Steam began to accept payments in bitcoins

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    On April 27, Valve and the Bitpay company announced the start of accepting bitcoins as payment in Steam service. In the announcement, the representative of the company bitpay indicates that Valve turned to them in order to diversify their markets. First of all, Valve wanted to give players from developing countries the opportunity to pay for purchases on Steam, even without a bank card.

    In an announcement written by bitpay business development director Rory Desmond, Rory Desmond mentioned such markets as India, China and Brazil. In these countries, the number of players is constantly growing, but there is no opportunity to get a bank card to buy games.

    Cryptocurrencies, and in particular, Bitcoin, according to Desmond, are a universal means of payment on the Internet, and therefore with their help Steam service will be easy to get to the most distant markets. At the same time, the service will receive such advantages of cryptocurrency, such as low interest for money transfer and the absence of the danger of return payment fraud.

    Steam is a digital distribution service for computer games and software owned by Valve, which was first introduced at the Game Developers Conference on March 22, 2002. Version of Steam 1.0 became available during the beta testing of Counter-Strike 1.4. As of fall 2015, about 6,500 games for the Microsoft Windows operating system, over 2,300 games for OS X and over 1,500 games for Linux are distributed via Steam. The number of active Steam accounts exceeds 125 million.

    Bitpay is a cryptocurrency payment processing provider that also supports the development of several open source projects. At various times, the company entered into payment processing partnership agreements with Microsoft, NewEgg, TigerDirect, Warner Bros. Records and PayPal. Also, bitpay was the first company to post advertising payments in Bitcoins on TV.

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