After a dispute with PayPal, german cloud storage service Seafile has turned towards BitPay and Bitcoin.
Seafile is a cloud storage service similar to DropBox. PayPal has claimed that by not monitoring user's files, Seafile is violating the PayPal terms of use. However, going through customer's files is actually illegal in the EU, which puts Seafile in a bit of a dilemma:
"From Sunday June 19th 2016 we are no longer allowed to accept payments via PayPal. PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as all our customers’ files for illegal content. They have also asked us to provide them with detailed statistics about the files types of our customers sync and share on https://app.seafile.de"
"Since complying with this demand would violate German / European data protection laws (and also be morally wrong in our opinion) we have declined to comply with this demand."
"That other similar services are allowed to use PayPal doesn’t matter to them. That some of them even use Seafile also doesn’t matter. PayPal makes these types of decisions on a case by case basis and in our case have decided to not allow us to use PayPal any longer."
With PayPal no longer being an option for them, Seafile have now implemented BitPay / Bitcoin as a new payment option. The suggestion actually came from their own customers:
"One suggestion we heard several times was: “Hey, why don’t you guys start accepting bitcoin?” We have to be honest: Up until we ran into trouble with PayPal we were not really convinced that using bitcoin was the right move for us. We considered it too much of a niche solution and not something we should seriously consider. But the amount of positive feedback we received made us reconsider. There seems to be a real demand for bitcoin in our user base."
Original story:
https://seafile.de/en/seafile-now-accepts-bitcoin-via-bitpay/
