Steam Will Not Accept Bitcoin Payments Anymore

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When investors are looking how Bitcoin increases its value day after day and how it gets legitimized, other platforms stop accepting it. Due to high volatility and its high fees, the gaming platform Steam will not accept Bitcoin payments anymore.

Steam Can’t Deal With High Fees and Volatility

The announcement was made on December the 6^th on the Steam Blog. “Since today, Steam will no longer accept Bitcoin as a means of payment in our platform due to high fees and Bitcoin price fluctuation,” reads the post.

Steam processes Bitcoin payments through bitpay since April the 27^th 2016. In the first announcement, bitpay explained that Valve wanted to offer fast international payments to its Steam clients worldwide. In order to allow it, bitpay could be the platform to receive payments.

“Valve reached out to us because they were looking for a fast, international payment method for Steam users in emerging gaming markets in countries like India, China, and Brazil. While more users are coming online in these countries, traditional payment options like credit cards often aren’t available. As the internet’s universal currency, Bitcoin will allow Steam to easily reach gamers in every market around the world,” and here is the remarkable point “without the high fees or the risk of chargeback fraud that come with card payments,” reads the statement.

Bitcoin Increased Popularity

Bitcoin has been increasing in popularity the last year. Its price has exploded in the last month and fees and volatility are Bitcoin’s daily attributes. Many claim that the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange offering Bitcoin futures, legitimize the currency. That created a bull market that increased Bitcoin price at a rate never seen before.

“Historically, Bitcoin price has always been volatile, but during these months, the volatility rates have been extreme, and it has lost almost 25 percent of its price in just a few days. That’s a problem for the clients that want to buy games using Bitcoin,” keeps the statement.

And that’s clearly a problem that we have experienced. Fees have been increasing as well as the transactions processed by the network. Bitcoin Cash forked from the Bitcoin network in order to offer low fees and faster transactions. The scalability problem is one of the main discussions that the community is now debating.

Litecoin Attacks

Many wrote me today telling me to contact Steam to convince them to support Litecoin. Remember that they use @BitPay to help them accept Bitcoin. So lets instead convince BitPay that they should add Litecoin support because Litecoin is a great coin for payments. https://t.co/f9jW2Uh5Do

— Charlie Lee [LTC] (@SatoshiLite) December 8, 2017

Litecoin is a cryptocurrency that is very similar to Bitcoin but it offers faster transactions and lower fees. Charlie Lee, its creator, is trying to convince bitpay so as to accept Litecoin as a means of payment. Litecoin is a much more stable currency that bitcoin and it offers lower fees. If Bitpay decides to add it to its platform, Steam could be interested in accepting virtual currencies again.

In the last days, Litecoin has experienced an amazing price increase. At the moment is being traded at $152 dollars.