'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted Bitcoin for payments

Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by ipaddr on Saturday February 26, 2022 @12:03PM (#30479386)

It provided a great way to buy weed before it was legalized and transaction fees skyrocketed.

Bitcoin at $5,000 a coin was extremely useful for transactions. Bitcoin at $50,000 make it less useful because of scaling issues.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by doomroot on Saturday February 26, 2022 @12:52PM (#30479880)

Have you tried lightning network its extremely fast and cheap and pretty reliable these days. Many great mobile wallets support it now, Blue wallet, Muun, Phoenix. Hell even Cash App supports outgoing lightning payments now. Scan a QR code few seconds later done, final, irreversible.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by ipaddr on Saturday February 26, 2022 @02:36PM (#30481018)

I haven't I'm use to having an account on an exchange and moving money directly to the account.

Is there a way I could use the lightening network directly if my exchange doesn't use it behind the scene?

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by beardog on Saturday February 26, 2022 @03:25PM (#30481553)

You're not supposed to be using an exchange for payments, you are meant to have a wallet, ideally a non-custodial one.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by ipaddr on Saturday February 26, 2022 @09:24PM (#30484711)

I worry about malware finding my wallet or my drive dying and losing the wallet more than using an exchange.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by beardog on Saturday February 26, 2022 @10:49PM (#30485239)

Malware on your PC can take control of your exchange account as much as it can a normal wallet. The drive dying is why you're supposed to backup your wallet or at least record the seed.

On an exchange you're vulnerable to compromise both from your end and on the exchange's end

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by mccorrinall on Saturday February 26, 2022 @03:01PM (#30481266)

You currently pay about 10 pennies for a transaction which is included in the next block.

Using Lightning is even cheaper.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by CJefferson on Saturday February 26, 2022 @03:45PM (#30481798)

Really, googling around, average transaction fee looks about $1.70? Which is much more than I pay through any other service.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by mccorrinall on Saturday February 26, 2022 @10:01PM (#30484943)

Average transaction does not equal a normal human's transaction. Those include arbitrary data being embedded into the blockchain, smart contracts, paying to a lot of recipients (e.g. exchanges batching payments) etc.

Just take a look at the most recent blocks, and check the one to one or one to two transactions. https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions?s=fee_usd(asc)&q...

You will see that those transactions cost ~0.10 USD :)

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK on Saturday February 26, 2022 @01:24PM (#30480220)

Well, my friend in Russia just yesterday donated $10,000 in Bitcoin to Ukrainian defense fund. Had he done that using paypal, he'd already be in Gulag being raped with a broken bottle.

Now he wants to leave Russia, but Russia is being banned from the SWIFT network, so he can't get any of his savings out. Enter Bitcoin again.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by newaccount74 on Saturday February 26, 2022 @11:58AM (#30479318)

The only real use case that people keep mentioning is transferring large-ish amounts of money (>1000 USD) internationally.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by thallium205 on Saturday February 26, 2022 @12:07PM (#30479428)

Which is not hard if you have a bank account that is in any tier above poor person consumer level.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by rabuse on Saturday February 26, 2022 @04:18PM (#30482066)

Unless you're Russian now

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by doomroot on Saturday February 26, 2022 @01:19PM (#30480163)

It's a permission-less payment network, can you not think of a single thing that would be useful for?

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by rabuse on Saturday February 26, 2022 @04:18PM (#30482062)

Xi angrily joins the chat.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by Finnucane on Saturday February 26, 2022 @12:09PM (#30479457)

No.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by reaperducer on Saturday February 26, 2022 @11:45AM (#30479154)

Does it actually provide any damn value at all at a macro level?

It provides macro value to coinbros and wantrapreneurs who think that bragging on social media about fake money is the same thing as owning real money. I guess that's something.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by abi on Saturday February 26, 2022 @12:18PM (#30479554)

Say you're a Ukrainian fleeing refuge and you want store your life's savings somewhere safe. Pretty damn useful there. If you don't want to deal with the price fluctuations of BTC or ETH, buy stablecoins instead.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by PragmaticPulp on Saturday February 26, 2022 @01:11PM (#30480088)

> Say you're a Ukrainian fleeing refuge and you want store your life's savings somewhere safe.

Doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone wire your bank account money to a crypto exchange, convert it to crypto, transfer the crypto to a different bank in another country, then withdraw it when they could just wire the money directly to the other country’s bank?

If you can’t wire money out of your bank account to somewhere else, you probably can’t exchange it for crypto either.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by IgorPartola on Saturday February 26, 2022 @12:46PM (#30479829)

Right so other crypto is just as good if not better for this?

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by rosndo on Saturday February 26, 2022 @12:58PM (#30479949)

Yes.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by pfooti on Saturday February 26, 2022 @12:37PM (#30479719)

there's also banks.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by esosac on Saturday February 26, 2022 @12:50PM (#30479856)

i don't know about ukraine, but i live in venezuela and i can't do an international wire transfer here. so some people can't rely on banks, but i probably can rely on someone around here wanting to take my cash or car or house and give me bitcoin if i needed to go away. i use localbitcoins a lot of buy local currency in exchange for bitcoin... and i'm not a "crypto person", but it happened to be super useful for me here in that way

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by nmilo on Saturday February 26, 2022 @12:46PM (#30479827)

But which bank are you trusting in a time of war? We've seen countries have the power to subvert savings accounts, e.g. Greece limited bank withdrawls to £5000/month. Do you trust these banks more than a distributed ledger? This is a question that needs real thought and evaluation, and crypto might be a useful option. Diversification is important.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by rosndo on Saturday February 26, 2022 @01:01PM (#30479974)

My Ukrainian bank card still works, but yesterday when I had to send a friend 40k UAH I had to split it into 8 transfers.

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by loyl on Saturday February 26, 2022 @05:05PM (#30482429)

What bank are you using I am trying to send money to my family and no transaction works

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Re:'50% of transactions were fraudulent' when Steam accepted... by rosndo on Saturday February 26, 2022 @06:16PM (#30483030)

My account is with first Ukrainian.

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