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• Evgeny Pospelov commented  ·  May 6, 2013 12:51 a.m.  ·  Delete

  It's very needed feature!

  There are already have VDS via bitcoin: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade#Dedicated.2FVirtual_Server_Hosting

  But your offer is still better..

• AdminMoisey Uretsky (Head of Product, Digital Ocean) commented  ·  April 18, 2013 9:43 a.m.  ·  Delete

  Thats absolutely the case and point, we aren't stating that BitCoin is fraud, just that the incidence of fraud goes up when users use a more anonymous form of payment, which in our case is Paypal which provides considerably more information than bitcoin in terms of payment.

• Anonymous commented  ·  April 12, 2013 2:11 a.m.  ·  Delete

  Why cant you guys understand. Its not fraud issues with fraudulent payments!

  Its fraud issues with abusing the servers for illegal purposes because nobody can come after you, because you are completely anonymous!

• AdminMoisey Uretsky (Head of Product, Digital Ocean) commented  ·  March 27, 2013 5:38 p.m.  ·  Delete

  I think we've discussed this at length and unfortunately we won't be implementing it.

  But we loved all of the different view points both for and against =]

  We are declining this request so that people can get their votes back.

• Anonymous commented  ·  March 27, 2013 6:56 a.m.  ·  Delete

  Bitcoin is weird and a scam. Please focus on other more important features.

  And how the heck will you even know how much to charge since Bitcoins can fluctuate by $20 in value in 20 minutes? Really unstable. Just a bubble.

• Kim commented  ·  March 22, 2013 11:17 p.m.  ·  Delete

  What about requiring a credit card to be linked if paying with Bitcoin?

• AdminMoisey Uretsky (Head of Product, Digital Ocean) commented  ·  March 12, 2013 9:19 a.m.  ·  Delete

  Salman:

  Actually that's true, if you look at other industries such as real estate in the United States you can not actually secure a mortgage for a property if any substantial amount of the down-payment has entered your bank account as "cash" and you can not provide any "cash" for the down-payment either.

  Unfortunately we live in a world where abuse is just part of the day to day work flow and if you knew how many different abuse cases we deal with you would be surprised. While it's true it may affect some real customers whether or not we are able to provide a specific form of payment the number of abuse cases would increase which would overall shift resources from development to handling abuse cases, creating more DDOS attacks both outbound and inbound and overall degrading the quality of service dramatically.

  While we understand that its frustrating for legitimate customers there are other factors that we have to weigh in because unfortunately that's just the reality we would deal with.

  We've already seen this happen with PayPal which anonymizes the payment a bit more than a direct credit card and the amount of abuse is 2x higher than the abuse we see with direct credit cards, so creating an even more anonymous payment system would see that perhaps increase another 2x which would be 4x more abuse and overall create 6x more abuse work.

• Salman Abbas commented  ·  March 11, 2013 1:10 a.m.  ·  Delete

  We don't rent cars to clients who pay in cash because they have the highest abuse rates xD

• Anonymous commented  ·  February 26, 2013 5:07 p.m.  ·  Delete

  @Molsey: Speaking of Linode and Bitcoin:

  http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/04/02/watch-bitcoin-robbery-in-slow-motion/
  http://status.linode.com/2012/03/manager-security-incident.html
  

• AdminMoisey Uretsky (Head of Product, Digital Ocean) commented  ·  February 18, 2013 10:22 a.m.  ·  Delete

  We aren't worried about collecting funds we are worried about the customer sending us funds being abusive. As you add anonymity in to the payment method the % of customers that are potentially abusive increases.

  We've already seen this just with implementing Paypal and have a much higher incidence of fraud with Paypal than with direct CC signups.

  So implementing an even more anonymous payment method would cause too much support overhead and other issues unfortunately.

• Anonymous commented  ·  February 17, 2013 4:08 a.m.  ·  Delete

  The very belief that anonymity equals fraud is obsolete with bitcoin. You get paid, and never defrauded.

• Adrian commented  ·  February 17, 2013 1:41 a.m.  ·  Delete

  There are no chargebacks with bitcoin, so you won't have any problems with stolen credit cards.

  The main problem that you'll have with bitcoin is spammers and other abuse.

• Kyle Weller commented  ·  February 16, 2013 10:10 p.m.  ·  Delete

  There are plenty of ways to implement this that turn the coins into cash. Check out coinbase.com and bitpay.com. there are also many other merchants. Bit coin is gaining widespread adoption and has a $300,000,000 USD market cap that has more funds available than over 18 countries. There is more benefits to accepting bit coin than other merchants, less fees and see your money faster is a big thing as a fellow business owner

• AdminMoisey Uretsky (Head of Product, Digital Ocean) commented  ·  February 6, 2013 9:25 a.m.  ·  Delete

  We currently aren't looking into integrating any other payment systems aside from what we currently provide which is credit cards and paypal.

  Thanks =]

• Kenn Ejima commented  ·  February 5, 2013 6:34 p.m.  ·  Delete

  Honestly, this being at the top of feature requests is damaging reputation for DigitalOcean and shuns serious users away. Or at least it indicates that the UserVoice-based feedback system is not really working.

  Sorry guys, but we all want DO to be successful, right? This feature will attract wrong crowd.

• Kaidesa commented  ·  February 2, 2013 12:12 a.m.  ·  Delete

  The biggest issue here wouldn't be fraud, but the risk you'd be taking in accepting Bitcoins as a currency. Bitcoins fluctuate quite frequently, and has had highs of up to $35 a piece and lows as low as $3 a piece. Just today within a matter of hours it has shot up to $22 a piece and just as quickly dropped to $18 a piece.

  If you don't mind taking a gamble as to the daily value of bitcoins changing drastically, I guess you could use them, but as it is I'd say it's too risky for legitimate businesses to use. I tried accepting bitcoins on one of my sites and it just wasn't feasible for long-term use. It never held a steady value, and while finding the exchange rate isn't difficult at all, finding a way to convert the coins into useful cash before the value once again changes drastically is nearly impossible, especially if you live in the US.

• AdminMoisey Uretsky (Head of Product, Digital Ocean) commented  ·  January 22, 2013 9:21 p.m.  ·  Delete

  After a long discussion in our IRC chat we wanted to clarify our position on bitcoin to make it clearer.

  We integrated PayPal payments a few months ago and after reviewing the numbers we saw a higher % of users that paid via PayPal violating our AUP/TOS which we had to terminate.

  We receive a lot less transparency from Paypal when a transaction is processed than we do with a direct signup which means that our backend will flag customers as abuse and without additional information our determination of whether or not it is a legitimate user is more difficult.

  We are constantly improving our backend monitoring for users that violate our AUP/TOS and if we feel comfortable that it is running in a purely automated fashion and not creating many false positives we can review the discussion of integrating with bitcoin, however at this point we still need to further refine our backend monitoring before we get to that point.

  If anyone needs any further clarification let us know.

  Thanks!

• Roman Shtylman commented  ·  January 22, 2013 8:15 p.m.  ·  Delete

  What do you mean by fraud issues? It sounds like you guys don't fully understand how bitcoin transactions work or for some reason think you need credit cards to accept payments from users.

• AdminMoisey Uretsky (Head of Product, Digital Ocean) commented  ·  January 20, 2013 12:50 p.m.  ·  Delete

  Looks like this one has gotten alot of upvotes and interest but it's going to be hard for us to instate this because of the fraud issues with anonymity.

• Dylan commented  ·  January 20, 2013 10:20 a.m.  ·  Delete

  I'd support this, but have to manually check every bitcoin-user thoroughly considering how much abuse and fraud comes out of there..