I don&#x27;t think this was done for any political or idealistic reason. I imagine bitcoin makes it a lot easier for purchases in countries with unreliable banking, high levels of fraud, etc. Try transfering a non-trivial amount of money to Eastern Europe, Africa, Russia, Brazil, etc. Steam deals with this millions of times a day with fraud credit attempts, legitimate credit cards being turned down, etc. Legitimate buyers can just use bitcoin and not worry about credit card shenanigans.<p>The &quot;omg futurist&quot; brownie points are just a side-effect.  Steam&#x2F;Valve isn&#x27;t terribly progressive. Heck, its only recently that they put in a refund policy and started putting in common sense limitations on trading to stop fraud. Someone did a cost&#x2F;benefit analysis here and it simply worked out. I guessing this is part of a larger anti-fraud initiative at Valve.