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Comment by pekk | Hacker News Reader

You will need one to mine Valve's hatcoins

Although we're joking, I wonder if Bitcoin would be far more successful if it originated within a platform like Steam. Let's say Steam replaced their wallet with Hatcoins. They allow users to add Hatcoins from their bank account, send Hatcoins to other users, purchase hats, and Steam games at a 2% discount if using Hatcoins during 2014. Valve runs the main Hatcoin exchange, and you'll have millions of people using the currency within a year. If I run a gaming site, I could start accepting Hatcoin donations or subscriptions, since they're already popular with gamers. Or, I could pay for servers using Hatcoins, buy Minecraft items with Hatcoins, Humble Bundles, games from GreenManGaming and GamersGate, etc.

It seems like they would have something that Bitcoin doesn't, a lively economy and marketplace to add stability.

This reminds me of Microsoft Points et al which I find incredibly annoying. It's much friendlier to ask me to pay for things in the currency I use for everything else in my life.

That was my thought. Pushing a new electronic currency in a locked-in environment such as steam comes across as a bit too company town and company store for my tastes.

No reason not to support multiple currencies, of course.

I don't think steam has that many users - if I remember correctly, steam numbers are dwarfed by WoW / LoL (PC) and console shooter numbers.

You'd be better off introducing a Call of Duty Coin... Call them Dogtags or something.

Steam generally has around 3.5 to 6 million concurrent users at any time. Dota 2 usually pulls around 500k users.

You can check Steam user counts here (http://store.steampowered.com/stats/).

Not sure how console user bases stack up, but that's a pretty wide base.

Depends if you define 60 000 000 as many.

Wow had 12M at its peak.

And there is huge overlap. LoL gamers and WoW are subset of steam users.

tencent already tried this before it was banned by the government.

I would definitely sell off my TF2 hat collection if I could legitimately buy something else with the proceeds (even if it was only other Steam games.)

You can?

http://steamcommunity.com/market/

Most hats aren't saleable on the market, but you can trade the hats for keys, which you can sell for about $2.25 a pop.

Yeah, the trading shit for other shit meta-game doesn't interest me at all.

Me neither, I'm just saying this "sell your virtual hat collection to pay for video games" future is already here.

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