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Comment by space_rock | Hacker News Reader

This article is incoherent. Say what you like about Bitcoin but fraudulent payments are not possible. And yes Gabe is right that people in crypto are criminals running scam projects

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Fraudulent payments are very much possible in the "buying stuff with a stolen credit card" kind of way. This is a much more common type of fraud than the "double spend" attacks Bitcoin protects against.

Bitcoin is only resilient to fraud only if you define fraud as "violating the rules of the blockchain". Any definition of fraud that involves meatspace is possible.

Stolen credit cards are a problem for the merchant because the charges could be reversed by the bank and merchant will incur the loss.

I don't see how that is even remotely possible with Crypto. How did Steam lose money ? My guess is they might be accepting it through some payment provider (so not a true crypto) who has in their T&C to be able to reverse transactions (which must be happening in Cash on the Steam facing side).

Yes they were using the BitPay provider when they were accepting Bitcoin, I assume they were made aware of that it was possible to track the transactions back to fraudulent credit card transactions, which I guess in some way could still make them liable for it.

This is absolutely not what happened. Why come up with such crazy theories when this just comes down to double spends of unconfirmed transactions?

> Another thing was that the vast majority of those transactions, for whatever reason, were fraudulent, where people were repudiating transactions or using illegal sources of funds and things like that.

Seems like it was multiple things and "fraud" is just a catch-all term and Gabe didn't bother to list everything that they considered to be fraud.

Odds are that Gabe doesn’t even actually know or remember the reason.

It might not necessarily be that they lost money, it is possible it happened through the way you are suggesting, but opening up for crypto does mean Steam becomes a money laundering platform.

Criminal creates a shit game and then uses the crypto to buy that game (with alt accounts) and since *very* few developers would be happy with getting paid in crypto, Valve has to convert it into fiat(?) currency.

That could be a problem but then that would be money laundering not fraud (and Steam won't be on hook for it - just like Amazon isn't for its gift cards).

The purchases are fraudulent. A single party buys the game from themselves many times, desiring to look like a diverse crowd making legitimate purchases.

> Stolen credit cards are a problem for the merchant because

Because they don't want to process illegal transactions with illegally acquired money, because they don't want to abide or facilitate criminal conduct, wherever possible. Life and business is not merely nor always about the potential to lose money through legal ramifications.

Yes fraud is possible with credit cards. You correctly left out Bitcoin. As fraudulent payments are not possible with Bitcoin

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