Slashdot Mirror
Mega Accepts Bitcoin; Email, Chat, Voice, Video, Mobile Coming Soon
An anonymous reader writes "Kim Dotcom knows how to stir up a storm on Twitter. On Saturday, he announced Bitcoin support for his cloud storage service and also sent out a slew of tweets suggesting Mega is going to become much more than just the successor to Megaupload."
It sounds like Kim Dotcom is turning Mega...
Yeeeeaaaaahhhh!
Insert self-referential sig here.
As soon as my companies new site is up this is something I'd love to offer our customers. We sell real physical goods too. The problem right now in implementing it is the integration with our shopping cart. I'm sure though when we have the time it'll be something we make sure to implement.
http://filecloud.io/ cloud storage site (with more features + cheaper than Mega btw) has been accepting bitcoins for a long time, and being an Irish company has to follow Irish+EU dataprotection laws
who feels like a larger chunk of the stories on /. cater to freetards and the people grasping on the latest technology fad? Wow, mediocre service is accepting a currency more volatile than the Zimbabwe dollar. Wait, but that service is MEGA and that currency is BITCOIN, let's frontpage this shit!
Kim "Kimble" Dotcom Schmitz is German-Finnish descendant, and during the WW II both Germany and Finland were Axis nations. See? With enough spin this could be turned into a drone bombing mission against an enemy combatant.
Don't tell me you never heard of megaupload before the guy was arrested.
Because I have no clue who the guy behind reddit is right now (heard of him once I believe, due to the death of swartz, if I am correct.
That is saying, drug gangs and pirates need to convert ill-gotten geld to untraceable cash, so to live it up behind their walls of scum !!
Count me in !!
Where do I send them my (used to be yours !!) money !!
a side note about bitcoin: ASIC mining is starting now. I guess this is why bitcoin price rised recently. asicminer has currently 2TH, and prepares for next 12TH. 2 avalon units have been shipped, and one of them is reviewed by Jeff Garzik (bitcoin developer). Nobody knows when other 298 avalon units will arrive, etc. But slowly asic mining becomes part of the history.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Some time ago Gregory Maxwell proposed the idea of autonomous programs that maintain their own Bitcoin wallet. He gave the concrete example of StorJ, a program that provides encrypted file hosting capacity a la MEGA. By buying server time from VPS providers and re-selling services, purchasing advertising via ad networks that offer APIs, hiring humans to improve their code and spawning children that grow up and compete with the parents in the market, StorJ would be the first artificial life form truly worthy of the name. I enclose a copy of his proposal below for your perusal. I also wrote a wiki page on the concept where I explore the relevance of trusted computing and TPM chips to this use.
Surely you heard of Megaupload??
Also, 4chan is accepting bitcoins for 4chan pass now, which gets rid of the annoying recaptcha from Google. (aka our word is plainly spelt out but will still return a failure on you because screw you we are Google!)
Has been for, uh, few months or so I think.
I wonder what the faces of all those naysayers look like now.
The instant those 2 banks started trading bitcoins, bam, legit currency was born.
Bitcoin itself is still horribly broken as a system because of various other reasons.
Particularly the bitcoin mining limit, as use for shopping, you can't really do much with the coins on the shops end. Sure you can refund with bitcoins, but that is very limited in scope. Buy things? Still a limited amount of things accepting it at the moment.
Still has a long way to go, I'd put it below the usefulness of Local Currencies at the moment. How long it will take for it to go past that is another question. (if it does, who knows what could happen, war, war on bitcoins, american tyranny, hacks, another meteor smashing our cities up, etc.)
This type of behavior is not unsurprising for a criminal organization.
Mr. Dotcom can thumb his nose all he wants, but with time will com his downfall.
A cell awaits Dotcom and all those who conspire with him.
- The US Department of Justice
1) Accumulate bitcoins bought at current prices at any bitcoin exchange.
2) Be the owner of a worldwide-relevant website and announce that you will start accepting bitcoins, so bitcoins get more valuable (because, in the market, useful == valuable).
3) See the quotes for bitcoins rising as a result. Sell bitcoins back. Profit!!!
I envy you, Mr. Neary!!!
With all the shady businesses he ran I trust this guy about as far as I can throw.
And my record was -3m(sic!) in high school - and I _know_ when you are supposed to let go of the ball but my body refuses to do it right.
Well, I'm sure I'd heard of it at some point, but I'd never been so interested by anything that I'd heard as to note what the site was even about.
I guess I've always had places to put my files online if I needed, so I never thought they were even vaguely interesting.. The only thing
that I could have told you about megaupload before his arrest, was what I could glean from the name.. AKA, "sounds like the either do, or allow you to do a lot of uploading"..... boring..
