Mar 15, 2012, 07:12 AM
Just my thoughts from a business and marketing standpoint, forgive the text-wall:
I agree that we need something better than paypal for TF2 items. With paypal you have no protection under the law, whether you be a buyer or a seller. In fact when you sign up for a paypal account the terms of service actively waive your right to the federal consumer protection that is in place on credit cards, bank accounts, and debit.
That being said bitcoin would honestly solve the chargeback problem, but is a hard sell. The currency's relative value in relation to the USD rapidly fluctuates, and it can be daunting for new people to get into as well as giving no proof of identity (a fair amount of trust is usually the price of anonymity). If you wanted to counter-act the risk of the BTC market fluctuations you would have to quickly convert it to USD, which usually is done at a loss.
Because of the nature of steam trading, though, there is no REAL way of protecting both the buyer and the seller. Meaning that unless all parties involved are highly trusted and reputable then SOMEBODY is going to be in a logistical disadvantage which leaves them vulnerable to get scammed.
If steam was more committed they would just make steam wallet a universal system, where you could change funds back and forth from your wallet and paypal. This would give them the ability to regulate cash-to-virtual-item sales and give them the ability to make it much safer by implementing their own escrow system.
The drawback of that of course being that if they acknowledged that their in-game items were worth real word money, then their crate-and-key system would constitute an illegal lottery/gambling system and they would be at risk legally (as well as a lot of other legal issues with trading virtual goods for cash).
So in reality there is no straight-forward move to be made by anybody here. Everything plausible has a lot of drabacks, the only thing we can really do on our end is try and increase the security through some sort of user verification that ties their real name (confidentially, mind you) to the account and requires some sort authentication proving their personal information. The lack of pseudo-anonymity would deter a lot of people.
I agree that we need something better than paypal for TF2 items. With paypal you have no protection under the law, whether you be a buyer or a seller. In fact when you sign up for a paypal account the terms of service actively waive your right to the federal consumer protection that is in place on credit cards, bank accounts, and debit.
That being said bitcoin would honestly solve the chargeback problem, but is a hard sell. The currency's relative value in relation to the USD rapidly fluctuates, and it can be daunting for new people to get into as well as giving no proof of identity (a fair amount of trust is usually the price of anonymity). If you wanted to counter-act the risk of the BTC market fluctuations you would have to quickly convert it to USD, which usually is done at a loss.
Because of the nature of steam trading, though, there is no REAL way of protecting both the buyer and the seller. Meaning that unless all parties involved are highly trusted and reputable then SOMEBODY is going to be in a logistical disadvantage which leaves them vulnerable to get scammed.
If steam was more committed they would just make steam wallet a universal system, where you could change funds back and forth from your wallet and paypal. This would give them the ability to regulate cash-to-virtual-item sales and give them the ability to make it much safer by implementing their own escrow system.
The drawback of that of course being that if they acknowledged that their in-game items were worth real word money, then their crate-and-key system would constitute an illegal lottery/gambling system and they would be at risk legally (as well as a lot of other legal issues with trading virtual goods for cash).
So in reality there is no straight-forward move to be made by anybody here. Everything plausible has a lot of drabacks, the only thing we can really do on our end is try and increase the security through some sort of user verification that ties their real name (confidentially, mind you) to the account and requires some sort authentication proving their personal information. The lack of pseudo-anonymity would deter a lot of people.
/sarcasm