Steam no longer accepts bitcoin payments
The Steam platform, the world's largest online gaming retailer, with estimated revenues of $ 3.47 billion in 2016, banned Bitcoin as a currency that could be used by users to make transactions.
The decision was taken because Bitcoin's extreme volatility made it almost impossible to set an exact price for more than a few minutes for the games and software sold by the company.
Also, single-payment commissions for Bitcoin reached nearly $ 20 last week, more than the full value of many of Steam's products.
Valve has announced that Bitcoin payments on Steam are no longer available.
“Over the past few months, we have seen Bitcoin’s growing volatility and a significant increase in transaction processing fees in the Bitcoin network. For example, the fees charged by the Bitcoin network have exploded this year, reaching nearly $ 20/transaction last week, compared to $ 0.2 a commission applied when Bitcoin was introduced as a payment option. ”
Bitcoin value was always been unstable, but in the past week, volatility has hit previously unreachable rates, with the virtual currency dropping or rising by 25-30% in a few days.
These can cause problems when a user of Steam virtual store tries to buy a game using Bitcoin. According to the company, there have been many cases where users have placed an order, but until the check-out and actual Bitcoin payment was processed, the price of the game was completely different.
“The normal solution to this problem was either the return the amount originally paid by the user or the request for it to pay an additional amount to cover the Bitcoin variation.
In both cases, however, the user had to repay the transaction fee applied by the Bitcoin network”
Bitcoin was valued at $ 15,019 on Thursday, representing a 1.400% increase from $ 997 at the beginning of the year.
