The Story Behind Steam Dropping BTC Support (And How BCH is a Viable Alternative)

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Avatar for Kyouma29
Written by
4 years ago (Last updated: 3 years ago)
In communities: Bitcoin Cash(e11c) , Cryptocurrency and Blockchain(7b7f)

Valve's Steam, the most popular PC gaming online store and launcher, started accepting Bitcoin (BTC) April 2016. At the time, Bitcoin was worth around $450.

Now, as you know, Bitcoin had some wild price changes soon after, and thus it's of no surprise that it became an issue not only for Valve, but also their customers.

An example to illustrate the problem at hand: Say you want to buy a game worth $30. You would transfer Bitcoin worth $30, but as soon as you make the payment, the value drops, and now you need more Bitcoin to complete the payment. On the contrary, if it rises, Valve will need to refund some of the Bitcoin back to you.

It becomes very clear here how that can be a hassle to manage.

There is also another problem with Bitcoin and that is the common complaint of high transaction fees. A higher transaction fees means that some purchases that do not cost high enough become unfeasible to purchase using Bitcoin.

It becomes even worse when you consider the previous issue of sudden price changes. If the price lowers, you will need to pay more Bitcoin, and thus need to transfer this additional amount, and again getting charged for the transaction. Similarly, if the value goes up, Valve will need to refund some amount to you and they get charged with some transaction fees.

So, as you can guess, what happened is that in December 2017, when the value of Bitcoin was around $14,800, Valve finally dropped support for Bitcoin stating the above issues as the factors that lead to them making this decision.

This is where Bitcoin Cash (BCH) comes in, Bitcoin Cash is both relatively stable and has very low transaction fees. Pretty clear how it's virtually free from the drawbacks that Bitcoin offered.

Okay then, what's exactly stopping Valve from picking up Bitcoin Cash, then? Truth be told, nothing in particular besides some inertia.

I believe that if enough people show their support, it can absolutely happen. Valve accepting it will be a huge step towards Bitcoin Cash becoming more mainstream, which is something I am sure a lot of people would desire.

Thanks for reading. If you want to show your support, please pass this article around!

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Avatar for Kyouma29
Written by
4 years ago (Last updated: 3 years ago)
In communities: Bitcoin Cash(e11c) , Cryptocurrency and Blockchain(7b7f)

Comments

yo

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User's avatar baekmigo
4 years ago

The volatility was never the problem. The problem was the lack of a payment protocol that ensured there was no over or underpayments. BIP70 solves exactly that, and was enforced by bitpay for many years for a reason.

Steam used bitpay, and got fiat money into their bank account like they want to, and they got the exact amount they expected, regardless of volatility. The sole and entire issue comes down to poor customer support and delayed transactions due to the 1mb blocksize limit.

When the payment processor sets a price that is valid for a given time window, and the damned blockchain network underneath fails to settle your transaction because some arbitrary limitation for usage, the transaction delay causes the payment processors window to expire, which in turn means the price is no longer guaranteed and so you get over and under payments, which needs to be handled by support.

Support costs money, and stupid amounts of supports costs stupid amounts of money, inhibiting the profitability of accepting bitcoin to begin with.

This is a good reason why we should make sure that we fix the DAA oscillations and work on pre-consensus, those gives us stability which allows people to sell risk-management tooling in order to provide a great user experience to the end users.

It might even be worth breaking backwards compatibility for the entire ecosystem and change the block headers to introduce something like Bobtail.

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User's avatar JonathanSilverblood
4 years ago

Nice.

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User's avatar Ironman
4 years ago

Feb to March this year BCH crashed from US$500 to $147 in four weeks. How can you claim this collapse as stable? Measuring any deflating currency against any inflating currency in value has to be volatile.

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User's avatar cock
4 years ago

While BCH fees are virtually nothing, and tx speed is incredible, BCH is far from being stable. Is highly volatile as Bitcoin. If anyone own a store accepting crypto should go for the stablecoins, or simply go with the price at real time (tomorrow it doubles? cool! Tm it halves? your fault for not turning it to stablecoins or Fiat.

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User's avatar Monolith
4 years ago
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