Today, Valve has announced that the Steam gaming platform will not accept plus Bitcoin payments due to high fees and incredible volatility. Valve says that the transaction fees, which are passed on to the company by the payment processor Bitcoin Bitpay, exceeded $ 20 last week. Transaction fees were only 20 cents last spring when Valve began accepting digital currency for payment.

The Steam platform began accepting Bitcoin in April 2016, while the currency was trading around $ 450. It is ironic that Valve complains of the high volatility of Bitcoin; if they had actually held the Bitcoins that they were receiving instead of selling them immediately, they would be sitting on an absolute fortune.

Valve wrote, concerning the volatility of Bitcoin:

"Historically, the value of Bitcoin has been volatile, but the degree of volatility has become extreme in recent months, losing up to 25% in value over several days.This creates a problem for customers who are trying to buy games with Bitcoin. "

Although the volatility of Bitcoin is problematic in terms cash flow and business planning, the currency has always tended to fall. If the sellers kept even a fraction of their Bitcoin revenue, they would pay more than the transaction fees of the currency, in time.

High Fees

Valve also rightly complained of high charges using the Bitcoin network:

"In recent months, we have noted an increase in the volatility of the value of Bitcoin and a significant increase in transaction processing fees on the Bitcoin network.For example, the transaction fees charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have soared this year, reaching nearly $ 20 last week's transaction (compared to about $ 0.20 when we initially activated Bitcoin) .Unfortunately, Valve has no control over the amount of fees.These fees entail excessively high costs for the business. buying games by paying with Bitcoin. "

Valve is not alone; many in the Bitcoin space have long complained of high fees. The main developers of Bitcoin, after rejecting a proposal to increase the blocks, have put their hopes in a solution called "flash network". This network will move transactions out of the chain, theoretically retaining security while drastically reducing fees and confirmation times. Many in the digital currency industry advocate the use of Bitcoin as digital gold, rather than as a method of payment, in itself. Max Keizer estimates that the price of Bitcoin could reach $ 100,000 because of its usefulness as a store of value, while other digital currencies could be used for payments. Keizer wrote: