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

To: tarsnap-announce@tarsnap.com

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

From: Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>

Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2018 02:31:23 -0800

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 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 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iHMEARECADMWIQTq9Iu6fMd6MP78Dak4zsppDGpqbgUCWm2mexUcY3BlcmNpdmFA dGFyc25hcC5jb20ACgkQOM7KaQxqam4nJwCff8LZbcTiQDmM5HWiGs/FanMA0RsA oLlG4dB8TqkoS1qeYqM4EFWpxQ70 =5RaL -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----