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Comment by rs186 | Hacker News Reader

Dumb question: what if Steam only takes cash or crypto payment for these games, and leave them on the market? Cash is loaded from debit card and can be used for buying any games, while crypto apparently always works for everything. Would they still be on the hook?

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IIRC the rule Mastercard cited was so vague that trying to workaround it almost seemed potentially pointless. It was basically a blanket "we think it makes MasterCard look bad so we end our relationship". Anyway, debit cards are still Visa/mastercard so using them as cash has the same problem. I was thinking they could just use Steam gift cards but since those are often themselves purchased in stores or with credit cards it seems to just push the problem a little further away.

I believe Steam did support bitcoin at one point but decided to end usage over because the price fluctuations made it to unpredictable on their end. Maybe the landscape has changed though.

That bitcoin decision was a long time ago. Long enough that it can be reversed. Other sites take bitcoin and manage it.

It's not about gaining a way to handle transactions without MasterCard. It's about losing MasterCard (or any other third party intermediary that follows their rules), and all of the accompanying customers who are accustomed to paying online with a credit card instead of going to a corner store and buying a Steam Card using cash.

>Steam did support bitcoin at one point but decided to end usage because the price fluctuations made it to unpredictable on their end.

Valve knew that there would be price fluctuations. Everyone knew that, and knew how to deal with it. They just priced the games in dollars, with a conversion to the Bitcoin value at the moment of sale.

But what Valve did NOT expect was that the Bitcoin blockchain would suddenly grow so popular and congested (which was a result of massive publicity from events such as Steam accepting Bitcoin). So suddenly, to Valve's surprise, the average fees to be sure that a payment would soon be processed on the blockchain fluctuated wildly upwards during that period, up to tens of dollars. The Blockchain congestion and high fees were exacerbated by technical and ideological arguments about how the Bitcoin network should function. The "small block" faction won, but Bitcoin quickly became a laughing stock as a method of payment, because second layer solutions to the network congestion weren't ready.

The high fees were a huge problem in themselves for Steam customers, and there were other support issues caused by Steam customer difficulty understanding how to use Bitcoin (and who can blame them?). Customers were angry because they had paid for a game, but their payments were delayed for days unless they paid an indeterminate Blockchain transaction fee which might be more than cost of the game they were trying to buy.

After a few months of that chaos, Steam dropped Bitcoin. So did many other retailers.

Ironic, Bitcoin payments work much better now and fees are lower, but it lost of a lot of goodwill from retailers like Steam during that period, and most of them have not come back.

Are you sure that Bitcoin payments work much better because the amount of payments has dissipated?

bitcoin lightning has been the solution for it

>Are you sure that Bitcoin payments work much better because the amount of payments has dissipated?

I don't know. On the base layer, payments are all just transactions on the Blockchain, like any other. So it's not easy to see whether a transaction is a payment or an "investor" speculating, or something else. Then there's also other layers, like Lightning.

My guess is the relative percentage of retail Bitcoin payments, compared to speculative transactions, is now lower than 2017, when Steam accepted Bitcoin. I don't know if absolute amount of payments has reduced. Maybe?

You could look at historical charts of average Bitcoin fees[0], which gives you an idea when retail Bitcoin payments are practical, and when the fees are too damn high. Fees often got above $4, sometimes much higher, in 2024 for example, which would unacceptable for something like buying a game from Steam. Though, still, that doesn't show what impact Lighting is having on retail payments.

[0] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

It would take a lot of effort for Mastercard/Visa to stop physical retailers from selling Steam gift cards. Beyond gift cards, there's also systems such as PaySafeCard, which lets you pay with cash at a physical store and spend it online at any merchant who accepts it using a code.

And for crypto they can just accept Monero. Steam accepted Bitcoin years ago, but stopped due to high fees and network congestion. Monero fixes that + makes it private like cash, and has been the de facto cryptocurrency for years now.[1]

[1] Random example https://xcancel.com/NanoGPTcom/status/1951300996329537625#m

What about just using checking account numbers like with your utility bills?

This is a better way to think about it: Valve is in a situation where they could maintain two payment regimes on their site: some content can be paid through methods X, Y and Z, while others cannot be paid by credit or debit cards but accept all other methods. That's some programming and payment routing change on their site, but might be within the possible. Valve can do that because they charge separately for each item. If passes or subscriptions, they would need to shift from one to two.

