Steam no longer supports Bitcoin due to high transaction fees

Beijing time, December 7th, Steam, a gaming platform that previously supported Bitcoin payments, has officially announced that it will abandon this payment method due to the high transaction fees of Bitcoin.

The original announcement is as follows:

Due to the high transaction fees and frequent fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin, starting today, we will no longer accept Bitcoin payments on the Steam platform.

Over the past few months, we have seen a significant increase in transaction fees on the Bitcoin network as the value of Bitcoin has become more volatile. For example, this year the fees charged to customers on the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed, reaching a peak of nearly $20 last week (when we first started supporting Bitcoin payments, they were only about $0.20). Unfortunately, Valve has no control over the rise and fall of these fees, so when purchasing games with Bitcoin, these fees have unreasonably increased the cost of purchase. High fees have become even more problematic when the value of Bitcoin has dropped dramatically.

The value of Bitcoin has been fluctuating for a long time. But in the past few months, the volatility has become extreme, with drops of up to 25% in a few days. This poses a problem for customers trying to buy games with Bitcoin. When checking out on Steam, customers transfer X amount of Bitcoin to buy the game, plus Y amount of Bitcoin to pay for the Bitcoin network's fees. Since the value of Bitcoin is only guaranteed to remain constant for a certain period of time, if the transaction cannot be completed within that time window, the amount of Bitcoin required for the transaction will change. Recently, the range of changes has increased, and the difference between the previous and the next price is unusually large.

Typically this problem is solved by either refunding the user the purchase amount or asking them to transfer more funds to make up the difference. In either case, the user is once again subject to the Bitcoin network fees. This year, we have seen more and more customers encounter this problem. The fees are currently so high that neither refunding nor asking the customer to make up the difference is feasible (and the additional funds themselves are at risk of not being paid for by the Bitcoin network, depending on how much the Bitcoin value changes while the Bitcoin network is processing the additional funds).

Therefore, we no longer have any reason to continue supporting Bitcoin as a payment method. Perhaps in the future we will re-evaluate whether Bitcoin makes sense for us and the Steam community.

For those customers who have been impacted by underpayment or processing fees, we will continue to do our best to resolve your issues.

- Steam Team