This, we went with Stripe before but apparently hosting is too high risk and (they claim) their banking partners did not want to do business with our little Irish startup. No such issues with bitcoin
Are you the owner of Ezfile/Filecloud by any chance? If you are, I'm actually quite curious to discuss payment processors with you. Last I checked, you're using Amazon gift cards and Bitcoin. Have you had any luck getting access to credit card processors? Also, what fee per transaction would you consider to acceptable from a CC processor for your category of website (with the ability to let users pay by subscription)?
Yup. They were insolvent for a year and a half, and paid out people with pending withdrawals when new people deposited new coins. How people thought it was a good idea to keep using them, I have no idea. There had been warnings about their solvency literally for the past year, starting with permanently "pending" BTC withdrawals, and slowly spreading to not allowing withdrawal of the altcoins on the site.
Banks are fractional reserve because at any given time they don't have enough cash to pay demand deposits but that's because they've lent that money out. So while banks don't have cash they do have _assets_ that could be sold or borrowed against to fulfill deposits.
If I have an uninsured, full reserve bank and somebody steals half the deposits I don't become fractional reserve, I become _insolvent_. Just like a fractional reserve bank whose assets drop significantly in value is insolvent.
> How people thought it was a good idea to keep using them, I have no idea.
Well, if they had no idea that they were missing all those bitcoins, then the reason is plain ignorance on the depositors' part, and criminality on Cryptsy's part.
The community consensus have long been that Cryptsy are at best incompetent, at worst crooks. They might very well have milked it for all they could get away with.
It's sort of absurd that there's only two places to talk about bitcoin. There's no reason that a small cabal of people should have so much control over the flow of information about any serious asset.
>A decentralized currency where the development, mining and discussion is controlled by less than a dozen people which is a joke
Again: why does anyone think you can get a decentralized structure out of a property-norm design (commodity money, held privately as capital) designed to create centralization and hierarchy?
Depends on why you're complaining about censorship. If you're talking about some God-given right to free expression, sure, complaining about censorship is ridiculous. But if you're talking about what's best for a community, complaining about censorship is a good way to motivate change. People start asking, "Why, exactly, are we censoring these viewpoints? Is it for a good reason, e.g. preventing trolls from taking over discourse, or is it for a stupid or even malicious reason?" Stuff like that is what gets rid of toxic leadership. On the Internet, it usually manifests itself in all of the high-quality folks going elsewhere.
Basically, relatively few people have a problem with the idea of censorship; a certain amount of moderation is necessary on an Internet forum to prevent shitposting. What people are decrying is misguided, stupid, and / or malicious censorship - either due to juvenile power games on the part of the moderators, or due to an external agenda that said moderators are pushing.
Why are "rights" and "complaining" related? It is generally the case that my rights include both things I should do and things I should not do, and it is generally the case that a healthy, free society encourages people to figure out what they should do via discussion ("complaining"), instead of via suppression of rights.
For instance, an employer has the right to fire under-performing employees, and the right to make the decision about that on their own (as long as their decision does not conflict with other fundamental rights, such as equal protection, that society has recognized). They are explicitly permitted to make bad decisions. A society that only gave you the right to make good decisions would not be a free one; a society that prohibited discussion about whether it was a good decision would also not be a free one.
I was using it for years on our sites, IT IS very easy to implement for a developer, especially easier than dealing with oauth oddities from google,facebook,microsoft etc
Yes one can program own username/password etc login, but it is actually alot of work making a proper one with all the edge cases (, password strenght, email validation, verification, account recovery) and so on and so on. I know because I have done it dozens of time and each time the project has slightly different requirements
Mozilla Persona was dead easy to implement on the other hand! Also alot of people did not like and complained about having to login with Google, Facebook etc yet the same people had no issues trusting Mozilla due to the goodwill they built up with firefox and their fight for privacy
Persona is the easiest one I've worked with, including usernames and passwords, because getting that correctly working with the best practices of 2015, even with built-in support in most frameworks, is and will always be a PITA, and heavily dependent on fragile DB schemas specific to a given framework's whims.
I think that usernames and passwords are "easy" is something of a sunk cost fallacy, both for developers and users, and we tend to forget how much time and effort we "waste" on this year over year. My password manager is up to hundreds of different passwords I use, and I know a lot of users these days whose "password" starts with the now ubiquitous "Forgot Password" button (which is its own headache to setup and get right), as they are okay relying on the relative security of their email address over the fragility of their own memory.
Even when using a framework that has username/password authentication already, you have to worry about whether your confirmation emails are getting sent properly and are not blocked. So, no, it's not simple.
Waking up one day to find that "your" money is no longer yours is not a compelling reason? I myself had nothing but bad experience with Paypal going back almost a decade, hell with them.
No. We might have fusion power plants within a few decades, but those will use deuterium and tritium as fuels, not Helium-3. Helium-3 fusion has some advantages, but it's more difficult and it might not happen within our lifetime.
