Bitcoin would be a great topic for another blog post, we have a really long love-hate relationship with it. Don't worry, Bitcoin support will hopefully return to our store and gaming bundles eventually. We know what we need to do to turn it back on (more or less, hook it into our SMS verification system) but we have many higher priority tasks work on. We are hiring if you know anyone: https://jobs.humblebundle.com/careers/ :)
While bitcoin is great for preventing chargebacks, it is inherently anonymous. That is good for certain use cases, but when you are trying to enforce a strict per customer limit, it is a nightmare. We invested a lot of resources into doing what we can to combat it, but eventually we figured that we had more important things to do and had to tap out. Almost 100% of the bitcoin traffic was bad actors, and even so it was such a tiny fraction of our sales, like under 0.05%.
There are a lot of diehard bitcoin users, like yourself, and I would love to support your preferred payment method again, but it is an incredible amount of work to do safely.
$22 [email protected]
[30 minutes later]
$50 [email protected]
[30 minutes later]
$15 [email protected]
etc.
$1.00 [email protected] [1 second later]
$1.00 [email protected] [1 second later]
$1.00 [email protected] [1 second later]
$1.00 [email protected] [1 second later]
$1.00 [email protected] [1 second later]
etc.
Vultr, a VPS Host, accepts Bitcoins but started to require a valid credit card or Paypal purchase before accepting Bitcoins to prevent ToS violators who used Bitcoin.
The reality is that Bitcoin is less convenient than using a regular credit card (because, realistically, you're not going to be mining Bitcoin but rather you'll be buying Bitcoin using your regular credit card/bank account). I would argue that Bitcoin is also worse in every way (no chargebacks, wild fluctuations in the valuation of a unit of Bitcoin, etc.) if you also don't care about anonymity and the product you're buying is fully legal.
So it's like "providing an ID", and then paying. Even if bitcoin is not "anonymous" (pseudonymous), there's still the decentralised+cheap nature of it that's worthwhile.
edit: oh look downvoted for speaking my mind, go HN groupjerk
You want to limit to one super-cheap steam-key per person. So that's more of a "promotion" than a classic exchange. Corner case ;)
So: don't accept bitcoin payments, accept coinbase payments, but only one per coinbase account.
What's annoying as a customer is many companies flag legitimate transactions, wait a few days to say so, and then handle it poorly after the fact.
If by this you mean they don't notify you that the transaction was flagged until a few days later, that's (probably) part of the fraud prevention system. There was a post on HN similar to this one awhile back about how another site handled fraud prevention. One of the most successful techniques is they found was to delay notification. Fraudsters are less likely to target you if it takes them a long time to find out their transaction was declined. Credit card fraud is very much a hit and run operation, as the card is likely to quickly get flagged and blocked by the issuer within a few hours of the fraudsters using it.
That said, a few days is pretty bad and I imagine it really only takes a few hours delay to make the technique effective.
They have not removed Bitcoin. You can check the current Book bundles which do have Bitcoin enabled. In my experience, it tends to be disabled on publisher bundles like the current 2K and Revelmode Bundles. Probably the publishers not accepting Bitcoins.
I completely fail to understand why they seem to rather dislike it.
Don't most merchants just use something like a 'pay with bitpay / coinbase' which results in them directly getting cash? I can't imagine how that would be much worse?
This last time I tried to buy something with my credit card I accidentally mistyped the code on the back and they disabled it until I called the card issuer and gave them my SSN!
"Scan QR code, press Accept" is poor UX? You should see Visa's 3D secure, the thing that just makes me close the browser window whenever I see it, because it means I'm never getting the payment through.
Despite not being our fault, the CC companies withhold the cash for months....
It seems to be enabled on a individual bundle basis. While the main bundles going on right now are not accepting it, the two Book Bundles are accepting Bitcions.
However it's always been the less noticeable button.
It doesn't take away from your main point, but credit card companies do have some incentive to improve. They want the customer not to be inconvenienced by having to report fraud in the first place, and they want to avoid having those people call the support staff. That's why banks monitor your activity and automatically decline transactions that seem fishy.
This practice is infuriating and does the opposite of encouraging me to call support less.
That is, you can prove ownership of a Bitcoin address, but you can't prove that you don't own an address.
how is that meaningfully worse than your proposed solution, paying the CC processor for fraud-prevention?
I've seen the discussions crop up on Hacker News before* of people starting commercial websites, getting hit with massive amounts of fraud, and either having to just shutdown completely or shell out more of their margin for a third party fraud prevention service. It's disgusting.
From the consumer's perspective it is nice that credit cards are easy to use, and that we are protected from bad merchants, thieves, etc. But we're putting a strangle on small business with this system. There are better ways that would both reduce fraud overall, thus saving consumers money, and not disproportionately penalize small businesses. It wouldn't make credit cards any harder to use.
On a tangent, Humble Bundle stopped accepting Bitcoin a year or two ago. Considering that Bitcoin can have a 0% fraud rate it makes it a somewhat odd move, especially since Humble Bundle is a really great target for fraud (the goods are easy to move). And no, I don't view Bitcoin as an ideal solution (as it exists today); it's on the opposite side of this problem, foisting fraud prevention onto the consumer. But from Humble Bundle's perspective (and any business, small or big) it is the perfect solution to preventing fraud.
* The ones I'm recalling are even more sad. They were getting hit by fraudsters who were just using their site to test the cards, before moving on to the actual fraud target(s). The end result is the same, though.