Tarsnap now accepts Bitcoin

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-03-27-tarsnap-bitcoin.html

by cperciva • 12 years ago

240 51 12 years ago

daemonology.net

gregimba2• 12 years ago

Stripe seems to be the default payment processor for tech startups. Especially now they are going to support Bitcoin.

cperciva12• 12 years ago

Absolutely. Stripe understands how to build clean and easily usable APIs.

aroch• 12 years ago

After setting up Paypal and Google Wallet payment forms and being left wanting to shoot myself, Stripe was a fantastic breath of fresh air.

icebraining2• 12 years ago

Alas, only for tech startups in one of the twelve select countries. We went with Paymill instead.

gregimba2• 12 years ago

I believe they were planning to expand the number of countries they operate in. The US also has terrible credit card systems compared to any other developed nation.

akama• 12 years ago

I wonder how Stripe is going to handle the tax implications of Bitcoins. It may not have an impact because they shouldn't be holding them, but it could be complicated.

mitchellh• 12 years ago

Hopefully it is a temporary thing but the iframe is not loading for me in any browser. "Server refused the connection"

cperciva12• 12 years ago

Accidentally ran paymentiframe.com out of swap space. Should be back now.

cperciva12• 12 years ago

And now I'm moving it to a heftier EC2 instance type.

datr• 12 years ago

Is Tarsnap going to drop prices in response to the AWS S3 drop?

blairbeckwith• 12 years ago

Gosh, I hope not. If anything, they should raise their prices.

sexmonad• 12 years ago

This is my question too. Tarsnap is cool, and Colin deserves to get paid for his hard work, but the cost differential is far too much for me to use tarsnap right now. If they cut their costs in half, I'd be able to afford to use them over raw S3.

spindritf• 12 years ago

Tarsnap's deduplication makes it even cheaper than it would seem. Considering what you're buying, Tarsnap is already ridiculously underpriced.

cperciva12• 12 years ago

I've been busy with bitcoin for the past few days -- I need to crunch some numbers on my AWS bills to see how much money this saves me; it's not as obvious as it sounds once GET/PUT costs and EC2 costs (which are mostly reserved instances, thus not affected by this price cut) are factored in.

But my first guess is that a price cut is very likely to be coming. ;-)

icelancer• 12 years ago

Please don't. Just pocket the margin. The prices should have gone up, anyway.

mhartl2• 12 years ago

This is great news. One quick suggestion: I recommend dropping the material on Bitcoin's unsuitability as a store of value or unit of account, or at least softening the language to sound less certain. It's possible that these views, which are shared by most mainstream economists, will prove to be true, but Bitcoin's design is a test of the contrary position. It seems reasonable to concede that there's some uncertainty in the matter.

cperciva12• 12 years ago

Blog posts are opinion pieces. I write my opinion, which is that bitcoin is a great medium of exchange despite its other shortcomings.

gburt3• 12 years ago

For what it's worth, my opinion on that is the exact opposite. Colin's blog post was enlightening and clearly just his own opinion.

cperciva12• 12 years ago

Thanks! I do my best to put the "news" at the top of posts and the "rambling thoughts" later in case people aren't interested in my opinions.

mhartl2• 12 years ago

I'm disappointed that the parent comment, which offers constructive criticism, has been downvoted at least five times (though, to be fair, upvoted at least twice). Please don't downvote comments just because you disagree with them.

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.

minimax2• 12 years ago

I tell them I want to get paid X dollars in bitcoins, and they tell me how many bitcoins I should ask for and what address they should be sent to. Stripe then gives me the dollars I asked for (minus a small processing fee, of course).

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.

shawabawa3• 12 years ago

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

I just made a $5 payment, and the btc value matched the bitstamp exchange rate

pc• 12 years ago

We actually haven't figured out how the pricing will work yet. (We want to make sure we have the product right first.)

minimax2• 12 years ago

Thanks for responding! Can you comment about how you set the bitcoin/dollar rate you use for pricing?

waffle_ss• 12 years ago

Will you be easing up on the "prohibited businesses"[0] restrictions for these Bitcoin transfers, since you aren't beholden to the credit card networks for these transactions? I've got a business that falls under category #2 that I'd like to use Stripe for but can't.

[0] https://stripe.com/prohibited_businesses

simonebrunozzi• 12 years ago

Hi Patrick. I think you should either give some guidelines, or ask for explicit suggestions about it. Great move, by the way. Happy to buy you a coffee and chat about it next time I see you in the Mission.

jamesaguilar• 12 years ago

If I were building it, I'd just match the price to whatever the prices were on the exchange I'm using, maybe with a small amount of padding to cover pessimal volatility.

Scaevolus• 12 years ago

It's strange that Stripe doesn't support paymentiframe.com's feature directly-- I'm sure many have similar concerns about embedding arbitrary JS into their domain.

fpgaminer2• 12 years ago

@cperciva, slightly off-topic: I had a curious question this past week about one aspect of the scrypt algorithm. If I recall correctly, it sandwiches the memory hard function between PBKDF2, and uses Salsa20 as the mixing function internally. In the spirit of reducing code, I'm wondering if it makes sense to replace Salsa20 with HMAC, SHA256, or just SHA256's mixing function? It would reduce the number of crypto primitives in the implementation. Not that it really matters much, but just curious (and partially curious if Salsa20 had specific properties that are useful in scrypt's design). Sorry if this is a dumb question; I was going to read back through your scrypt paper, but have been busy all week.

cperciva12• 12 years ago

Salsa20 could be replaced by almost anything -- the requirements for the mixing function are very very weak (basically just that there's no short-cut to iterating). But Salsa20 has an advantage in throughput, which matters for maximizing the amount of memory you can use in a given amount of time.

Asymptotically speaking the best function there is the one which maximizes [B/s software output]^2 / [B/s hardware output].

gburt3• 12 years ago

Can you elaborate a little on how you got to that maximization? I am not sure I understand why you're squaring the software level.

fpgaminer2• 12 years ago

Thank you for reply. Then I suppose re-using the SHA2 primitive doesn't make much sense, except perhaps in awkwardly constrained environments (area starved ASIC/FPGA, embedded processor with accelerated SHA, etc). Regardless, it's interesting to know that the mixing function can be swapped around.

prirun• 12 years ago

The IRS just ruled that Bitcoins are property, not currency, and are subject to capital gains taxes when they are spent. IOW, you have to keep track of your basis every time you buy and spend Bitcoins, just like stock.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/bitcoin-is-property...

cperciva12• 12 years ago

Fortunately, I'm neither buying nor selling Bitcoins, so this doesn't apply to me.

Tarsnap now accepts Bitcoin

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