2013-01-09 ngrblog.com - Hitnews Accepts Bitcoin Payments

[julz]

Newsgroup Reviews Blog

Hitnews Accepts Bitcoin Payments

2013-01-09

http://www.ngrblog.com/hitnews-bitcoin/

A couple months ago we noticed that a newly launched service, Bitusenet, was focusing on Bitcoin Usenet payments.  Now it looks like Hitnews has joined in as well.  While Bitusenet only offers Bitcoin, Hitnews has a number of other payment options including iDeal, bank transfer and credit card.  Hitnews is the first established Usenet provider we’ve seen add Bitcoin payments.  It will be interesting to see if other companies join in as well
...

You can see from the hitnews signup page that they're using BitPay.

This is interesting in the light of the recent closure of newzbin2 - stating:
"..no, Bitcoin isn’t credible as it’s just too hard for 90% of people"
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128412.0

Presumably hitnews doesn't carry the binary newsgroups and 'pirated' content which the newzbin2 provided access (search facilities?) to.
That an established usenet provider is accepting Bitcoins so soon after the newzbin2 shutdown, shows just how shortsighted the newzbin2 operators were with their "bitcoin isn't credible" statement.

[grondilu]

I've never ever used binary newsgroups to download files.  And yet I tried at least once, but I couldn't figure out how to use this thing.  I've always used P2P.

Are binary newsgroups still used by lots of people nowadays?

[julz]

I haven't used binary newsgroups since the early 90's... when for me it was quite a tedious process with uudecoding multiple parts.

[Akka]

This is interesting in the light of the recent closure of newzbin2 - stating:
"..no, Bitcoin isn’t credible as it’s just too hard for 90% of people"
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128412.0

The funnies thing about this statement is really that figuring out how to use binary newsgroups is a lot harder than to learn how to use Bitcoin.

[nevafuse]

I've always used P2P.

People still use P2P?  I thought people stopped using that as much because of getting served notices for uploading, slow speeds, and viruses.  Usenet always felt like the more secure method since you didn't have to upload, SSL, fast speeds, less malware, and you actually paid (very cheaply) for a service so if anyone ever came knocking you can say you just thought it was like Netflix.

But I agree, Usenet can be pretty complicated to use.  Anyone that understands usenet, shouldn't have a difficult time understanding bitcoin.