There’s no way for Valve to accept and then immediately convert Crypto to USD.
I didn’t realize that. It does seem an insurmountable problem.
The fundamental flaw with all current crypto is that it’s far too volatile to use as a currency. The only reasonable use for it at the moment is as a high risk commodity which is the vast overwhelming majority of what we see. Any so called “currency” that regularly sees price swings of multiple percentage points in a day isn’t actually a currency and is unsuitable to be used as one.
Adding to this is the problem of transaction times. Actual payment systems typically have transaction times of less than a second, occasionally a second or two. Bitcoin in contrast can take multiple minutes, sometimes hours or even days to confirm a transaction. There’s no way for Valve to accept and then immediately convert Crypto to USD. The process would inherently involve at least to transactions, one to transfer the crypto to Valves wallet, then a second to transfer from Valves wallet to the exchanges wallet, and only then could Valve attempt to sell that crypto. The financial uncertainty involved in all of that is entirely unacceptable for a business.
At this moment there is only one potentially viable way of approaching this and it’s government regulation of some kind. Either government needs to regulate that payment processors get no say in the contents of customers business, or else they need to regulate the adoption of a neutral digital payment system. One possible example of what that could look like would be the GNU Taler system which might eventually become a payment system in Switzerland but isn’t yet.
Boddhisatva@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
swelter_spark@reddthat.com 18 hours ago
Bitpay allows companies to accept crypto payments and receive it as real currency automatically.
deafboy@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Wait. Bitpay is still around? That was the company Valve has used before. It was the de-facto standard for every eshop accepting bitcoin. Until they decided to implement identity checks, and only support payment from wallets implementing certain protobuf-based payment protocol. Which made them slide into obscurity pretty fast.
Nighed@feddit.uk 21 hours ago
What about the so called ‘stablecoins’?
(Although those sound dodgy AF to me?, not backed 1-1 anymore?)
Revan343@lemmy.ca 13 hours ago
Afaik no current stablecoin is proven via audit to be 1-1 backed, not sure if any are still claiming it.
Algorithmic stablecoins on the other hand are only stableish; see the terra/luna fiasco
misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours ago
Stablecoins are the answer here. Theoretically though if cryptocurrencies were very widely used they’d be more stable, like actual currencies (probably $100T market cap of actual use, not just investments, so not any time soon).
Note stablecoins have “institutional/existential” risk. Dai is decentralized but as seen with Terra/Luna they can be attacked in many ways.
Generally… Just keep a small balance in crypto, whatever you plan to spend in the next few months.
LunaChocken@programming.dev 20 hours ago
Stable coins… Aka gold? I heard gold is pretty stable.
Yes sir, I’d like to buy this game with this bar of gold. At Steam’s headquarters.
Nighed@feddit.uk 19 hours ago
Cryptocurrency that is pegged 1-1 against a normal currency. I think they have some limitations though.
LunaChocken@programming.dev 11 hours ago
It was a joke. Mocking stable coins for how they never compare to golds stability.
tekato@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Your debit card transaction does not happen in seconds, it actually takes days to complete.
orclev@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Yes, but actually no. In the strictest sense that is true in that it isn’t “officially” settled typically for a day or two. However, the reason why businesses are willing to accept credit card transactions is that there’s a soft approval that happens pretty much instantly and weeds out nearly every non-fraud instance of non-payment. Once that soft approval comes back (which remember happens within a second or two) the retailer can be confident that the card is tied to a valid account, that has a large enough balance to cover the transaction, and barring fraud dispute it will go through and they’ll get paid. If something were to go wrong in that process there’s also banks and the CC processor that the business could go after in court to get their money.
In contrast crypto takes several minutes to go through if not significantly longer, and if something goes wrong in that process there’s no legal recourse of any kind. If a business were to allow product to leave their store prior to that minute+ approval process and it fails, they’re screwed, they just have to eat that cost.
tekato@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Yes. That’s why cryptocurrencies won’t work in a physical store because the customer would have to stay in store for several minutes until the merchant can release the product.
But this is not an issue for online marketplaces like Steam. Customers should be willing to wait 10-20 minutes to get their video game key, or for Amazon to start processing a delivery. Faster cryptocurrencies like Litecoin actually take around 3 minutes to confirm transactions. Mullvad’s model is pretty good, where your account doesn’t get updated until the transaction is confirmed.
It sounds like a good compromise, unless dealing with payment processor policies is not as bad as they make it sound.
spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 15 hours ago
Genuine question, but what about stable coins?
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 18 hours ago
I think it’s more likely for me to win the mega jackpot, and I don’t even buy lottery tickets.