Tarsnap now accepts Bitcoin
daemonology.net
daemonology.net
How much is the fee? Is it a fixed amount or proportional to the transaction value? How does Stripe set the dollar denominated bitcoin price? One easy way to make a bitcoin payment look cheap is to offer a low fee but offer a slightly inflated exchange rate and take a profit out of the difference between the rate used for payment and the rate you can get in the market (exchanges or dealers). It's hard to compare the economic value of dollar denominated bitcoin payments (relative to credit cards) without knowing these details.
I just made a $5 payment, and the btc value matched the bitstamp exchange rate
Asymptotically speaking the best function there is the one which maximizes [B/s software output]^2 / [B/s hardware output].
The US also has terrible credit card systems compared to any other developed nation.
What do you mean? Aren't the CC systems pretty much the same everywhere? We do have some alternatives to the CC system as a whole, and they work fine, except when we want to sell internationally :|
Who is the guy behind this?
Dr. Colin Percival — author of Tarsnap and FreeBSD Security Officer Emeritus.
But my first guess is that a price cut is very likely to be coming. ;-)
Edit: in most HNers opinion.
While I'm at it, a feature I would love to see in tarsnap is server side pruning of old archives so I can remove the delete permissions from my production keys and not have to setup a secondary pruning server.
That's not possible -- the service doesn't know which old blocks are being reused in new archives.
Even after de-duplication and compression, my company stores about 400 GB of data with Tarsnap. Tarsnap is a double digit percentage of our monthly infrastructure costs.
I think, perhaps, it's rather that the value that a business backing up a 30 MB database every day gets isn't radically different from the value that we get backing up several orders of magnitude more than that.
The question really is if straight utility pricing makes sense. I could imagine that a floor on the pricing, or a non-linear curve would probably do better than simply keeping the same model and raising the prices. There's also a question of distribution of total revenue -- if the revenue for the small accounts was increased by 10x, would it balance out a 50% loss of large accounts?
No. You wouldn't be far off if you assumed that 100% of Tarsnap's revenue came from large accounts.
The question is if the costs of running tarsnap correlate exactly with the amount of data that is stored, or if the number of users also have to be factored into the equation, ie. if each additional user has an added cost. I would say that in a business like this, with a low barrier to entry, the price should reflect the costs as close as possible. So if there's a constant setup cost for each user, the price shouldn't be $X/GB, but $X/GB + $Y.
Ideally, Tarsnap should make the same amount of money from a single user storing 100 TB and 100×10^12 users store a single byte. If this is not the case, the pricing structure is suboptimal.
This is what happens when one's pre-paid Tarsnap balance goes to zero:
You will be sent an email when your account balance falls below 7 days worth of storage costs warning you that you should probably add more money to your account soon. If your account balance falls below zero, you will lose access to Tarsnap, an email will be sent to inform you of this, and a 7 day countdown will start; if your account balance is still below zero after 7 days, it will be deleted along with the data you have stored.
I was N days from hitting a the 7 day warning, so 14+N days away from hitting "Lose all my business' backups for the last several years." It is possible that I would have gotten really lucky and seen those emails (which I was, by definition, not particularly expecting) rather than, oh, being on a business trip in April and finding about them after the fact.
I cannot put enough underlines under I Would Consider Losing All My Backups A Failure Mode.
In the context of the OP, I felt that several opinions about Bitcoin were expressed as fact, but I appreciate cperciva's polite replies and have upvoted them accordingly. This is because I believe that all polite and constructive comments (even when critical) deserve to be upvoted, or at least not downvoted. I hope in future other HN readers will extend me the same courtesy.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/bitcoin-is-property...