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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
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.
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 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.