Tarsnap support for Bitcoin ending April 1st; and a Chrome bug

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

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Hi all,

Two payment-related announcements here.  The big one first: On April 1st,
Tarsnap will stop accepting payments via bitcoin.

While I was very enthusiastic about bitcoin as a medium of exchange when
Tarsnap started accepting it in March 2014, over the past six months it
has become less and less useful for that purpose; scaling problems within
the bitcoin network have resulted in transaction costs ballooning out of
control, and the high volatility in the BTC:USD exchange rate meant that
it was often impossible to carry out USD-denominated transactions without
a large element of luck.

The final straw came on Tuesday, when Stripe (which Tarsnap uses for both
credit card and bitcoin payments) announced that they were going to cease
their support for bitcoin, due to exactly the same problems as I noticed:
  https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support

While there are other companies offering support for accepting payments via
bitcoin, given the current condition of the bitcoin network it simply doesn't
make sense to pursue other options; with tarsnap users making payments which
average around $25, it will take a significant reduction in the load on the
bitcoin network before bitcoin transaction fees come down to a reasonable
level.

However, I join Stripe in being optimistic about the potential for other
cryptographic currencies (hopefully based on something more efficient than
proof-of-work!) to fill the void being left by bitcoin; if and when Stripe
supports other cryptographic currencies I fully expect that Tarsnap will be
one of the first companies to make use of that support.

The second, far less significant announcement: Some Tarsnap users have had
problems attempting to pay with credit cards recently; upon submitting their
credit card details, they find themselves presented again with the Tarsnap
login form.  This phenomenon is caused by a bug in Chrome's handling of form
submissions by out-of-process iframes, and is triggered by enabling the
"strict site isolation" flag in Chrome.  If you run into this problem, you
can use a different browser, turn off that option in Chrome, or upgrade to a
newer version of Chrome -- the fix was committed on Friday and should be
present in future releases.

As always, I'm happy to respond to any questions or concerns, whether related
to bitcoin, credit card payments, or anything else.

- -- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid
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