When Steam announced they started to accept Bitcoin payments, the community was over the moon with excitement. This was yet another major player accepting cryptocurrency, further validating this revolutionary payment method. Now that the platform is once again accepting zero-confirmation transactions, all seems to be well with the world.
For quite some time, the Steam platform insisted on having at least one Bitcoin network confirmation before a purchase would be completed. Albeit this is not a major issue for most people, it could take up to ten minutes until this happened. Keeping in mind how they rely on BitPay to process payments, this decision seemed a bit weird.
Lo and behold, things have shifted back to their standard procedure once again. Steam purchases are completed as soon as transactions hit the network, to much joy of Bitcoin community members. No one wanted to wait 10 minutes before a game starts downloading, a process that can take up quite some time as well.
For now, it remains unclear as to what has caused this transaction confirmation switch. There was no official communication from either Steam or BitPay regarding this change.It is possible the company was experimenting with some settings, although it seems a bit odd to do so.
Requiring zero confirmations for transactions is often seen as a security risk. Bitcoin double spends may occur at any given time. This is why Steam has partnered with BitPay to process cryptocurrency payments. If a double-spend were executed, the payment processor would be responsible for any financial losses.
To be more precise, BitPay would be held responsible based on which risk settings Valve has set for the Steam platform. It is good to see the platform process Bitcoin payments quicker again. We can only hope to see some statistics regarding Bitcoin usage on the Steam platform in the future.
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