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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.
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!
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.
Is there a reason you can not offer the customer an option on how to pay? ...
e.g. Various credit cards, BitCoin, Paypall, Bank order, On delivery,
Just like it is possible to make a choice on how you want it deliverd.
That way the customer has the choice. Sure, each has its advantages and disadvantages and it is then upon you to see how you deal with the possible extra cost (e.g. extra charge or reduction) and then let the customer make his choice.
So if you want it in 24 hours and you do not care what the cost is, you get some priority DHL delivery and pay with your AmEx card.
If cost is the important part, you pay via bank (which is free of charge in e.g. Belgium, but takes at least two days to process from/to a business account due to legal stuff) and have the postal service do the delivery. That way you will wait probably 2 weeks or so and you need to be where the package is delivered. Otherwise you need to go to the postal office. Cheaper, but not as easy.
And then there are all the options in between.
As long as I am not loosing money on payment and delivery, if my primary goal is sales, then I do not care and have the customer make a choice.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This is all very "ideal world" though. The reality is that Bitcoin directly undermines established payment processors such as VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal. Consequently, expect that if Bitcoin continues to grow in popularity, that these companies will threaten to block payments through their networks to any merchants using Bitcoin in any official capacity. At this point it will most certainly be in the merchant's interest to drop Bitcoin.
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.
If Bitcoin grows enough that the credit card companies are concerned about losing business, it will no longer be clear whether it is a better idea to drop Bitcoin, or to drop the credit card option.
Anyway, I'm not aware that credit card companies are threatening to block payments to companies offering PayPal. Why should Bitcoin be any different?
And besides, at least in Europe I'm pretty sure it would be illegal to credit card companies to do this.
If I were considering whether to accept payments by Bitcoin, I'd be more concerned about legal aspects than about whether the credit card companies would like it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
clearly you misunderstand bitcoin, when bitcoin difficulty rises its security increases. There is no such thing as "plentiful" because with faster mining the difficulty self adjusts.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Well, duh, all programs expand until they can send and receive email.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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
If you properly encrypt your most private thoughts before sending it to the cloud, you don't have to worry about to whom that company may give that pile of bits, because without the key it will not be worthwhile anyway.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The difficult adjusts to the block discovery rate such that the supply of bitcoin is roughly fixed. ASIC miners won't have much impact on total bitcoint production but they will dramatically change who gets that production.
So it really depends on how the willingness to sell differs between the old GPU/FPGA miners and the new ASIC miners.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Here's an example of where the rule that prepositions shouldn't go at the end makes a sentence more awkward rather than less. Now you have this awful "about to whom" pile-up. Instead, you could write: "you don't have to worry about who that company may give that pile of bits to".
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.
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.
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.
i agree, but it would still be `whom.'
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
??? PayPal generates a huge amount of business for Visa, MC, Discover, and Amex. Why would they threaten PayPal?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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"
This was a typo on my part, but actually I meant "which has increased the wealth OF so few", if anyone was confused.
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
I admire your persistence sir. Keep saying it's a ponzi scheme, it just might work and people will stop using it to exchange services and goods.
paying money for some anonymous imageboard ... can there be a more obvious trap?
There appear to be a lot of people on /. that are afraid of computers.
There are also quite a lot of people on /. who are highly familiar with computers but aren't 12 years old and don't believe they are the cure for all mankind's woes.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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
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.