...
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Bitcoin can't be, but Bitcoin acceptance can be. It is illegal to use Bitcoin (or for Valve to accept Bitcoin) in several countries.
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right. for some countries trading in bitcoins is illegal. And then in a few-- all activites, mining too is illegal
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Bitcoins are rootly digged for. Means you need an awesome rig and a bitcoin miner and you just let it mine for the bitcoins(the process is done in mining pools). This process nowadays yields around 0.00000000001BTC a day, which is not a lot. Therefore people just invest, it's like switching between currencies to have more money. (Imagine buying one BTC for $100 today, the day next it becomes $400)
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Don't care for bitcoin at all. Also might be good to give a bit more information (where did you find this for example)
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Please correct me if I'm wrong, but... wouldn't it be a waste to use Bitcoins on games, unless you plan on buying hundreds of dollars worth? Like, one Bitcoin is worth $374.11 USD, according to Google. Can you split them or something? I don't really know much at all about Bitcoins, so, please do fill me in. I could always use Google, but I'm too lazy. (:
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Well technically you can split them up into 100 million parts exactly. Which is pretty close to "as you want" but not exactly.
In any case the smallest part you split it into is much less than a cent, so ideal for micropayments.
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Of course, there's no need to go any lower. Im just pointing out the fact that, even though you can split them into very small
parts, you still can't split them indefinitely. In fact even those 100 million parts may be too small fragments already, especially
with websites (faucets) that give you like 10 satoshi and act like they're being super "generous".
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Bitcoin supply has a hard limit, so it's not unthinkable for bitcoin to appreciate enough that splitting satoshi becomes useful.
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Hah, BTC is dying failed currency, offering services for it at this point is waste of resources...
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Why is it failed? I'm seeing more and more evidence of the opposite, with more and more stores accepting bitcoins, and not only for digital (or illegal) goods.
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And in the end many of those stores discovered that they don't make much out of it, often not even returning the costs from integration. Only people who use it are nuts that want it to succeed so they buy it, pay extra just so they can be charged extra to pay with it.
Also in large scale, it's not really suitable for real use. Just too slow and limited in number of transactions. Also the infighting inside community might prove to be disastrous...
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The tech/geek-focused stores around these parts (those are the only one using it) seem to be doing fine. I don't have any numbers on it, but I've not seen any store drop support for it, but I've seen more and more actually using it. Currently cryptocurrencies only really appeal to tech-geeks & economists, but a currency is worth as much as people think it's worth, so if cryptocurrencies gets more widespread acceptance, the value will stabilize more and it will be useful outside of niche markets where people already are inclined to like new tech.
Once e-wallets really become widespread, paying with cryptocurrencies will be no harder than paying with regular money, so that's also something to keep an eye out for.
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The problem is actually that too many people use Bitcoin. The current system as-is can't scale to a higher volume of transactions and is already overwhelmed by the minority of people that use Bitcoin. There's been an ongoing debate about how to solve it, but so far nothing has been done.
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As long as bitcoins can be split (can they can), it should be able to stabilize at some value, once we no longer have a big influx of people. We'll just have to get used to paying in fractions of a coin.
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I'm sorry, let me explain again. At the present time, the biggest issue with BTC isn't the value of BTC, but the way transactions are processed. The number of transactions overwhelm the current transaction block size limit resulting in long processing times. If BTC actually became mainstream then the system would just die. When I say it can't scale I mean that in a literal sense, at least until the current debacle is solved (and so far there's ideas but disagreement all around).
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Actually, Xapo (One btc wallet) offers a debit card using the funds from your wallet. I'm not 100% sure how this works but I think it's supposed to work anywhere...
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I think the problem with most of those is they're skimming a conversion fee on top of an exchange rate that may or may not be competitive, and that you don't get to see before you use it.
I suppose it's convenient if you've acquired your bitcoin relatively cheaply, but I wouldn't equate it to spending it at market value.
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For the average business Schmoe, there's services that can be implemented into most e-commerce systems that take bitcoin and give you a payout via real money while taking a nominal cut (less than credit/debit processing fees). I could see a big commerce site not making a return on implementing due to low volume of transactions, but for many it'd just take a couple of hours to get the ball rolling.
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BTC as a cryptocurrency is one thing, but BitCoin as a money-transfer technology is great.
