What about refunds? With Paypal you know you're getting the same amount back, in the same currency, as if you haven't bought anything at all. Given the fluctuating nature of Bitcoin, surely that's not possible?
Bitcoin does have mixing services that would "launder" or obfuscate the link between bitcoin and your real identity, which does provide value for some users.
What is "valid payment data"? How do they validate this data?
>Bitpay is definitely subject to KYC / AML compliance.
Why is that relevant?
You need to have a valid payment method. I'm not sure how better to explain this... a credit card or paypal account etc. It's validated when the payment clears. Both of these have strong identity data linked to them.
KYC (Know your customer) / AML (Anti Money Laundering) compliance means validating the identities of those you do business with. That means, using Steam to launder money isn't possible. This should be pretty obvious.
No, paypal doesn't do ANY identity verification for customers beyond fraud scoring and AVS.
For cards, you can just get a prepaid. And most cards outside of the US don't even support AVS, so there's no way for valve to validate any of the information you give them besides the PAN and CVV.
>KYC (Know your customer) / AML (Anti Money Laundering) compliance means validating the identities of those you do business with. That means, using Steam to launder money isn't possible. This should be pretty obvious.
I don't think Valve is covered (or considers themselves to be covered) by either of those, and they certainly don't appear to be doing any of the typical KYC stuff.
there are good ways, this isn't one of them. Stick with Shapeshift.io
It seems that BitPay (the payment provider used Steam and many other merchants who accept Bitcoins) gets a dollar valued refund amount from the merchant (so you can do partial refunds). Then they calculate the Bitcoin value of the refund amount at the current exchange rate and send that much bitcoin back to the user. There's an extra Bitcoin transaction fee involved. I'm sure BitPay keeps a few thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin on hand to pay refunds, and I'm sure refunds are rare enough that any frictional costs are much smaller than what they bring in through their own fees.
So basically the user is taking on the exchange rate risk -- if you buy a game, Bitcoins go up 20% overnight and then you request a refund, your refund amount will be less Bitcoins than you originally paid. If they did it any other way then it would be subject to abuses that would allow users and merchants to collude to extract money from BitPay (BitPay would essentially be writing options which would allow users to buy back bitcoins that were sold on their behalf in the past at the same price they were sold, even if that's substantially different from the current market price).
Go look at USD/YEN movement, 1-3% movements occur daily, if you were to purchase YEN with USd and later refund to USd you could end up significantly up or down.
But the wealth YEN represents is many many magnitudes greater than Bitcoin. When YEN appreciates by 2% that influences hundreds of millions of people and business, and guess who is pulling that lever, a small cabal of corrupt bankers.
It is done completely legitimately - you're just not getting money from steam