> 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.

>The fact they removed Bitcoin may suggest it's less useful than you might think.

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 wonder why, though. The publishers don't need to accept Bitcoin, HB just gives them dollars in the end. I would like to hear from an official source on this, because Bitcoin seems like the best payment method for them (and me, because I love how easy it is to use).

I completely fail to understand why they seem to rather dislike it.

It's possible that HB doesn't want to be liable for the conversion of BTC to USD, and therefore the two parties are unable to come to an agreement as to how the royalties and compensation works for BTC sales. In the absence of an agreement on how to process BTC, it's easiest to simply not accept BTC for all parties.

That sounds unlikely to me, since Coinbase and the other processors promise to accept a price in USD and give you exactly that price, abstracting payment from you completely...

Don't they use a bitcoin payment processor like bitpay or coinbase which handles conversion?

Humble Bundle uses Coinbase, but maybe they don't convert it to USD.

>sadly it's just worse than Credit cards for most merchants.

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?

I really like bitcoins ux, it's really simple to take out your phone and scan a qr code. I've also made a large number of transactions and have never had one fail (some can take a while to get confirmed but every merchant I've used credits you as soon as they get the broadcast, not when it's actually confirmed.

This is my feeling exactly! Bitcoin ux (especially for online only stuff that doesn't actually need an address) is actually way nicer than typing in my credit card.

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!

"Poor UX"?

"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.

I would guess, just having it as an option in addition to credit cards, wouldn't make someone abandon their cart in the case of a poor UX (more likely abandon bitcoin)

Yes there's a small but significant percentage of transactions for my company that are flagged and completely withheld because of some non-related issue of fraud. For example they lost their card, or their card had some other fraud on it, or they mistakenly reported fraud.

Despite not being our fault, the CC companies withhold the cash for months....