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Nope, it's horrible in large scale. It won't just scale to comparable number of transactions to any existing payment network.
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yeah, but, for small money transfers, it's great.
The reason it doesn't scale is because there isn't enough bitcoin to support large transfers.
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No I meant that it won't scale in number of transactions. Quote: "Today the Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 7 t(ransactions)ps due to the bitcoin protocol restricting block sizes to 1MB. " Just for comparison paypal is at 115tps.
That means 604 800 transactions per day. So 4 million users would be able to make one buy per week, or receive money once per week. Ofc blocksize can be increased, but the size of blockchain is already 55GB. The traffic of P2P network can become unsustainable too. And then there are some miners that see that not including transfers in block is faster. Which actually lessens the throughput.
In the end BTC just doesn't really offer anything better than Paypal or traditional CC for regular people, those work in their local currencies, where btc is entirely new with no frame of reference.
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I see bitcoin more as a proof-of-concept cryptocurrency, and one that for all its shortcomings has succeeded brilliantly. Eventually we'll have a successor that will solve the problems bitcoin has faced, such as a lack of anonymity, slow confirmation times, large blockchain size, inconvenience of buying etc.
However, I do disagree with your assertion that bitcoin doesn't offer benefits to the people. Some of these include:
- Pseudo-anonymity: While not completely anonymous, if you are careful with buying and spending you can hide the identity of the wallet holder. Credit bureaus, data mining corporations, and governments cannot build a profile of your spending and track your location by credit card usage
- There is a finite amount of BTC available. Governments or private institutions like the federal reserve cannot devalue the currency by printing more paper money with nothing to back it
- It cannot be confiscated (without access to the wallet). In a financial crisis, governments like Greece cannot loot savings funds and pensions remotely. If you secure your wallet well, only you have access to the funds. As a vendor, companies like Paypal cannot freeze all your funds on a whim and make a bunch of unreasonable demands to get them back (which they've done to many projects)
- No chargebacks - it makes BTC more like cash, which as a huge benefit to vendors. No more fraudulent purchases that later get revoked. Of course, on the flipside it also means you should trust the person you're buying from, but you should do that anyways.
- My personal favorite - it takes the control of money from corrupt bankers and politicians, and puts the power back in the hands of the people
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They should apply it to CSGO. Imaginary guns for imaginary money.
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Let's go back to bartering. Send 5 eggs for a TF2 Key!
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As opposed to this "real" and, by extension, valuable money?
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Still useable for toilets, campfires, joint making. No internets needed. Win! $)
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"You can use it to wipe your ass in case of hyperinflation" doesn't quite strike me as a decisive advantage of paper money over electronic money :)
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I like the idea of cryptocurrency, so I'm all for this. There will of course be some issues along the road, but cryptocurrencies can already be used in some stores, so hopefully Valve will have done their homework and looked at how those stores handle it. I wonder if adding cryptocurencies to a store as big as Steam will help stabilize their value, because the lack of stability with the cryptocurrencies is one of the things that holds them back.
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I used some cryptocurrency too, I like the concept, but I think they are still not mature.
Anyway, steam failed hard more than once:
gems launch, several heavy vulnerabilities, market glitched hard (like selling stuff for 6 millions €), etc...
I hope for them they'll keep their eyes open with bitcoins.
Also I would be happier to see some investments in... you know steam support...
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I severely doubt this will affect the stability of bitcoin, because:
1) they're probably only interested in bitcoin as a money-transfer technology, not as a crypto-currency. Most stores auto-sell bitcoins at the time of transaction and don't hold onto it
2) for a currency to be stable, rate of supply needs to be proportional to the adoption rate, which requires some form of regulation.
Basic economics:
If there's a large increase in the adoption rate, without a large increase in supply, prices will rocket. If there's a large increase in supply without a corresponding increase in adoption rate, prices will plummet.
Considering that both the adoption rate and the supply are in a state of flux, with very little predictability on either end, of course there's no stability
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It will depend on how they handle it. If they attach a fixed bitcoin value, then bitcoins will finally have something that its value can be compared to. Currently the common person has no idea how much a bitcoin is "worth". We can say that a bitcoin is worth X USD, but we don't have anything "real" to actually compare the value to. If a game costs Y Bitcoins, then suddenly we will get a far better feel for what a bitcoin is worth.
