IIRC the rule Mastercard cited was so vague that trying to workaround it almost seemed potentially pointless. It was basically a blanket "we think it makes MasterCard look bad so we end our relationship". Anyway, debit cards are still Visa/mastercard so using them as cash has the same problem. I was thinking they could just use Steam gift cards but since those are often themselves purchased in stores or with credit cards it seems to just push the problem a little further away.
I believe Steam did support bitcoin at one point but decided to end usage over because the price fluctuations made it to unpredictable on their end. Maybe the landscape has changed though.
>Steam did support bitcoin at one point but decided to end usage because the price fluctuations made it to unpredictable on their end.
Valve knew that there would be price fluctuations. Everyone knew that, and knew how to deal with it. They just priced the games in dollars, with a conversion to the Bitcoin value at the moment of sale.
But what Valve did NOT expect was that the Bitcoin blockchain would suddenly grow so popular and congested (which was a result of massive publicity from events such as Steam accepting Bitcoin). So suddenly, to Valve's surprise, the average fees to be sure that a payment would soon be processed on the blockchain fluctuated wildly upwards during that period, up to tens of dollars. The Blockchain congestion and high fees were exacerbated by technical and ideological arguments about how the Bitcoin network should function. The "small block" faction won, but Bitcoin quickly became a laughing stock as a method of payment, because second layer solutions to the network congestion weren't ready.
The high fees were a huge problem in themselves for Steam customers, and there were other support issues caused by Steam customer difficulty understanding how to use Bitcoin (and who can blame them?). Customers were angry because they had paid for a game, but their payments were delayed for days unless they paid an indeterminate Blockchain transaction fee which might be more than cost of the game they were trying to buy.
After a few months of that chaos, Steam dropped Bitcoin. So did many other retailers.
Ironic, Bitcoin payments work much better now and fees are lower, but it lost of a lot of goodwill from retailers like Steam during that period, and most of them have not come back.
Are you sure that Bitcoin payments work much better because the amount of payments has dissipated?
>Are you sure that Bitcoin payments work much better because the amount of payments has dissipated?
I don't know. On the base layer, payments are all just transactions on the Blockchain, like any other. So it's not easy to see whether a transaction is a payment or an "investor" speculating, or something else. Then there's also other layers, like Lightning.
My guess is the relative percentage of retail Bitcoin payments, compared to speculative transactions, is now lower than 2017, when Steam accepted Bitcoin. I don't know if absolute amount of payments has reduced. Maybe?
You could look at historical charts of average Bitcoin fees[0], which gives you an idea when retail Bitcoin payments are practical, and when the fees are too damn high. Fees often got above $4, sometimes much higher, in 2024 for example, which would unacceptable for something like buying a game from Steam. Though, still, that doesn't show what impact Lighting is having on retail payments.
[0] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
bitcoin lightning has been the solution for it
That bitcoin decision was a long time ago. Long enough that it can be reversed. Other sites take bitcoin and manage it.
It's not about gaining a way to handle transactions without MasterCard. It's about losing MasterCard (or any other third party intermediary that follows their rules), and all of the accompanying customers who are accustomed to paying online with a credit card instead of going to a corner store and buying a Steam Card using cash.
It would take a lot of effort for Mastercard/Visa to stop physical retailers from selling Steam gift cards. Beyond gift cards, there's also systems such as PaySafeCard, which lets you pay with cash at a physical store and spend it online at any merchant who accepts it using a code.
And for crypto they can just accept Monero. Steam accepted Bitcoin years ago, but stopped due to high fees and network congestion. Monero fixes that + makes it private like cash, and has been the de facto cryptocurrency for years now.[1]
[1] Random example https://xcancel.com/NanoGPTcom/status/1951300996329537625#m
What about just using checking account numbers like with your utility bills?