The technology and computing company Microsoft will accept bitcoin as a form of payment again. The service has been temporarily suspended since Sunday, January 7.

According to sources Microsoft temporarily stopped all payments with bitcoin in its online store due to price volatility and high commissions caused by high transaction traffic in the blockchain and spam attack occurred the past days. The company began accepting the popular cryptocurrency in 2014 with BitPay's platform as an intermediary to load funds into Microsoft accounts, which allow it to acquire applications, games, and products from Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox.

An unidentified spokeswoman for the company contacted by the Australian news media confirmed that the service was temporarily suspended but will resume as of today thanks to an agreement on the commission price negotiated with the team responsible for the payment platform.

"We have restored bitcoin as a payment option in our store after working with our supplier to ensure that smaller amounts of bitcoin are redeemable by our customers."

Other companies related to the world of technology have had a similar relationship to Microsoft's with cryptocurrencies. Steam, the online platform for distributing and updating computer games belonging to the video game company Valve, game creators such as Half-Life and Counter Strike, accepted payments using bitcoins on its website since April 2016.

The platform allowed you to accept payments in your online store using the popular cryptoactive, calculated based on the local currency at the time of purchase. Therefore, in the transaction the company received the equivalent of the price in fiat currency and the consumer could make use of its digital currency.

At the beginning of December 2017, Steam stopped accepting bitcoin as a payment method for the same reasons that led Microsoft to suspend the transactions temporarily.

In the official statement the team explained that it has had problems to process video game purchases using cryptocurrency because of the high prices in transaction fees that must be assumed by the company. These came to represent at that time up to 50% more than the value of the game, for example, in a $40 purchase, the commission for using bitcoin could be up to $20 to be taken over by the company. Whether this decision will be temporary is unknown.