That empire won't fall imo, but competitors will become stronger and more popular in future: GOG, Humble Bundle and etc.

I think that, if Steam ever falls, then Humble will fall shortly after that, too. I just checked their store and less than 30% of their catalogue is DRM-free, the rest of that is either a Steam key redemption or (in case of Ubisoft titles) a Uplay key redemption. They're too tied to Steam.

Of course, GOG would become stronger because it's not related to Steam in any way.

In that case GamersGate will fall too .

Domino effect :D

I think the right question to be made here is how much time one must mine Bitcoins from a common PC to be able to buy a USD 60.00 game without actually spending any real world money at all.

a long, long, time.

it hasn't been profitable for people to mine bitcoins for a while on PC. people have set up shop with these great big farms of ASIC boards mining bitcoints. it's made the computational requirement so ridiculous that a single non-purpose-built computer needs to crunch for a long, long time.

litecoin was profitable for a while there but that all crap nonsense happened a little while ago and then there was a bubble and then controversy and now I have no idea where that stands. probably not as good as it was.

Meanwhile, GOG has no sight of usage for the feature. Even worse, Google dropped off the feature entirely a while ago from the Play Store.

Last thing I want to do is spend that bitcoin on Steam.

Seems to me the last thing I'd want to invest in is bitcoin.

..............so? What's your reasoning for this? My reasoning is all obvious if you're curious though. It's tucked behind the word "Steam" if you're wondering.

Oh. I'd invest more of my time in it if it supported a lot more than what it currently supports. It would be great until I hit the legal age for a credit card. Or if one of my close friends does. Whichever comes first.

It should be noted that saying "Steam now accepts Bitcoin" doesn't fully capture the actual situation. Steam is allowing people to pay using Bitpay, which is a payment processor that converts bitcoins into actual currency, which is what the merchants receive. Steam won't actually be receiving any Bitcoins, only the equivalent USD after Bitpay processes the payment. Such payment processors are necessary as the volatility of bitcoin makes it quite risky for a merchant to directly accept then hold bitcoins for even short periods of time.

I smell Varoufakis. That alien vampire even wanted to make real currency similar to Bitcoin, once. Did steam hire this mage class charlatan back again?

Bitcoin? I'm still trying to use up all of these S&H Green Stamps...

Yes, I wonder if the creator or creators anticipated this. It's not really decentralization when larger corporations only have the means to invest in the mining operations and there's a in-built security issue if one entity controls 90% of the mining, they will be able to control it like any other monetary system.

Here's a graph presenting the distribution between the largest pools. Antpool has 30% and F2Pool has 22%. Together they would have the majority of the network. Still, 52% is a long way from close to 100% but with the current economic climate as Bitcoins become more stable and more usable this number will accumulate to one entity, negating the entire idea of decentralization. This might become a minor issue in the larger scheme of things given the advantage of faster transactions and world wide access.