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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

If valve can escape the Microsoft store, it can handle a few payment processors.

what would happen if Valve accepted Cryptocurrency?

in turn, what might happen if valve decided to become a cryptocurrency exchange exclusive to the gaming community?

EDIT: another solution is to use a load-wallet based system to shroud transactions from your financial nanny. money in, money out, no explicit evidence of a purchase.

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Steam used to accept BTC payments in 2016 but they didn't want to deal with the probabilistic finality of bitcoin so they quickly removed the btc option. previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30478262

In 2016 this wasn't a solved problem but today it is

How is it fixed today? I'm not in the bitcoin game but doesn't the transaction have to be mined and that takes at least 10 minutes?

The landscape of third party companies who offer transaction insurance has increased. With bitcoin you have the lightning network.

The lightning network is a "solution" to Bitcoin in the same way that buying a new car fixes the old one.

I think Valve will not accept crypto unless they run out of options. They don't accept any games that use NFT's on their platform and haven't added crypto top-ups to this day, even though it would be simple for them via providers like Stripe

Steam used to support Bitcoin to add money to your Steam account. To my knowledge, they removed it due to issues with fees and other stuff.

It does not make sense to add crypto currencies unless there are official ones in the U.S/EU. Otherwise it is just asking more scamming/instability in the scale of Steam.

Load-wallet would probably be better.

Crypto is almost as bad as handing over your ID to see "adult" materials, because both require you to trust two parties (government ID stores and the general crypto community) that have shown themselves to not be trustworthy at all.

I'm not seeing how the "general crypto community" can be compared to a "government ID store".

I can count on people in the government to abuse having my ID linked to my online activity.

I can count on people in the crypto community to do unsavory things with my money to my financial detriment.

nobody would be able to see what you bought with the coins, only that you sent them to steam

for the 1000th time. the blockchain with all transaction and wallets being viewable and traceable is not a issue of cryptocurrency itself but certain inferior and outdated coins like bitcoin.

monero has solved that issue and it does not matter if you see any "IDs"

This presupposes that we should have to hand over ID to see "adult" materials, which is by itself an idiotic and deformed notion that should be killed dead before it gains more ground. Porn is not the same as buying a goddam gun or a bunch of liquor in a store, and I don't see why people should have to digitally identify themselves because they want to look at MILF porn or whatever..

> cryptocurrency

A technological solution to a political problem. Visa/mastercard/banks will just censor the off ramps next.

> wallet based system

What does this accomplish? The same institutions will request proof that all transactions are compliant, which will most easily handled by simply banning the content.

Whose off ramps? Steam doesn’t need CCs for that. The more likely situation is them preventing payments through their system for Steam and Steam having to pick.

We were talking about steam transacting in crypto to avoid the censorship.

The people pressuring visa and Mastercard to drop porn/sex related services are not going to suddenly roll over when those services switch to crypto. They’ll simply go for the crypto off-ramps.

accepting cryptocurrency is depending on jurisdiction a legal liability

people already are trying to use all kind of vectors to launder money, including steam

and cryptocurrency systems in general don't do the legal due diligence of a payment processor/bank

so you now have the problem of being partially responsibility to do that legal due diligence yourself and make your service more attractive to be abused as in money laundering schemes

but if things get worse they could consider creating a payment processor sub company, the issue with that is I think there are a lot of way Visa can mess with them in the US and it seems not necessary in the EU (as due to side effects of pushing/forcing banking payment system improvements you technically have a wide choice of alternatives to PayPal or Credit Card payment for only payment, it's just many solutions are niche so most sides don't bother for now (but things are changing))

They used to but removed it because nobody actually uses crypto currencies as currency.

They also already let you load funds onto a wallet for use later.

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