Even if the auth expires (5 days is probably the limit imposed by your payment processor although it's probably sufficient in most cases) - when you are ready t

Even if the auth expires (5 days is probably the limit imposed by your payment processor although it's probably sufficient in most cases) - when you are ready to ship and do a capture against it, it'll fail so you know the guarantee provided to you when the original auth went through is no longer there. bitpay - even if they were happy with 1 conf it would still mean 10 or so minutes before you are guaranteed your funds as a merchant. They are not, however - "When an invoice is complete, it means that BitPay.com has credited the merchant’s account for the invoice. Currently, 6 confirmation blocks on the bitcoin network are required for an invoice to be complete." (https://bitpay.com/docs/invoice-states https://bitpay.com/docs/invoice-states) Although the merchants can take the risk of course, and if they are controlling the product after the sale (which is the case with Steam) - they are free to dispatch the goods when they please. Fraud - sure, you're talking good ol' chargebacks and yes not having to deal with chargebacks is a good selling point for btc payment acceptance. These happen AFTER the settlement however. If the customer convinced their bank to remove the auth hold, then the capture the merchant performs before shipping would fail so you know that the guarantee the issuing bank provided is no longer there. Again, bitcoin does have it's strengths in terms of being attractive to both the merchant and the buyer, transaction confirmation times is probably the single biggest weakness here especially compared to the way CC processing works.