I am not sure why anyone would want to accept Bitcoin via Stripe
Same can be accomplished with Bitpay, who take 0% in fees with a 30$/month package (1% otherwise), they also pay into the bank the next business day unlike Stripe.
And they are also alot more open as to the types of businesses they accept.
Or hell one could directly accept bitcoin with bitcoind running locally or using the blockchain.info api and then converting bitcoins with Bitstamp (or just using the bitcoins to buy things, every day more and more places accept them!)
It is great seeing Stripe actually embracing new technologies but imho their current bitcoin "offering" is not great and they are picky as to who they do business with.
edit: ah typical HN fanboyism, vote down anything negative said about Stripe instead of addressing the points raised.
Bitpay, bitcoind et al may technically be better offerings, but if you're already using Stripe to take card payments then woohoo, you can now take Bitcoin.
If Bitcoin wants to play with the big boys then the likes of Stripe getting on board are nothing but positive.
Having to have a separate system to handle Bitcoin vs Visa, MasterCard etc just seems archaic.
Because Stripe has already established a reputation with people who take payments but aren't familiar with the ins and outs of Bitcoin?
A lot of people aren't going to have the time to do research to find out about the ins and outs of taking online payments with Bitcoins, and at any rate, there's enough negative news about bitcoin that some of their research is going to turn up the various shenanigans of bitcoin banks, or the shenanigans done to them, etc.
In short, Stripe provides some automatic legitimacy.
If I had a need for Bitcoin, I'd probably want to go with someone established in the mainstream of payments, as well. Which means Stripe or Braintree or one of those guys. A large bank would be even better, but that may take a while.
You are getting down-voted because you miss the point of stripe. Sure, there are arguably better methods to accept bitcoins, but Stripe is a service that does bitcoin AND other payment methods in one single solution.
1. has to have at least two established theories (cosmological or otherwise) in it
2. they must combine to create a dramatic plot issue
3. in a fashion which doesn't involve a time-loop paradox
that or some generic metric; "Firefly is delightful, but only scores 2.7 Asimovs"
I agree that Dr. Who is most certainly science fiction, but I've __noticed__ a lot more instances of script-writer-protection of the heroes in the 2005+ Dr. Who. So many times that the bad guys decide to do something other than Just Kill Them.
I don't mind that the Sonic Screwdriver is a psychic Scotty in a stick ( ;) ), but the fact that the Doctor and friends don't get shot in the face (especially once he reveals who he is) more often is getting almost absurd.
Star Trek certainly has it's share of that kind of writer-armor for characters, but many more of them are less overt. As in, the Romulans/Klingons aren't going to just kill Kirk or Picard for $Reasons, or $Treaty.
Many seasons start with a great potential, only to fall on their face. It can create such nice ideas... and then destroy them by reusing and abusing them.
(Weeping angels)
It also doesn't know how to 'scale'.
In the first (2005+) episode with the Dalek, you see how terrible and brutally efficient they are. Fast forward a few episodes/seasons, and now you must have an entire army to show how things are 'bad'.
Did you notice how many times the overall arc changes? Or rather, how it isn't described at all so the writers can come up with whatever they want?
SPOILERS
"Bad wolf" ---> "Oh I've just taken these words and sent them myself in the past." Yeah, right.
"Silence will fall" ---> So it's an event? Eh... no... it's a species that make you forget when you watch them? Almost... It's a religious movement! There! Phew, we almost had to plan something!
It's not in the same optimistic genre as Star Trek TNG, but the 100 is watchable. It has a younger cast, so it might be better at getting younger viewers into sci-fi. Other current sci-fi, also not in the TNG genre but still enjoyable: Continuum, Defiance.
Actually it's a great premise, but it is overshadowed by the "cool teen" factor which plagues other shows on the CW (though Arrow has mostly been able to escape that..for now).
The Vampire Diaries is a good example of what being on the CW does to a show. It started out in the first two seasons as a dark, violent, mostly serious take on the "teenage vampire" trope, and could be enjoyed by both teens and GenX/GenY fans of the vampire genre. It has a pretty good cast (Nina Dobrev's "Katie Holmes v2" notwithstanding). After those first seasons, however, it devolved into the stereotypical teen drama + nonsensical mysticism. Eventually, after seeing a school dance or town festival as the main plot device every two episodes, I had to stop watching it. My wife still watches, but she tends to enjoy the occasional plotless teen drama.
The first time the page failed to load, the second time it took 52.76 seconds according to the Chrome Developer Tools. I'm on a university network that is super fast.
This anyone considering a "serious" long term business should avoid Paypal, they eventually screw every merchant one way or another, their history is littered with horror stories and business that have grown reliant on then and went under when their funds get eventually frozen over some automated stupidity and no customer support.
Ive been given a static ipv4 and a big ipv6 range from my isp, problem is despite getting the latest and best router
http://www.asus.com/Networking/RTN66U/
I cant get ipv6 to work with this router, tho if i connect laptop directly to the wan cable i get an ipv6 address without issues and can use google via ipv6 etc
If a slightly unshaven geek like me cant get ipv6 to work easily what hope is there for rest of the world :(
"Just like sending funds to bank accounts, a transfer to a debit card costs 25¢ and will arrive in the card’s bank account in 1-2 business days. As always, you’ll need to verify your recipient’s identity.
While we can only support U.S. Visa and MasterCard debit cards at the moment, we’re actively working to bring our transfers API to our users in other countries."