This would be harder - it seems - for something like OnlyFans where payments and censorship are all one soup shared among all content.

That's where it gets disgusting. They don't tolerate that solution, which is a proof that this has nothing to do with brand protection or chargeback rates or anything of sorts.

So either those poor games need to be kicked out, or everyone has to switch to cash/app overnight. The transition process has to be easy enough that the dumbest addict you have seen in worst fast food restaurant place can complete in few clicks. That has proven difficult for many, and sadly the former options are usually taken.

Debit cards still go through MasterCard and/or Visa. They could take crypto, but crypto is far too volatile for the types of transactions Valve wants to be handling.

What they mean is that you top up your Steam credit and rest is between you and Steam.

Volatility isn't an issue for the merchant - prices can be adjusted in real-time based on the cryptocurrency's value at the time of purchase, and if they don't want to be exposed, they can sell it immediately on purchase.

Whether or not Valve would want to encourage people to pay with crypto and expose their customer base to its volatility is another matter.

In a world where people need both fiat and crypto, the volatility of crypto precludes returns.

Besides being able to change prices (whether USD or bitcoin) in real time, Valve is also selling bits and global data center activity. Their prices are very disconnected from other prices to begin with. Not like if they were selling tomatoes at cost plus living wages. Plus or minus 10% from one day to the next is not necessarily relevant on a sale to sale basis.

Yes, but also the crypto option has been tried and absolutely doesn’t work.

Can you elaborate? If crypto is the only viable option to pay for something, I would agree due to the low amount of people familar in dealing with crypto. If it is an additional option, what part of it is not working?

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...

Well that was before Lightning was invented - that elimnates the high fees.

It really hasn't. Everything has been tried with crypto, except actually buying things with it.

To be fair, in the case of Steam they legitimately did try. They supported bitcoin purchases for nearly two years before they stopped, citing volatility and processing fees:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...

I wouldn't call using Bitcoin legitimately trying. Even in 2017 Monero existed, which solves both the fee and transaction time problems, and as an added bonus is way more private.

This is literally wrong. It's even googleable.

It was tried, way back when it started, and it didn't work very well. Maybe a modern blockchain can work better, but the transaction volumes of credit cards are orders of magnitudes above the busiest blockchain today.

Why not? I regularly buy products and services online with crypto and it works quite well, usually a better experience than with a credit card.

There are plenty of chains that can confirm transactions in a couple seconds, and if you're concerned with volatility, just use USDC/USDT. There are crypto payment processors that handle all of this and allow payment across a range of chains and handle the volatility so that the merchant doesn't need to worry about anything crypto and just receives fiat.

I think I trust Stripe and Steam, probably two of the biggest money movers online by volume, to know when something doesn't work over just you.

how do you "take cash" over the Internet?

Mullvad VPN takes cash, you post it to them.

This realistically doesn’t work that well above anything like a micro scale. It’s also a crime to mail cash across many borders, so it only really works domestically.

What about a system of agents who locally take cash then bulk transfer to Steam? Like some kind of middleman: a processor, if you will, of payments.

Cash handling isn't really the problem with this suggestion

I doubt Mullvad has anywhere near the volume of transaction Valve does. And mullvad has plenty of other payment methods, so only a tiny, tiny fraction of their userbase likely pays in mail-in cash.

I don't think Valve could feasibly implement this at their scale - especially if this method was the _only_ way to acquire the games in question.

Steam sells physical gift cards. You can buy them at convenience stores, Walmart, etc. you can pay cash for them.

those stores would absolutely stop carrying the gift cards if customers could not pay with visa/mastercard for them.

Japan lets you make payments for online content at convenience stores.

How it works is you purchase a product online and it gives you a barcode that can be scanned at any major convenience store. You go to the store, scan the code, hand over cash, and the content you bought is instantly unlocked once the payment is confirmed.

The closest thing is via an instant bank transfer, like the new FedNow protocol in the US.

I would say monero but it is actually superior because there is no serial number tracking.

Debit cards use the same network. Either way, it's a non-starter from a business perspective, even if they accepted cryptocurrency, majority of the economy does not use it.

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