Surely you heard of Megaupload??
Maybe he's not a pirate.
It's in anyone's self interest to use 50 free gigs of encrypted cloud storage. The majority of the political dispute are just politics and have nothing to do with business or value to the customer. Megau is the best product whether you agree with it's politics or not. Bitcoin is a political move by Mega probably as a hedge out of fear the US government might try to cut off it's revenues somehow.
Mega and these sorts of products are just more important than the political special interests. The user having privacy to think as they like is an essential human right. This essential human right is tied into the right of having encrypted cloud storage. It is not in the best interest of humans as a species to give up the ability to have private thoughts. Anything you put in your cloud is your thoughts and anything you search for via Google are your thoughts. There might be instances where in the course of say a child porn investigation we might need to check a customers search records to rule them out, but there is no reason to check peoples cloud storage. If it's a situation where a person somehow has dangerous classified information then put the person under surveillance if it's about national security. The police have no business here, the RIAA has no business here, and Mega isn't going to protect people from total surveillance and it's not designed for it so once again the people who are against Mega are against it for political reasons only. Political reasons are not always in the best interest of the community or the country.
Sometimes we have to set politics and ideology aside and use the best product if it's the best. Google drive isn't offering 50 gigs of storage and doesn't encrypt it. Facebook doesn't offer 50 gigs of storage either. Once again they should not have a right to view out files as there never has been any legal justification for giving the police the right to view out private files.
I see no real advantage to using Bitcoin and Tor just for storage when you can store it on Mega or anything else on the more reliable Internet. Also anyone who uses Tor receives the stigma of rapist, pedophile, terrorist, just by using it at all.
So what are the benefits to Storj and who is it marketed to? Is Storj supposed to be the black cloud or something? Once again for what purpose do we need a black cloud and who is going to use it?
This stuff however isn't Fiat money, not even Yugo money :) - it's an empty promise from people with no reputation to lose. It's just another Ponzi scheme but this time baited for geek. The fixed volume of potential bitcoins is a pretty massive clue that it's a scam.
How many free gigs?
And why would we use filecloud when we KNOW the political establishment hates Mega so at least with Mega they wont turn over our most private thoughts to the police for political points.When it comes to stuff like cloud storage it's very important that the company watching over our data doesn't have a political agenda. If they do then they might abuse our trust.
How about Colossus or Guardian?
Last month, just a couple days prior to the launch of MEGA, Slashdot ran a story that informed us all that each user would get 50GB gratis storage on the service. This story brought with it a comment from the creator of ScatterBytes, the distributed storage backend that MEGA uses. The entire reason that gratis 50GB can even be offered to all users, and indeed one of the oft-touted improvements of MEGA over MegaUpload (to try and convince us we won't lose our data at the whim of any given government like last time), is that anyone with spare storage space and bandwidth can be financially compensated for hosting the (encrypted) data of other MEGA users.
The concept of this distributed storage and accompanying financial compensation system is certainly a more novel approach to what file lockers have offered in the past, and this is precisely what ScatterBytes is providing to the infrastructure of the MEGA network. But I was shocked to learn, in the comment of ScatterBytes creator, that the financial compensation system would be using PayPal. Why the creators of MEGA & Scatterbytes would be so short-sighted and foolish to base their system off of a centralised, USA-based payment company widely known to be the Internet sector of the US financial-military-industrial complex was completely beyond me.
As a server operator myself, why would I want my disk space (NOT in the USA) to be a part of the MEGA network (NOT a US website) when details of my contribution (and a cut of the profits) would be handed directly to a US company known to directly work with the US government? Had the people behind MEGA & ScatterBytes not been paying any attention to PayPal's history? Shouldn't the operators of a file locker site which was mercilessly raided by the moneyed American corporate interests trying to stymy progress (and currently entangled in a court case) be slightly more intelligent and aware than this?
In my response to his comment, I asked the ScatterBytes creator why they are creating a system that would hand the US government banking-level details of MEGA collaborators , easily sortable by size of contributions no less! For the successor site to MegaUpload, this level of unthinking oversight is absolutely embarassing. MegaUpload's servers are still sitting in limbo, and people have served jailtime over this service. Why any third-party (ie most of us on Slashdot) would be enthusiastic to contribute to the relaunch of this service, even if it does differ technologically from the previous incarnation, when it means giving all of our personal information to an organisation as nefarious and unfriendly to progress as PayPal is beyond me. To Jack's Complete Lack of Suprise, within a week of the launch of MEGA, an organisation seemingly created to kill file locker services (at least ones which multimedia publishing cartels decide to target) worked to shut off PayPal access to the primary MEGA resellers. So much for paying attention to history.
