Screen grab from Steam platform
Investors of the popular cryptocurrency bitcoin were certainly delighted as its stock value has risen exponentially these past few weeks.
But among those not too pleased was Valve’s popular gaming and digital distribution platform Steam, which recently disallowed bitcoin transactions due to its volatility and high fees.
In a recent blog post, Steam addressed the recent surge and explained why it won’t be able to support the alternative payment system much longer.
“In the past few months we’ve seen an increase in the volatility in the value of bitcoin and a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the bitcoin network. For example, transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week (compared to roughly $0.20 when we initially enabled bitcoin),” the announcement read.
“Unfortunately, Valve has no control over the amount of the fee. These fees result in unreasonably high costs for purchasing games when paying with bitcoin. The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of bitcoin itself drops dramatically.”
Furthermore, since the cryptocurrency’s value keeps rapidly changing, Steam also had to make a lot of compromises in terms of purchasing.
Still, Steam is not closing its doors on possibly accepting the cryptocurrency once again in the future, stating: “The company adds that it may re-evaluate if accepting the cryptocurrency makes sense at a later date.” Khristian Ibarrola /ra
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