In what is the biggest coup for the Bitcoin community in 2016, Valve Corporation’s video game platform Steam started taking Bitcoin payments. Keep reading for more details on how that came about and why this is a big deal.

Also in video games news for Bitcoin, the gaming marketplace Kinguin just announced that publishers on its platform may withdraw funds as bitcoins–last year the marketplace joined with BitPay, Inc. to allow customers to buy with bitcoins.

The fallout from the failure of the Coin.mx exchange continues with another arrest after previous inditements for money laundering.

Finally, Japan is in the final stage of passing bills that will allow companies in the country to treat transactions with cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, similar to other types of money–thus opening up the country’s banking businesses to investments in the Bitcoin industry.

This past week saw Bitcoin’s market value increase somewhat suddenly with a lot of optimistic buying. Starting around the $430 USD range last week, the market value shot up to $470 on April 25, but then suddenly took a sharp dive on April 26 down to $455. At the time of writing the BTC weighted market average price is sitting around $455 (BitcoinAverage.com), which is up from the trend over the past month of sitting near the $420-430 range.

Speculation regarding the market price rise includes positive media coverage and potentially the big win with Valve Corporation’s digital media platform Steam’s integration of bitcoin this week (according to Bitcoinist) more on Steam below.

Welcome to Steam — would you like to buy your games with bitcoins? You can do that now.

Steam now has Bitcoin payments for video games, movies

Bitcoin enthusiasts who are also video game enthusiasts may now use bitcoins to pay for content on the video game digital marketplace Steam!

This news initially hit the community when BitPay API calls (for accepting bitcoins as payment) were found in Steam’s developer workshop.

Now the rumors turned into announcement has come to fruition and numerous media outlets are running with the story including CoinDesk and Bitcoinist.

Valve partnered with BitPay to process bitcoin payments in the usual way adding Bitcoin to the list of other payment types (including Visa, MasterCard and PayPal).

The breadth of effect on the legitimacy and use of bitcoin as a payment system of this news cannot be understated. Steam is the largest video game digital distribution platform on the market and boasts millions of users. According to SteamSpy.com, during the 2015 Steam Summer Sale Valve made approximately $243 million in revenue selling over 37 thousand games. The platform commonly sees over 11 million peak concurrent users. This is a gigantic audience of users who already trade in fully digital products and bitcoin is a digital-only currency that is perfectly built for these sort of transactions.

Japan to proceed with recognising virtual currencies as legitimate investments

The Land of the Rising Sun may be giving a boost to the Bitcoin industry with a set of bills passed through Japan’s Cabinet recently that will allow banking groups to expand investments into virtual currencies and industries that cater to them.

According to the Japan Times, this means that “bank-holding companies will be able to acquire IT-related ventures.” Under the current regulations, member companies related to the banking industry cannot invest in Bitcoin-related ventures such as Circle, Inc. or Coinbase, Inc. This limits Japan’s banking industry’s expansion into innovative markets that exist within the fintech sector–however, with these bills, once approved, banks and bank-holding companies will have more latitude to invest and acquire.

“The latest bills on virtual currencies recognize them as asset-like values that can be used in making payments and be transferred digitally,” the article notes.

This means that Japan’s regulations will treat cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, similar to government issued money.

Another arrest in the Coin.mx exchange failure

Arrests continue to come out of the failure of Bitcoin exchange Coin.mx, now with the indictment and arrest of 65-year-old Michael Murgio from Palm Beach County, Florida. According to Duncan Riley here at SiliconANGLE, Murgio is the father of Anthony Murgio who was arrested in July last year for his role in the Coin.mx operation.

It is still unclear as to how the senior Murgio was involved in the Coin.mx, but his son, Anthony, was indicted for participating in a scheme to bribe operators at the National Credit Union to funnel funds for the exchange.

They money funneled from the exchange through the credit union was used to cover up money laundering, amid various other financial crimes, and was also used to hide the proceeds from ransomware scams.

Kinguin.net is a marketplace where gamers can purchase Steam keys, CD keys, virtual items in games, etc. from resellers — and now customers can buy them with bitcoin.

Gaming marketplace Kinguin enables bitcoin payouts

Marketplace and platform for game content creators Kinguin (Kinguin Limited) just announced the ability for publishers to receive bitcoin payouts.

“We have noticed a demand from our merchants for paying out with Bitcoin,” said Faheem Bakshi, Kinguin’s Vice President for Global Expansion. “Having the option to pay out with Bitcoins is a great opportunity to attract more merchants selling digital products on Kinguin. It allows users of Kinguin’s platform to buy and sell video games in even more new ways”

In October last year, Kinguin partnered with BitPay, Inc. to enable Bitcoin payments for customers on Kinguin.net–but at the time publishers could not receive bitcoins as payment themselves (just the normal payout solutions already existing). BitPay acted as a merchant processor for bitcoins from customers to Kinguin; now, with this expanded feature, publishers can also withdraw funds in bitcoins.

This enables publishers to disburse funds amid participants with less fees and with more control.

photo credit: Bitcoin IMG_1924 via photopin (license)

Mining pool BitClub offers 291 BTC back to the person who fat-fingered a transaction

Someone is out 291 bitcoins (approximately USD $131 thousand) after apparently accidentally putting them in the transaction fee portion of a tiny bitcoin transaction. The mining pool that earned the fee, BitClub (BitClub Network), is offering to give it back to the poor sod.

The details are at CoinDesk but the details have caught the attention of many on social media already.

$135,888? A generous fee indeed. https://t.co/LGJ4TOpKFa #Bitcoin #blockchain

— Juan Llanos (@JuanLlanos) April 26, 2016

When a transaction is executed on the Bitcoin blockchain it moves a certain amount of bitcoin, but it also contains another amount of bitcoins as a “miner’s fee.” When a miner “mines” a block, they earn not just the block reward (currently 25 BTC) but also rake in all of the fees attached to each of the transactions written into that block. Since the block reward halves over time (until it will eventually disappear) miner fees will become the incentive for miners to process Bitcoin transactions and secure the network.

In the case of this amazingly interesting transaction — identified as cc455ae816e6cdafdb58d54e35d4f46d860047458eacf1c7405dc634631c570d — some unknown someone sent 0.0001 BTC (approximately 4 cents) but set the fee at 291.2409 BTC.

via reddit member huevos_de_acero