[drzaiusapelord]

I don'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.

The "omg futurist" brownie points are just a side-effect. Steam/Valve isn'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/benefit analysis here and it simply worked out. I guessing this is part of a larger anti-fraud initiative at Valve.

[mbmott]

That was pretty much my point. Bitcoin has a solid use case (being a global currency) and Steam is exploiting it.

[MichaelGG]

It's not that it's a global currency. It's that there's zero buyer protection. Or phrased positively, zero risk fit the merchant. Anyone offering that in any currency would be useful.