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Comment by lsadam0 | Hacker News Reader

Ok, so? Bitcoin is an accepted payment method. Why should you care how exactly they handle processing of it? The only measure of success here is how much people do or do not use it. Are you honestly trying to argue against their acceptance by nitpicking the details of the backend implementation? 99.9% of people don't care.

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It read to me as questioning the value of BTC since neither Bitpay or Valve are interested in holding BTC themselves.

That would not change my stance.

It should be quite clear that in this particular instance, Valve has decided that Bitcoin has utility as a transfer of value. You're questioning whether or not Bitcoin has utility as a store of value / unit of account. It appears that to Valve it does not, but there is also a chicken/egg issue with bootstrapping a new currency given that Bitcoin doesn't have sufficient adoption yet to complete a full lifecycle in terms of usage. That is - Valve has no use in holding bitcoins because they can't use them to pay their bills. This may change at some point.

At this point there are many people who simply have bitcoin. Maybe they bought it a long time ago, maybe they bought it recently. The acquisition time isn't really a factor anymore, it's been around long enough that people simply have it, and they would like to be able to spend it directly.

There are not many people specifically acquiring bitcoin just to pay for steam games with it, where it will be converted right back. Maybe some to test. Questioning the value as a result of the "usd -> btc -> usd" transfer isn't really applicable because it just generally doesn't apply anymore.

>>The only measure of success here is how much people do or do not use it.

No, that's your only measure of success. In order for Bitcoin to succeed as a viable payment platform, businesses also need to adopt it wholly, which means actually conducting business in Bitcoin rather than converting it to a "real" currency as soon as possible.

Basically, if they are treating it as hot potato, that means they see it as too unstable and risky.

If I sell a good or service to a resident of China, in CHY, and then convert CHY to USD....the CHY has failed?

I don't understand the need to require a business to hold the bitcoin in order to consider bitcoin a "success". In this scenario bitcoin has succeeded as being a cheap method of transferring value.

> Basically, if they are treating it as hot potato, that means they see it as too unstable and risky.

Eh, I'm not so sure. You are probably right, but at the same time they probably want USD for the same reason they get USD from Paypal or their merchant bank when someone pays in a different currency.

Is Paypal not a viable payment platform?

There are two parts to Bitcoin - some folks think it's a great store of value. I do not. I think it's an amazing decentralized transaction system that can replace VISA/MC - not replace the US Treasury.

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