If you had any doubts that MegaUpload, and its outlandish founder, were a big deal: let this assure that it is. As sharing and cloud hosting services become a natural extension of the Internet, Kim Dotcom's new service ("Mega") is poised to make a huge impression. It's not a stretch to think that most of MegaUpload's users will be giving Mega a whirl, and tons of people who had never heard of the prior service will be joining as well. But Mega is evidently going to keep to its name in terms of scope: it'll do more than just host files. According to Dotcom, it's going to grow into a provider of secure e-mail, chat, and voice services -- not to mention "video and mobile."



For now, however, those interested in taking advantage of Mega's existing service can finally pay with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency, and while that may sound a bit like Monopoly money, there's a serious amount of steam behind it. Huge swaths of Internet users are now leaning on the currency, and because it has no central issuer, it's increasingly difficult to track and impossible to lock out of any nation. In other words, it's truly a free-flowing global currency.

Mega will let people purchase 500GB of data storage and 1TB of bandwidth for 0.5184 Bitcoin per month or 5.1888 Bitcoin per year, or 2TB of data storage and 4TB bandwidth for 1.0373 Bitcoin per month or 10.3781 Bitcoin per year. Heavy users can get 4TB of data storage and 8TB bandwidth per month for 1.5563 Bitcoin per month or 15.5674 Bitcoin per year.

The Bitcoin move could be as big for the currency as it is for Dotcom; who knows if this is just the first of many up-and-coming Internet companies to start widely accepting a newly formed digital currency.