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There's no way they'd attach a fixed bitcoin value (at this stage). It's not like they can pay all the game publishers and developers in bitcoin, so they'd be taking on a huge risk. From a business standpoint, it'd be beyond stupid.
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I'm not saying that they will do it right away, but they might well do it somewhere down the line. And even just having something you can directly compare the value to could help stabilizing the value (after a while).
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it's a chicken and egg problem - when the value gets fixed, it'll (somewhat) stabilize, but the value needs to be stable before it gets fixed.
But until both the adoption rate and the supply rate become stable, the value will swing too much to reasonably predict the changes in value.
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My opinion is that Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency is rather meh, and has plenty of problems (see e.g. Mt. Gox)
But, Bitcoin as a money-transfer system / insta-payment system, that's some great technology. Transferring money abroad especially, but even locally, is quick and cheap using the system.
For a company like Valve, it's cheaper than processing credit cards, there aren't any charge-backs, and there aren't any currency controls that they need to deal with. As long as they don't need to hold onto bitcoins in any way (by partnering with Bitpay), it's a great business move with almost no risk. They just need to monitor bitcoin's legality across the globe and implement appropriate measures, something they already have experience with (censorship laws, regional distribution, etc.)
Eventually they may also have issues with anti-money laundering regulations, but that's not something to worry about in the near term
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I guess it's about time I start hitting the faucets again, then. :P
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Bad news, most of the best paying faucets ran dry or cut their payout drastically, because
ad revenues drastically broke down. It's really hard to get a few dollars out of faucets these days.
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Buying bitcoins takes additional cost. What's the point of paying through bitcoins in steam if it have additional cost?
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The point is if you already have them for some reason, now there's one more way to spend them directly.
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Because you could buy bitcoins when their price is low and buy your games when the bitcoin price rises.
Also, you could have won or gotten some free bitcoins on the web somewhere. Mostly a waste of time,
but hey, some folks are just lucky.
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Why through bitpay? Isn't a bitcoin wallet enough? :/
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On your end, a wallet should be enough, but Valve still needs some service to exchange the bitcoin they
get to dollars and to process the transaction. They obviously chose bitpay for that.
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Oh goodie, my hardcore drug dealer freinds can get into gaming without laundering their profits now!
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Shit Valve would accept food stamps if they can,they will take anything that will make them more money....hell i do not blame them
Bitcoin is nice to use and be able to purchase on Steam,but i can see a lot of games being bought and game collections growing because how easy it to use Bitcoin for fraud and money laundering.Just use someone CC to buy bitcoin,but game on Steam,keep or sell it.Either way it is yours and they can do little to prove where the funds for Bitcoin came from.
I am not saying everyone uses it for that,but a lot of cartel money/human trafficking/drugs and so on are funneled through Bitcoin,so i would not be surprised if what Bitcoin you purchase was some how tied to illegal stuff.
I am just surprised it took this long.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4fuknl/steam_games_accepting_bitcoin_is_this_real/
Great news! It was obviously a matter of time.
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so gaben wants to get in some unregisterd money, i guess he wants to move some to panama :)
but then again i like the bitcoin concept, just regret not stepping in back in the day wenn it was low :) now i dont have it :)
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Bitcoin purchases are now live and (as mentioned earlier in the thread) are handled via BitPay. Anyone wants to take the plunge? :)
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bitcoin_authorization_explanation
Bitcoin transactions are authorized through the BitPay website. Click the button below to open a new web browser to initiate the transaction.
bitcoin_payment_tips_header
Tips for Bitcoin customers
bitcoin_payment_tips_text
This process can take up to 60 seconds. To avoid purchasing failures, please do not hit your back button or close the bitpay window before the process is complete.
checkout_payment_method_specific_note_bitcoin
Note: Any approved refunds for purchases made with Bitcoin can only be credited to your Steam wallet
checkout_receipt_pending_bitcoin_long
Your purchase is currently in progress and is waiting for confirmation of Bitcoin delivery from BitPay. This process can take several minutes to a few days for confirmation. Valve will send an email receipt to you when payment is received for this purchase. During this time you may continue shopping for other games, though you will not be able to re-purchase any products that are pending in this transaction.
checkout_receipt_pending_bitcoin_text
For questions regarding your payment processing status, please contact BitPay.
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