To see adoption of BitCoin is good news, but it's what should have been done at launch. It's 2013. We don't need centralised US-controlled middlemen spying on all of our financial transactions and taking our money anytime we want to transfer funds. We ha
Well, duh, all programs expand until they can send and receive email.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Surely you heard of Megaupload??
Maybe he's not a pirate.
I fail to see how a wooden leg or a parrot is related, you're weird dude.
In the last 3 months: money supply expansion halved, number of merchants doubled, wordpress accepted it, US facing pokersite leaks they will accept it, largest gambling site profit up hundreds of %
If this stuff happened to any company, its share price would double.
Also, in the last year:
Network transaction fees per day are up 1100% from 4 to 48
Explosion in p2p exchanges for cash or bank transfers on sites like localbitcoins
Coinlab and BitPay each got 500k in venture capital. Coinbase got 100k.
Bitcoin Foundation Launched in September 2012
ponzi worth between 250k and 5mil collapsed
BitInstant lets you buy bitcoins at walmart, 7-11, and CVS
Silk Road is doing at least 2mil/month. Forum usage up hundreds of percent over last year.
A $10mil company will be releasing the BitcoinCard this year at the Vienna Bitcoin Conference. The Russian founders say 5 years of research have gone into this technology allowing a super-low-power credit card sized device to send texts, bitcoins, login info, and consumer data through an ad-hoc network instead of cell towers, at a card cost of only $10-$25
SatoshiDice has shown the potential of the bitcoin gambling market by earning $600k, including 17,266 bitcoins in December
Many companies in the bitcoin community have gone public.
Read the bitcoin FAQ: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ
If you still have concerns, see if they are addressed in the "myths" section: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths
I've never seen somebody using slashdot to ramp currencies before. Good luck.
Well, not as large as the states that make up the former Yugoslavia, but the Bitcoin money supply ($295 million) is 1.8% of the Slovenia money supply ($16 billion), one of the states it broke up into. That's not bad considering Bitcoin's money supply was negligible two years ago.
* Bitcoin makes no promises, it is a transaction protocol, like FTP or HTTP. If someone is making promises, point them out.
* Bitcoin units in circulation are growing at about 12% a year, so it is not fixed volume. The final quantity of 21 quadrillion Satoshi should be sufficient for any conceivable financial purpose. 1 Bitcoin = 100,000,000 Satoshi, and transactions are recorded in the smaller unit. The larger bitcoin unit is for convenience when the price was low. milliBitcoin (mBTC) are becoming more common now that the value is higher, and people will transition to micro-coins and Satoshi when it makes sense. If you didn't know Bitcoin are divisible into smaller units, I guess you didn't know much about them.
* By your argument, the fixed volume of gold and land makes them scams too. New gold mining adds about 2%/year to the world supply, which about keeps even with population, and is slightly behind economic growth, so it is nearly fixed in the short term. They aren't making more land, of course, except in some cities where land values are very high. This is more than made up for by sea level rise which is decreasing the Earth dry land area.
here here!! :D
What some people here on Slashdot are missing is that bitcoin is not just a virtual currency, it's a transaction protocol, with new features being developed and applications being written. It should be thought of in the same category as FTP and HTTP, as a means of securely transferring balances, rather than bits.
The protocol can be used for other purposes than a currency. You can use it anywhere you need to securely transfer a quantity, value, amount, or balance from one place to another online. Think for a bit what you can do with that, it goes far beyond just currencies. The distribution of initial amounts can use other algorithms than the one in the Bitcoin system, they just chose one that appears to work well for a currency.
nice post. I think you mean "which has increased the wealth to so few"
It appears the ScatterBytes creator actually replied to your comment and asked for advice/help on implementing Bitcoin payments, so I'm not sure you should say his "level of unthinking oversight is absolutely embarassing". Perhaps if you'd helped randallman, they'd be accepting Bitcoin already.
You are absolutely correct, and I should have indicated this in my initial post. I did not actually mean to come off as dismissing the work of the Scatterbytes creator, as his system (even in beta) is the most solid attempt at solving the technological problems of relatively secure, web-based distributed storage that I have seen. And I was very glad that he seemed receptive to implementing support for BitCoin in response to my comment in the earlier story. Personally, I have enough work to do than help him implement BitCoin support for his (and MEGA's) own profit, but I was perplexed that they didn't forsee an issue using PayPal in the first place (and I am not surprised AT ALL to see how fast that part of their plan failed).
