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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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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
"A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation."
"Ponzi scheme" is not a synonym for "something to do with money I disagree with". Stop using it as such. Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme because it's not an investment scheme. Furthermore, since all the details about Bitcoin are publicly known, it's hard to see how it could be called a scam at all - there are no below-table dealings there.
"Ponzi scheme" is quickly becoming the Godwin of economic discussion.
While it's likely that deflation makes Bitcoin unsuitable as a currency, that doesn't make it a scam, just flawed.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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
The idea that deflation leads to depression was proven to be false back in 2004. The "Bitcoin has a flawed economic design" argument is wrong and I will keep posting this study on Slashdot until it gets modded up and people read it.
"Ponzi scheme" is not a synonym for "something to do with money I disagree with". Stop using it as such. Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme because it's not an investment scheme.
If you're going to argue something it's probably not smart to quote something that ruins your argument. The vast majority of BitCoins are being held as an investment/speculation, and the only way it'll pay returns is by subsequent BitCoin buyers driving up the price allowing the early investors to sell off their BitCoins at a profit, since BitCoins don't produce anything or have any value by themselves. Current BitCoin holders have exactly the same incentives as members of a Ponzi scheme to keep the pyramid growing, the bigger the pyramid the more profit they make. That all this profit flows from the late entrants to the early entrants without producing anything of value is what makes it a Ponzi scheme, that it is done through deflation only makes it look like there's no money flow.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
What he quoted doesn't "ruin his argument". Bitcoins are no more an investment scheme than domain names are. Sure, you can camp on domain names and hope they go up in value. That does not make the DNS a ponzi scheme.
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