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."

Godwin's law

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

StorJ

[IamTheRealMike]

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 [bitcoin.it] where I explore the relevance of trusted computing and TPM chips to this use.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

StorJ (pronounced Storage)

Consider a simple drop-box style file service with pay per use via bitcoin.
(perhaps with naming provided via namecoin and/or tor hidden services)

Want to share a file? send at least enough coin to pay for 24 hours of
hosting and one download then send the file. Every day of storage
and every byte transferred counts against the balance and when the
balance becomes negative no downloads are allowed. If it stays negative
too long the file is deleted. Anyone can pay to keep a file online.

(additional services like escrow can also easily be offered, but thats
not the point of this document)

Well engineered, a simple site like this provides a service which requires
no maintenance and is always in demand.

Many hosting services are coming online that accept bitcoin, they
all have electronic interfaces to provision and pay for services. Some
even have nice APIs.

An instance of the site could be programmed to automatically
spawn another instance of itself on another hosting service, automatically
paid for out of its revenue. If the new site is successful it could
use its earnings to propagate further. Because instances adapt their
pricing models based on their operating costs, some would be more
competitive than others.

By reproducing it improves availability and expands capacity.

StorJ instances can purchase other resources that it needs:
it can use APIs to talk to namecoin exchanges in order to buy
namecoin for conversion into DNS names, or purchase graphic
design via bitcoin gateways to mechanical turk. (Through A/B testing
it can measure the effectiveness of a design without actually understanding
it itself).

StorJ instances could also purchase advertising for itself. (though
the limited number of bitcoin friendly ad networks makes this
hard right now)

StorJ is not able to find new hosting environments on its own, due to a
lack of sufficiently powerful AI— but it can purchase the knowledge from
humans: When an instance of StorJ is ready to reproduce it can announce
a request for proposal: Who will make the best offer for a script that
tells it how to load itself onto a new hosting environment and tells it
all the things it needs to know how to survive on its own there?
Each offer is a proposed investment: The offerer puts up the complete cost
of spawning a new instance and then some: StorJ isn't smart enough to judge
bad proposals on its own— instead it forms agreements that make it
unprofitable to cheat.

When a new instance is spawned on an untested service StorJ pays only the
minimum required to get it started and then runs a battery of tests to
make sure that its child is correctly operating.

Assuming that it passes it starts directing customers to the new instance
and the child pays a share of its profits: First it proxies them, so it can
observe the behavior, later it directs it outright. If the child fails to pay,
or the customers complain, StorJ-parent uses its access to terminate the child and
it keeps the funds for itself. When the child had operated enough to
prove itself, storj p

Re:filecloud

[blind biker]

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

Except, they don't encrypt the content.

MEGA was foolish to use PayPal in the 1st place...

[ornia]

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 [slashdot.org] on the service. This story brought with it a comment from the creator [slashdot.org] of ScatterBytes [scatterbytes.net], 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 [slashdot.org], 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 [scribd.com]) be slightly more intelligent and aware than this?

In my response to his comment [slashdot.org], 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 [arstechnica.com], 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 [stopfilelockers.com] (at least ones which multimedia publishing cartels decide to target) worked to shut off PayPal access to the primary MEGA resellers [torrentfreak.com]. So much for paying attention to history [wikipedia.org].


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