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Could they accept crypto? I can pay for my shady IPTV service with it, so why not games too? There's gotta be a way around this.
Steam gift cards can be paid in cash
They could easily accept crypto. The problem is paying devs and staff. You have to pay them with dollars or their native currency.
If crypto was mass adopted, this is the ultimate answer and would put them out of business anyways.
No, they could not, not easily.
... Yes. These are... the main reasons why this is not easy.
You're basically either running your own FOREX exhange, which is costly, complicated, expensive and intensive...
Or you are holding a significant chunk of your operating budget in... one, many, all cryptos? Which is extremely financially risky...
Or, you're paying people directly in crypto, which ironically, probably a vast majority of people and entities that publish on Steam would quit the platform if that was mandated... kinda like how MC+Visa making a unilateral decision forced Steam to ban a bunch of games.
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You're doing magical thinking.
Stop that.
Or something like Gnu Taler, which has many of the advantages of crypto with few of the problems.
Stablecoins already solve that. Not very trustworthy because they could in theory do the same but as a temporary solution should work.
Quick question, which stablecoins have actually been stable for 5 years?
10?
Ok, so we've got a single stable coin that's been fairly stable for 5 years, good start.
Now, how do I know which ones that were around 5 years ago....would be this stable, 5 years back in time?
How do I know this one will be stable for another 5 years?
Is there... some kind of objective analysis I can do here, of all stablecoins, to at least have an idea of this, or am I throwing darts while blindfolded?
Businesses tend to like certainty and predictability when it comes to the fundamentals of their operations.
USDC and USDT have also been stable for quite some time.
USDC might be the only one I'd really trust though. Since it's backed by Coinbase and Circle, it seems extremely unlikely to break down in any way. Because the powers at be wouldn't allow it. Too much institutional investment.
Yes, by which ones are peer to peer and which ones are centralized. That's also why there doesn't need to be a bunch of them.
Cool, how do I determine that?
Is there some kind of... universal metric, a p2p to centralized scale, that is accurate, transparent, and stays basically the same... for a deacde?
Unfortunately not, it's like picking the right Unix-like OS in 2003.
It's always been BSD, it'll always be BSD.
... and that is my point.
This is an extremely unreasonable paradigm to expect a business, or really any kind of enterprise or endeavor beyond a fairly low stakes hobby to be built off of and operate from.
A good manager can address this problem by hiring engineers who understand what they're talking about. There's no score for decentralization because there's a lot of moving parts; it's not just a single percentage score.
Every single large scale retailer I am aware of, that has attempted to offer an ability to buy at least some segment of its goods via a crypto coin, directly... has abandoned this attempt after a few years.
You just assert this problem is solved by hiring 'competent engineers', yet no one has actually figured out how to do this, beyond basically black/gray markets, and hyper niche privacy oriented digital services.
Again, the managers, the CEOs of this business... would still need some way of objectively assessing what is and is not 'competent engineering'.
I... assume you are not familiar with modern software related hiring processes, where it has been a running joke for over a decade that HR has literally no comprehension of what they ask for in job postings, and thus has no real way to evaluate candidates by competency, they often cannot even come close to even describing the actual nature of the job.
Do you actually need another example, this time of a company accepting crypto for 5+ years? Yeah, hiring competent engineers is hard, yet you'll still go out of business if you don't. 😭
Oh yeah sure totally, not like 1/5 of the US tech sector just got laid off and their work handed to LLM AIs and a handful of vibe coders that literally are definitionally incompetent.
You completely do not understand how businesses work.
Keep dreamin buddy, you can get to the moon if you master astral projection.
Sounds like these LLMs are functional replacements, maybe they can simplify decentralization down to a single number for you.
Yeah dude convert that shit as soon as you get it, don’t hold it. I’m not a fan but for receiving salary or processing payments in USD it does the job
See my point here is:
Stablecoins are not actually meaningfully stable, they are not a realistic solution.
Yeah they all have depegged at some point I guess and Tether offloads the risk of the shitty Chinese bonds or whatever they’re investing in on you as a token holder.
Circle is SEC regulated which makes USDC a bit more trustworthy but if we have learnt anything from the banking crisis then that this is no guarantee. Plus they depegged to like 0.87 once I think.