To be honest, I am mostly perplexed at the admins/creators of MegaUpload/MEGA. They know first hand the extent of the global power of their enemies: they were on the receiving end of an excessively brutal campaign to ruin their lives. Millions of dollars of servers confiscated, SWAT team raids on private property, jailtime, property and asset seizure, onerous international court cases, threats of extradition: all of this is based on the concept of profiting from data storage. To force contributors of the backend of the resurrected version of MegaUpload (who would be profiting via similar methods on a service with almost identical name) into using PayPal is, in my opinion, absolutely irresponsible. It would be announcing, loud and clear, to the US government (perpetrator of the aforementioned excessive force) that we too would be profiting from this new version of MegaUpload, not just Kim Dotcom and his associates. This puts contributors in danger, with those with the capacity to be the largest contributors in most danger.
The harsh tone in my post mostly stems from a burning desire to see people cease using (and therefore funding) PayPal. To anyone reading this, please close your account if you have one !!! Do humanity a favour and let's let this one die, for the betterment of all of us. Exponentially so if you are running a service which uses (promotes) it.
There appear to be a lot of people on /. that are afraid of computers.
Bitcoin adoption is increasing and reaching new businesses every day. The more people who get into this virtual currency, the better! For those who haven't joined the revolution yet, check out http://thebitcoinmaster.blogspot.com and get started!
While I might agree with you bitcoin is still in its infancy and paypal has a significant number of users. I would love to impliment bitcoins on our web site although there are problems accepting it still. For instance my company uses a shopping cart platform and there are (or at least were) no solid implimenations to support bitcoins in a sane automated and simple manor. My business is not bitcoins. I'll put money into implimenting the code if needed if it is not too costly although chances are we will still need a third party to convert bitcoins to USD, etc. Ultimately we can't accept bitcoins and spend them without converting to other currencies because most of our suppliers don't accept them at the moment. There is a company working on these aspects though and when I have the time and money to put into it sure. Until then though there are problems with the immediate acceptance of bitcoins.
I would suggest mega go and seek out the one UK company which has partnered with a bank and is legally following the laws of the UK/Europe. That would probably be more bulletproof than paypal. However it would probably be better for them to impliment there own local solution and fight for local political control. If you can fund the political campaigns/influence the vote it'll be much harder for the enemy to attack. However mega needs to do this at the European and international levels too or the company could get wrapped up treaties that ruin the business.
and your account is how old? I support ragingbull1965's comment 100%, my account I believe is old enough?
Heck the other day Megaupload sent me an email saying that a file sextrivia.txt violated their TOS. It apparently had the word sex in it. Even though it was just a list of trivia questions rather than porn or something. I might have been like one of the only people using it for legit purposes, and still got burned.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
nice post. I think you mean "which has increased the wealth to so few"
The FIAT system has brought US's inequality to 3rd world status, and here you are, defending it.
Gosh, good thing it wasn't about sextuplets. Who knows what might come of it!
AC
nice post. I think you mean "which has increased the wealth to so few"
This was a typo on my part, but actually I meant "which has increased the wealth OF so few", if anyone was confused.
"Flawed" by design with the "flaw" being of benefit to the founders - thus a scam.
ScatterBytes is NOT the backend for MEGA! I'm not sure how I gave that impression. I have however worked BitCoin into the service and to my delight, it has enabled the creation of registration free storage nodes. That means to run a storage node, all you'll need to provide is a BitCoin address to accept payments, and you can just put that in the configuration file. Uploading/Storing data still requires a verified email address because it seems necessary to me for billing. I'd like to support other payment options so I'm all ears.
I haven't released the updated software yet so please be patient. Shortly, I'm going to be publishing a Debian repository for the client and server to make installation and updating easy. I've also got some new (512 MB RAM) Model B Raspberry Pi's in the mail which I'm going to setup as storage nodes. I think they'd make great storage nodes due to their low cost and low power consumption. I welcome any feedback.
-Randall
This is the main value of bitcoin. The mining aspect is closer to a game to get initial interest, the deflationary character makes it an unreliable working currency prone to speculation but as a reliable, secure, anonymous payment mechanism it's hard to beat. For significant commercial adoption the exchange rate will have to stabilize, probably some sort of hedge fund to slow fluctuation enough that spikes don't completely devalue payments before the merchant can extract them.
paying money for some anonymous imageboard ... can there be a more obvious trap?
A $10mil company will be releasing the BitcoinCard this year at the Vienna Bitcoin Conference. The Russian founders say 5 years of research have gone into this technology allowing a super-low-power credit card sized device to send texts, bitcoins, login info, and consumer data through an ad-hoc network instead of cell towers, at a card cost of only $10-$25
You have to pay to get your arse raped by Russian gangsters? I can't imagine the most helpless slashdot virgin falling for that one.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Posted AC for obvious reasons, as criticising Kim Dotcom here is like visiting vatican.org and saying the Pope's a cunt.
I'd love to run a storage node! How do I sign up? I've sent you a message via the contact page on the web site. io{at}damnit dot org.