Bitcoin Forum

After banning several of the largest file-hosting sites, PayPal is now taking aim at Usenet services. The payment processor has just cut off several providers of Usenet services and frozen the funds in their accounts. These actions are due to growing copyright infringement concerns which have resulted in an extremely strict and in some cases privacy-violating set of requirements being laid down by the payment processing company.

Full story http://torrentfreak.com/paypal-bans-usenet-providers-over-piracy-concerns-121121/


First WordPress and now this?

Paypal got already bashed by the European parliament for this methods. They are shovelling their own grave:

http://news.techeye.net/internet/european-parliament-gets-behind-the-pirate-party

Banks in the US blocked wire transfers from the US to Somalia in 2011 during one of the worst droughts ever seen. The UN said it was the "worst Humanitarian Crisis"
This was one year ago but Somalia is still in really bad shape.

Full Story http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/10/somalia-drought-worst-humanitarian-crisis-_n_894072.html

And in other news...

 Your credit card is no longer any good at California medical marijuana dispensaries, whose accounts with credit card processors have been canceled, thanks to pressure from the federal government.

Take some money from an ATM and you're good to go. :)

spiccioli

This works for in person transactions with a bricks and mortar business but not online where the only practical alternative today is Bitcoin. It is the one reason the real opportunity for Bitcoin lies with online businesses as opposed to bricks and mortar businesses.

Good.

Yep ..Paypal is digging there grave and BTC is just in time to be a great alternative to switch to.. :o

Just time will tell if it will get adopted by more free thinking peoples... ;) ;) ;)

Spread the word.... :P

Bitcoin required to legally buy marijuana for medical reasons, that's epic  :D "bitcoin is used to buy drugs" they say, and yes, that's true, it's LEGAL and it's for medical reasons  :D

Paypal is the biggest headache I ever dealt with. I do not accept paypal any more.

I know some local herb dealers that accept bitcoin, they are not licensed though.

https://bitpay.com/terms - BitPay probably would at the first sign of any trouble also back out of anything like that.

Only having Bitcoins is very often probably not enough for merchants (see Wordpress!) or resellers, they would likely prefer services where they get USD, no matter what the payment is in (ideally you can pay in any real or virtual currency, up to WoW gold and all the merchant gets is a daily transaction with all the money converted to USD that came in).

The difference is that it is not required to use BitPay to use bitcoin.  I prefer using BitPay as they simply my online store, but if BitPay was (forced) to stop accepting certain merchants the merchants could continue using bitcoin manually or through their own server.  That is a huge difference VS Visa/MC.

Are there any alternatives to bitpay yet?

If mtgox got most buyers/traders, and bitpay most merchants, for my taste Bitcoin would depend a bit too much on those 2 companys.

I think they are trying to make something similar for Europe: http://www.paymium.com/

Haven't seen any presence of them on the forum though.

There is also https://walletbit.com, it's cheaper than bitpay.

If a merchant ends up with only Bitcoins suddenly these are even less useful than having [insert obscure currency from a country far far away] because there's no real way to just exchange them, to even find out the current prices etc.

Yes, BitPay and the like are business models that can be copied and compete with each other (unlike PayPal, as they rely on their user base, not their technology) but at the moment BitPay is the only solution I saw where you can sign up, get a button and get EUR/USD to a bank account. Maybe MtGox merchant tools finally got around to providing something similar, but I doubt it (also they are a pain in the rear with all their holdups on getting fiat out).

I really can't imagine a a worse way to run a business.

The problem with these kind of usenet services is that they are advertised as such.
They usually specifically mention the purpose of downloading media for their services and most of the time they do not even support regular usage. (You cannot download article headers and have to rely on secondary services to improve performance with poor hardware). This is done to cater newbies which do not know what usenet actually is, added to that they are usually overpriced since you can get a real service at the same price elsewhere.

I'm not saying that paypal took the right course of action since they wouldn't be liable for any lawsuits but those were a ticking timebomb considering the filehoster crackdown from last year.

I just bought another month with my provider before they get taken down.

And nothing of value was lost. Usenet is so bad, for realz!

Depends on your provider and your intentions.