My biggest issue with stables is actually that they all have asset freezing mechanisms built into their smart contracts which goes completely against the idea of decentralization. Not to mention that they’re a privacy nightmare as well.
I totally agree with you that they’re not a long term solution but they can be useful if you just use them to send / receive money vs actually keeping them in your wallet. In a perfect world we’d be all using Monero at Solana speed & cost.
I am not as well versed on Solana, but yeah, as best I can tell, and I've been following crypto since Satoshi's paper dropped, since before Mt Gox became a trading house...
Monero is the only crypto that is really even close to kind of being the bare minimum starting point that Satoshi wanted Bitcoin to be.
And... we still don't have any kind of broad, tangible uses case for any crypto... other than scams, gray/black market stuff, money laundering, extremely privacy focused services, and extremely speculative investing.
Crypto is basically a problematic solution, still searching for an actual problem it can actually solve better than what has come before.
Solana is awesome in terms of tech, it does everything that ethereum can do but faster and cheaper. The problem is that the foundation has unlimited voting power and it’s unclear if that’s ever gonna change. So the protocol is decentralized but the economics are only decentralized if the foundation keeps listening to the community.
IMO the use cases are there, I can send Solana instantly and at ridiculously low fees around the globe. Let’s say I wanna wire 10k USD to Europe from anywhere else, if I go through my bank it’s insanely expensive and will take days if not weeks.
Another use case is that as long as I hold native token, they’re mine. If Trump declared me a political enemy and freezes my assets, well, he can’t freeze my XMR or SOL, so that’s another use case, protecting yourself against malicious governments.
Finally, as for XMR the use case is private internet money. With cash transactions becoming rarer this is super important.
So I think decentralization is the use case. But I’m worried that it’s never gonna happen because corpos are gonna lobby promising projects like Solana and XMR is gonna get abandoned
Ok, yeah, I can absolutely see at least some real, relative utility in Solana then, if it is basically the fastest transacting and also least energy intensive crypto...
Though yeah, being essentially monopolized in terms of governance is a pretty big flaw, in a lot of possible scenarios.
At this point, I just wanna genuinely thank you for being the least deluded and most reasonable crypto person I've talked to in a long while... you seem to have a much more realistic view on all this than the vast majority of others I encounter.
=D
Yeah I think we agree that XMR is currently the best option in terms of... actually private and secure transactions...
But of course, it is still fairly difficult to actually pull XMR out as a standard currency, or buy into it, in a way that is actually not traceable.
Wouldn't solve the problem.
If Steam republished all its now censored games, and magically developed and implemented a world class crypto payment system overnight...
Then Steam is still in breach of MC/Visas terms, and MC and Visa drop them, and now everyone has no choice other than to use GabeBucks or w/e to purchase Steam games with.
Also, Valve now pays employees and game publishers in GabeBucks.
Which would cause a fuck ton of games to leave Steam.
Are they even in breach of those terms right now? My understanding was that it only mentions illegal games. This was part of the reason why MC isn't even talking to Valve, because they have no leg to stand on.
Are they in breach right now?
Evidently no...
But the entire problem at this point is that no one actually knows what the actual, specific guidelines even are.
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MC + Visa get pressured from Aussie Puritans.
MC + Visa basically have a Zoom call with Steam and Itch, and tap on the gigantic sign in the backdrop, at one specific rule... which is actually pretty vague.
Steam and Itch then do their best to interperet that as broadly as possible, update their own policies.
Gamers revolt, blow up MC + Visas phones and emails.
MC and Visa backpedal, claim that well actually, Step 2 didn't go down like that, they were actually pressured by... all their other partner client banks, whom they also largely lord over with an extreme power imbalance?
New local laws, which are not specified at all?
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The entire problem is that MC and Visa just thought they could swing their dick around, make vague threats, leave Steam and Itch to ... figure out all the details... and then that blew up in their faces.
Had they actually done a legitimate amount of research, such that they could actually give much more specific guidelines, you know maybe involving Steam and Itch in the process, in a mutually collaborative way, instead of an authoritarian way?
Well then this mess would not have happened.
And now, actually doing this is the only way to fix the situation.
