Mega update: Dotcom's service now accepts Bitcoin
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
I also see a market for a mail-service like Gmail, but operated from a company within Europe, so it has to adhere to European standards for data protection and privacy.
Besides, I have to ask. Why is any one who requires actual privacy on the internet or using tech at all? These days, if I wanted to communicate my evil intent to another party, I think I use lemon juice and a carrier pigeon, or something. I certainly would not be using the internet. Using the internet these days is like planning a heist in a loud voice in a busy pub. If you do it and get caught, well, you're an idiot and Darwin swings in to action. Same now with the internet.
The solution to privacy on the internet is simple to me: stop using it, there isn't any. The idea that the internet affords privacy is dead, if it were ever true in the first place. Lets stop pretending other wise and stop even wasting our time and energy trying to hold back the tide. Certainly trusting government to protect our privacy is, well, at best, amusing.
In fact, where did we ever get the idea that we had some right to privacy on the internet in the first place? We never ever did. We just assumed we did. All that's happening now is a long sad education process were we learn that our naive assumption was totally wrong.
Hm. Well that's depressing.
Before anyone comments: I`m well aware that both Mega as well as Bitcoin CAN be used for non questionable purposes. Their main usage as of today are some sort of illegal or at least questionable activities.
I`m still surprised how much love Kim Schmitz receives from liberal minded HN fellows - unaware that he is gladly taking your believes as a thin cover-up to conduct at least questionable business.
You can buy soft and hard drugs in your local supermarket, just a very small subset of them. Caffeine is used by almost everybody and it qualifies as a soft drug. Alchohol is used by the majority of the population and it is a hard drug. Tobacco is a soft drug in terms of psychological effects and a hard one in terms of it's physical impact. If the law is so irrational as to categorise many other soft and hard drugs as a danger, why should people not side-step it? What is the benefit of jumping off an intellectual cliff just because the majority of people are doing so?
Copyright infringement is based on similarly irrational laws. They are for the benefit of the few and harm society as a whole. Culture has traditionally been free to share. This brings the benefit of giving people access to materials which inspire thoughts and feelings that they might not otherwise come across. This, in turn, provides a greater probability of innovative and novel ideas coming about, which benefit everybody. Intellectual property has been described by many people as an oxymoron.
In my opinion, the questionable activities are not of those who use bitcoin to buy illicit substances or use Mega or Torrents to access cultural artifacts but of the governments who subscribe to the notion that these activities are negative and that violence must be used against those who participate.
"Bitcoin is a perfect fit for Mega, which wants to distance itself from governments as much as possible."
my take ...
Bitcoin is a perfect payment option for global merchants who have customers in countries where credit card fraud is rampant - as well as those desiring privacy.
Coincidentally, I performed an international wire transfer today where the outbound fee was about 4%. If my merchant had accepted bitcoins it would have cost me only 1% to get my dollars into Coinbase bitcoin and my merchant would likewise incur a low fee to get their received bitcoin payment into Polish currency.
Indeed, the bitcoin economy is growing exponentially - from a very small base.
Can you explain this part a bit?
BitCoin is super important in terms of giving consumers the right to buy any service they want anywhere in the world regardless of legislation. This takes care of financial blockades by banks and credit card providers. The only other place to block things besides at the financial layer is at the network layer and that is easily solvable by using VPS services anywhere in the world that doesn't enforce a network blockade. These VPS services can also choose to accept BitCoin.
I think Bitcoin has a future as a transfer medium. Person A converts their money into BTC and sends it to Person B, who immediately converts it back into "real" money. As long as the conversions are close enough together, the actual value of the bitcoins doesn't matter.
Sure, some hardcore users will continue to hoard and speculate. But in my opinion, the real value of Bitcoin is as a secure, anonymous, digital means to send money.
My, granted ignorant, assumption is that BTC would keep revaluating each time a big organisation adopted it, but that "reaction" would smooth out as more and more organisations adopted it and its value settled.
So, yes, initial pain, but surely all interested would know and accept that in advance. As usual, early adopters accept the pain as it were. But early adopters in general are up for that for the thrill, if you like, of being there at the beginning. A bit like people who buy Tesla cars. They know its not perfect and that there will be some pain, but they love it anyway.
The problem is, somehow they know if two people upload the same file even though this should be impossible if they do bullet proof client-side encryption.
This does make Mega anything but "cryptographically safe"
I don't know how secure mega is, but deduplicating encrypted data is possible.
"Secure" isn't boolean. Although convergent encryption will prevent people from accessing your secret data, it does have different security properties: Mega would be able to determine whether you have a particular file, which they cannot with the current system.
"Fact #1: Once this feature is activated [deduplication], chunk MACs will indeed be stored on the server side, but they will of course be encrypted (and we will not use ECB!). Fact #2: MEGA indeed uses deduplication, but it does so based on the entire file post-encryption rather than on blocks pre-encryption. If the same file is uploaded twice, encrypted with the same random 128-bit key, only one copy is stored on the server. Or, if (and this is much more likely!) a file is copied between folders or user accounts through the file manager or the API, all copies point to the same physical file."
So no, they don't know that two different users upload the same file, unless the key used for encryption is the same, which is almost impossible in practice.
MEGA actually doesn't have the key, except for files of which they already have an unencrypted copy (since the key is derived from it).
They used to claim that your data was inaccessible without your password, but this was always a lie.