Quote from: ArticMine on January 20, 2013, 04:46:45 AM

Quote from: hazek on January 19, 2013, 07:04:34 PM

Quote from: Spekulatius on January 19, 2013, 06:54:28 PM

Somehow I am a bit disappointed of Kim. After all his talk about getting rid of US dictated monopolies, like credit cards and Paypal, I at least would have expected SOME other option than that. Maybe direct bank wires or cash in mail or ANYTHING, but Paypal, Visa and Master all over again?

I'm starting to think more and more that Kim is just a stupid guy who happened to get lucky with his service. I mean he knows how to provide that service but other than that he is a moron.

Actually as far as I can see this is a very smart design. Mega itself does not deal with the retail sales but leaves this to the resellers who can use any payment method they choose including of course Bitcoin. These resellers can be anywhere in the world so even if some one pays with say a credit card or PayPal, Mega itself does not get the payment information, and the end user can literally shop around for the jurisdiction with the strictest privacy laws when choosing a reseller. This also means that Mega itself collects minimal information a name (with no verification), email address and an IP address (TOR anyone?). The design also calls for distributed hosting with backups of each file in different at least two different jurisdictions.

The files are encrypted and Mega itself does not have the private keys. So the only way a copyright holder will even know that there is infringing content is if the person who uploaded the content leaks the key directly or indirectly to the copyright holder. At this point I am sure Mega will honour a takedown notice provided that the copyright holder has dotted all the legal i's and crossed all the legal t's. Now user side encryption has many perfectly legal and legitimate uses such as the cloud backup of sensitive data.

This whole thing looks like it has been designed by an army of lawyers in order to create a mega legal headache for the entertainment industry while at the same time being in strict compliance with the law.

+1. The more I think about this, the more I agree. Both with all of your points, and with the mode of operation which mega.co.nz looks like they may have taken.

After many time-outs, I got on enough to get a test account. After many time-outs on the e-mailed link, I got signed in. Now I'm playing with it a bit, but my test upload has not gone through. Understandable if this really is the most successful 'start-up' of all time, and I would not rule it out.

I needed only provide a working e-mail and it didn't give a shit about my 'name' being just a short small-case username. So, it is only one step behind 'instawallet' in terms of respecting my privacy. I like that a lot! I just read through all of the 'help' items and I like what I see. So far it's looking a lot like "Kim Dotcom (and company) FTW!"

I would go so far as to say that at the end of the day, the model for the service that Mega is providing may rank up there in importance with Zimmerman's PGP work, and he Kim (and his minions) just may have the muscle, money, and smarts to make it stick.

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Oh ya. Hey Hazek. Don't be so butt-hurt that the guy didn't choose to pump our pet currency. Very few 'stupid' people get as far as Mr. Dotcom and I would be shocked if he were one of them. Think about it a little and you might conclude that by (seemingly) ignoring Bitcoin things may well work out a lot better for both us and for Mega. They are not going to need any extra entaglements, and it'll be lucky if Kim's mansion does not end up being the location of the first drone strike in New Zealand.

edit: name clarity