... They could have just done this from the get go, and not have caused mass confusion and a huge consumer revolt.
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So this all isn't me disagreeing with you, its basically me agreeing, yes-anding, just expanding on how the entire fucking problem didn't even need to exist, the problem is the utter lack of clarity and specificity, was borne out of total hubris on the part of MC + Visa.
I just think, if it went to court, Valve would eat MC's lunch. So I'm not sure they should be worried about being in breach of terms (that they haven't even breached).
I hear you, but I wouldn't go that far.
You think Steam is a money printing machine?
MC and Visa are payment processors.
Literally every credit or debit transaction that involves them?
Oh yeah, they shave a penny or two or sometimes more off of that transaction, the business and actual banks involved usually eat it, not too long ago it would be much more common for retailers to pass some of it to the consumer as well.
Its the Office Space scam, but actually legit, at a muuuch grander scale.
Thats a fucking money printing machine, they unironically have at least 10,000x more money to throw at lawyers than Valve does.
It doesn't matter how many lawyers you have, when Valve is literally simply not in violation of the terms of their contract.
And it is the legal system that determines whether or not a contract has or has not been breached.
Just like it is also the legal system that determines whether or not a company is a harfmul monopoly.
Your opinion is one I agree with, but that isn't how things work, there has to be an official arbiter that agrees with or disagrees with that, and those arbiters are called courts, which are full of lawyers making arguments, and the best lawyers tend to cost the most money.
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Also... what, is Valve going to sue Visa and MC for... Visa and MC choosing not to do business with them?
There is no legal mechanism that forces Visa and MC to do business with Valve, that punishes Visa and MC should they choose not to.
This is like suing a person at a farmer's market for not buying an apple.
Or, that is roughly what Visa and MC's lawyers would argue.
I don't think Valve would sue MC. They would just ignore the demands that conflict with their agreement (i.e. removing games that aren't illegal), and the honus would be on MC to sue Valve.
Which they probably wouldn't, unless I'm mistaken about the terms of the contract. Which is certainly possible.
Minor nitpick:
It's just onus, no h. English is inconsistent.
Herb, lol.
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But anyway... so, this has yet to go to court.
If Valve just... does their own intepretation, unbans some games, Visa and MC can just say welp you violated the partner rules, no more payments for you.
Now, Valve has to do a prolonged legal battle to prove wrongful termination of contract ... while also having their money printing machine offline.
And also, all that would do is possibly award them compensatory damages.
A court cannot compel a business transaction (an ongoing partnership) or partnership anywhere near as much as it can compel people, corporations have more rights than people.
If it could, well then we have turned the economy on its head, now judges run businesses, not CEOs.
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Maybe there is some kind of wrongful termination / non renewal of contract clause, but:
1 - I doubt it
2 - Well you'd be having lawyers argue the validity of that anyway.
Valve and MC + Visa both currently do not want to take this to an actual lawsuit because it would be extremely costly in financial / reputational terms for each of them.
Visa and MC and Valve would all massively lose financially if their agreements fell apart, Visa and MC and Valve as well could also suffer massive reputational damage depending on how exactly the public narrative forms around the lawsuit... and lawyers are quite expensive.
Nobody actually wants to pull the trigger, because its akin to a MAD scenario with nukes.
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That is why we are getting this weird tap unfolding basically PR war, where both sides are angling snd making essentislly veiled threats... but not actually seeming to do much beyond posturing.
This kind of shit happens all the time between corporations, its usually just that it stays internal to the involved companies, you read about it two decades later in an autobiography named 'My life as a corporate big shot' or whatever.
They sell them at gamestop and best buy.
Crypto is volatile, any volatile currency is not a good currency to be used, as most people will either hoard it or trade it. Alternatively people can use steam wallet.
DAI is pegged to the US dollar
But what is USD pegged to? 🤔
I believe last time I saw it it was hanging from Donnie's diaper, like a forgotten strip of toilet paper...
You can probably find a place to buy Steam gift cards with crypto...
10 or so years ago, Steam accepted payments in Bitcoin, for some reason they stopped, so they certinaly can do that but chose not to.
Also, 99% of people would not use it so wouldn't change much.
You might, but most won't.