If you were hoping to use the money you've made from the recent rise in Bitcoin value to purchase some games, you're going to have to sell them first, as Steam has now officially dropped Bitcoin from its list of accepted payment methods, just over a year and a half since it initiated it.
As far as cryptocurrencies go, Bitcoin is the originator, the most popular and the most valuable, with a market value in the hundreds of billions and a per-coin price of more than $14,000 at the time of writing, owning even a fraction of a coin can be extremely worthwhile at this time. However, while those already holding Bitcoin are enamoured with its ability to rise in value over the past year, Valve sees that as too volatile a currency to keep up with and has subsequently dropped it from its list of accepted currencies.
"At this point, it has become untenable to support Bitcoin as a payment option," Valve said (via Ars). "We may re-evaluate whether Bitcoin makes sense for us and for the Steam community at a later date."
The way Bitcoin payments typically worked on Steam is that they were funnelled through third-party service, BitPay. Because Valve didn't have much control over how much Bitcoin was requested, or how it was valued by BitPay at the time of the transaction, it saw that as a potential for customers to lose a lot of money by overpaying if BitPay didn't keep up with the current trend in Bitcoin's value rise.
Have any of you made money out of Bitcoin's recent surge?
