I love Gmail, but I think I'd move my main e-mail to Mega if they launched a good one. I don't think foreigners' data is very safe with American businesses and on American territory. The US government seems to care very little about protecting the privacy of US citizens, let alone of foreigners, for which they feel no obligation to protect.
Plus they should allow as early as possible to connect existing domain names with their service. I wouldn't want to know everybody that I'm sailing under an offshore pirate flag. Primary users would probably come from the grey'er corner of the Internet, so it will most likely lead to some flagging/spam/etc issues.
The reputation is typically assigned to outbound IPs or signing keys, so new domain names wouldn't do much. (Even then, a simple "dig mx your-email-domain.com" would reveal who hosts your email.)
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.
I'm not so sure American authorities would respect that agreement if they decided they didn't want to for what ever jumped up anti-terror or copyright violation they can come up with. Is the EU really going to do anything anti US if some CIA bloke spys on my email? Would it even know? Would I know? Hell, in the UK international news organisation spy on the public, and that's pretty much fine. Of course the plebs get in trouble, but those at the top? Makes me laugh.
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.
Which obviously does not apply to Americans, or the rest of the world for that matter. The whole point of this thread is to have privacy and data protection for everybody -- regardless of nationality.
A business (Mega) whose profits will be mainly generated by exploiting copyright infringements will be accepting a currency that's mainly used for illegal activities such as buying drugs, money laundering...a perfect match!
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.
Mega as well as Bitcoin have both a very liberal philosophical foundation by strengthening personal property rights. Bitcoin helps preserving and moving wealth without government intervention and Mega helps preserving and moving data without government intervention. In times of increasingly corrupt and dysfunctional democratic processes, this is the right thing to do. Note that legal and morally right is not always the same. This is a basic premise your our TV tells you every day (e.g. Jack Bauer illegally torturing suspects or Robin Hood stealing from the rich). I believe that both Bitcoin and Mega make the world a better place.
This comment seems to make the assumption that something being illegal makes it wrong.
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.
My take: Kim Dotcom knows very well that Bitcoin is an absurdly deflationary currency, and wants to long it as much as he can, as soon as he can. As you very well point out, there's a possibility the bitcoin economy will grow exponentially, from a very small monetary base :)
Better than credit cards, worse than cash. There aren't any mixer services, for whatever they may or may not be worth, that work for credit cards (and you don't necessarily have to get bitcoins in a way that traces back to you. You could, for example, buy some weed with cash and sell it for bitcoins.).
I kind of hope these kinds of issues become more common. The more draconian and in the pocket of private interests the US becomes, the more it promotes use of services that no one by the copyright lobby see as illegitimate. I guess I secretly hope that we (the US) lose our hegemony over certain internet services due to our terrible framework for privacy and having so many laws written by the copyright fundamentalist lobby. Backwards laws and enforcement is increasing innovation with respect to privacy and financial innovation.
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 apologise, but the pedant in me can't help but point out that your capitalization "BitCoin" is incorrect. For talking about the network and software, use "Bitcoin". When talking about the currency, use "bitcoin", no capitals, as one would with "dollar"
What would it take for a major player in the the field of eCommerce to accept this? Let's say an Amazon.com, Newegg, etc. Any guesses to what would happen to the value of BTC?
I think Amazon accepting BTC right now would be a disaster, the value of BTC would have to shoot up very fast and high, and the resulting instability would look awful and then Amazon would be forced to remove support for BTC making a massive PR problem for BTC.
Dont you think there would be an initial sort of violent (I could use a better word there) revaluation which would quickly settle down in to something stable? I suppose a bit like initial trading of a new businesses on the stock exchange, perhaps?
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.
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.
I wonder what the anonymity implications would be if that usecase became predominant, especially if one exchange wins out. Correlating purchase of n BTC and conversion of n BTC to real currency could reveal who was paying whom.
They could offer bitcoin acceptance for their Amazon Marketplace merchants. This would be a small step that offloads the risk to only those merchants that opt-in. This would make Amazon acceptance gradual and a much lower risk proposition.
Amazon has enough problems with various governments related how to pay their taxes. I think supporting a dubious currency like Bitcoin is last in their priority list.
I still don't understand how files are "cryptographically safe" on Mega
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"
"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.
but then 'duplication" only happens if the source file is shared post-encryption, which is far less common than sharing pre-encryption, sync post-encryption sharing requires sharing the key as well.
They don't use convergent encryption, they randomly generated keys when files are uploaded. The only deduplication that exists is when you copy a file that's been shared with you by another user, because in this particular case you also copy the key.
"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.
Mega only de-dup the encrypted result of the file. This means only files from the same user are de-duped. Given that this is likely to be rare, in practice de-dup doesn't happen.
