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Bitcoin Businesses The Internet News

Mega Accepts Bitcoin; Email, Chat, Voice, Video, Mobile Coming Soon 143

Posted by timothy from the now-sends-pizza-but-on-the-internet dept.
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."
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Mega Accepts Bitcoin; Email, Chat, Voice, Video, Mobile Coming Soon More

Mega Accepts Bitcoin; Email, Chat, Voice, Video, Mobile Coming Soon

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  • Megasite (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by bazald ( 886779 )

    It sounds like Kim Dotcom is turning Mega...

    ...puts on sunglasses...

    ...into a megasite.

    Yeeeeaaaaahhhh!

  • filecloud (Score:5, Informative)

    by ionix5891 ( 1228718 ) on Sunday February 17, 2013 @05:25AM (#42926583)

    http://filecloud.io/ [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

    • Re:filecloud (Score:5, Interesting)

      by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Sunday February 17, 2013 @07:08AM (#42926833) Journal

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You can always encrypt your files yourself before you upload them.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Make no mistake; Mega encrypts files for it's OWN protection. If you want encryption worth considering a defense for yourself, you should be using Truecrypt before uploading to the cloud anyhow, no matter where it's going. Mega's encryption is about plausible deniability, not making anything particularly bulletproof.

      • Re:filecloud (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Turmio ( 29215 ) on Sunday February 17, 2013 @11:21AM (#42927883) Homepage
        If you're really interested in privacy of your data stored on some cloud service, I'm sure you'll understand that the only way to make sure that your data is safe is to encrypt the data yourself before uploading.
      • Encrypt it yourself...? 50 gig free is pretty damn good. Right?

    • 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.

      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by siride ( 974284 )

          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".

  • Am I the only one... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Bogtha ( 906264 )

      This isn't even a faddish story. It's an advert. This guy is a publicity whore, the only question is whether Slashdot were dumb enough to run his ad for free or not.

    • Be that as it may, Mega and Bitcoin are on the cutting edge of both technology and politics. Even though their direct impact may be small, they are a looking glass for what the future may look like. Decisions made today may have large legal ramifications in the near future.

  • ASIC (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Janek Kozicki ( 722688 )
    a side note about bitcoin: ASIC mining is starting now. I guess this is why bitcoin price rised recently. asicminer [bitcointalk.org] has currently 2TH, and prepares for next 12TH. 2 avalon [avalon-asics.com] 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )
      Why not use it to find oil by reprocessing seismic data, or FEA on potential product designs and make real money instead of falling for this crappy ponzi scheme?
      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by dbIII ( 701233 )
          I keep persisting because this scam is aimed squarely at the sort of people that read this site but do not have the life experience to have seen anything similar before.

  • StorJ (Score:5, Interesting)

    by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Sunday February 17, 2013 @05:55AM (#42926643)

    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

    • I would be worried that it would hire hit squads to force a merger with competing AIs.

    • ok, I want to make money by providing storage space to storJ, where do I start? :)

    • 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?

      • Storj is a proposal for an experiment on independent artificial entities, not a product to be marketed and sold.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The mechanism to ensure that malicious code isn't spawned by human actors is flawed, I can't see how it wouldn't get hijacked and turned into a botnet. How does it find said humans? How does it validate their code outside of simulated sandboxes? Can easily develop a malicious payload atop of the legitimate program.

      • There are multiple ways to allow humans to modify the code safely, but yes, it's one of the parts of the idea that needs more fleshing out. In the wiki page I proposed the use of TPMs and trusted computing technology to help resolve some of these issues - you can have a small immutable core that handles the money which can't be changed, and then human upgrades can be limited to things like optimizing the web UI, the install scripts, etc ... things which can't steal the money. You can also run human-provided

    • How about Colossus or Guardian?
    • Because JSTOR wasn't bad enough!

  • 50 free gigs = too good not to utilize. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by elucido ( 870205 ) on Sunday February 17, 2013 @08:16AM (#42927033)

    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.

    • 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.

      Indeed, he might have looked at what happened to Wikileaks, [mcclatchydc.com] and decided to take preventive measures.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by elucido ( 870205 )

        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.

        Indeed, he might have looked at what happened to Wikileaks, [mcclatchydc.com] and decided to take preventive measures.

        Wikileaks has nothing to do with Mega. When you even put them in the same category you endanger Mega. Wikileaks was basically functioning to piss the US government off almost exclusively for the past few years and wasn't prepared for the reaction. Wikileaks was threatening not just a faction within the US government but the entire State Dept itself. That being said the actions to try to block the flow of money were unconstitutional as Julian Assange is not an American Citizen they had no business trying to

    • It's in anyone's self interest to use 50 free gigs of encrypted cloud storage.

      See I thought the same thing but then discovered that "use" is a key word in this sentence. I've so far not even managed to successfully back up my photo collection and a few other odds and ends to the tune of a mighty 4GB. The upload speeds I'm getting are terrible, the interface makes it worse in that you must have the browser running to upload anything. It doesn't do jack shit in the background (like dropbox does).

      I'm ready to

  • MEGA was foolish to use PayPal in the 1st place... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ornia ( 1225132 ) on Sunday February 17, 2013 @08:58AM (#42927197)
    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

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ornia ( 1225132 )
        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 h

    • 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 paym

      • 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.

  • Well, duh, all programs expand until they can send and receive email.

  • Bitcoin is taking off. Pay attention to it. (Score:5, Informative)

    by ragingbull1965 ( 2755663 ) on Sunday February 17, 2013 @10:37AM (#42927583)

    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 [bitcoin.it]
    If you still have concerns, see if they are addressed in the "myths" section: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths [bitcoin.it]

    • 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 fo

    • 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.

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