Right now, most of our marketplaces' sellers seem to prefer using their regular bank accounts rather than Bitcoin. But if/when the Bitcoin revolution happens, we'll enthusiastically support that too. (We're running a Bitcoin acceptance beta right now: https://stripe.com/bitcoin)
It's tough to use Bitcoin seriously on a day to day basis when the value fluctuates so much. Yes, there are security advantages and there's less transactional friction. But that friction has a value, and it's way overshadowed by the volatility of the currency (today).
In Europe at least I'd expect it to be a total non-starter.
For starters, there's a ton of alternatives, but more importantly giving out the debit card number is high risk - much worse even than handing out your credit card details (getting charges dropped / charged back is much more effort with a debit card) - whereas giving out your bank account details is not (if bank lets anyone do anything other than depositing money in your account with just your account details, the liability is entirely on them).
And for most transfers within the EU, you can do an online electronic transfer and get the money to the recipient in <2 hours - very often in less than 10 minutes.
Same in Australia. It always amazes me how archaic the US banking system is - particularly the continued use of checks. When my wife (then girlfriend) saw that I owned a check book here in Oz she burst out laughing and called me an old man. That was a decade ago.
I switched from ABP to this hosts file a few months ago and I have zero regret. My browser's faster, lighter and ads are blocked just as well as with ABP.
I actually even started splitting my hosts file: the layout is
/etc/hosts ('compiled' version)
/etc/hosts.d/
/etc/hosts.d/aaa-warning (warning reminding me to run `update-hosts` instead of modifying /etc/hosts. Appears atop the compiled file)
/etc/hosts.d/adblock (that website's hosts file)
/etc/hosts.d/base (original system hosts file)
/etc/hosts.d/dolead (work-related file for development)
And I have the following functions in my .bashrc file:
function update-hosts() {
cat /etc/hosts.d/* > /etc/hosts;
}
function update-adblock() {
curl http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/hosts -o /etc/hosts.d/adblock 2> /dev/null
update-hosts
}
So if I want to update "adblock" (it is obviously an improper name) I simply do `sudo update-adblock` and if I change another file (mostly `/etc/hosts.d/dolead`) I'll just run `sudo update-hosts`.
I was not aware of Tynt, but I believe it's well blocked.
I just looked at the adblock-hosts file, and 'tynt' appears several times. One of those lines is commented with a link to an article about tynt[0]. I tried copy-pasting from The New Yorker and TechCrunch (who, as claimed by the author of the article, use tynt), and both times there was no crap appended.
Interesting, my experience with hosts files has been that they do not block ads nearly as well as ABP. A lot of the ads I see are served from the same host as the content. ABP also blocks things like youtube ads that I don't think can be blocked at the DNS level.
I'd love to move the ad filtering out of my browser though, either into a proxy like privoxy or DNS filtering, if it worked well.
Host files are very limited, and when you start dealing with anti-adblock scripts and other css/js scripts on some sites it falls apart.
Basically hosts file was great 10+ years ago when the Web was new(ish) and Adblock was only used by a few. Now we're dealing with CSS, objects, subrequests, first party ad/tracking scripts.
With all the features Adblock Plus gives us, far far more than just blocking xx and yy domains like in a hosts file... Why not just use the extension? Let's leave the host file to the history books.
ABP is filtering content that's already been retrieved over the network and read into the browser. With hosts, the blocked content never makes it into my machine, which saves bandwidth.
I think using both is better than either one alone. A hosts file to quickly remove most of the unwanted stuff, and ABP to finish off the rest that does get through.
I like this as well, even works great for windows 8 IE which there is no ad block for otherwise, but sometime I need to see ads and then switching is not worth the hassle. I've been thinking of developing a system tray hosts file switcher for this purpose. You think anyone else would use it?
I'd tried this in the past but my machine slowed to a crawl. I guess it was to do with the algorithm used for handling the list of hosts (this sounds like a job for a bloom filter).
I've just tried the list you provided and it seems to be ok. Will try it for a while to see how I get on.
A quick dive brought me to glibc: seems like everything is done in `resolv/gethnamaddr.c`. Look for `_PATH_HOSTS` mentions: it is defined as "/etc/hosts/". The parsing seems done by the function `gethtent`. However it returns a single `hostent`...
It's a brute-force linear search. _gethtent() returns one line from the hosts file at a time, the loop itself is in _gethtbyname2(). It opens and parses the hosts file every single time. If I were asked to improve this, I'd probably open and parse the file only once, reparsing when the file's been updated, maybe use an on-disk cache file. Second change would be to use a hash table. I don't think anything as sophisticated as a Bloom filter is necessary unless you have truly huge hosts files.
Since gethnamaddr.c appears to be BSD-licensed I'm willing to bet that 99% of all OSs out there (including Windows) are going to have similar if not identical code.
There's a few packages that take a serious approach at adblock-through-hosts-file, including hostsblock[0], linked below.
The cost of the systematic linear search is mitigated by the use of a DNS caching daemon, such as dnsmasq or pdnsd.
Indeed a Bloom filter would be overkill, and I'd rather avoid false positives!
It'd be interesting to dive into parts of e.g. Linux source to see how it tests domains against the hosts file. It probably isn't doing anything as clever as Bloom, though, but who knows...
Same can be accomplished with Bitpay, who take 0% in fees with a 30$/month package (1% otherwise), they also pay into the bank the next business day unlike Stripe. And they are also alot more open as to the types of businesses they accept.
Or hell one could directly accept bitcoin with bitcoind running locally or using the blockchain.info api and then converting bitcoins with Bitstamp (or just using the bitcoins to buy things, every day more and more places accept them!)
It is great seeing Stripe actually embracing new technologies but imho their current bitcoin "offering" is not great and they are picky as to who they do business with.
edit: ah typical HN fanboyism, vote down anything negative said about Stripe instead of addressing the points raised.