I've lurked on Usenet a bit before and came to the conclusion that while there's a lot of spam, there are still a few active/well-moderated newsgroups worth joining.
To that end, which high-quality newsgroups do people recommend?
What requirements must a micropayment solution fulfil to be considered as the de-facto standard for the web? Where do current solutions fall short? Which are the most promising solutions today?
I certainly remember using Flattr a long time ago — what ever became of that? It seems that "Donate Bitcoin", Patreon, PayPal and "Buy me a coffee" (https://www.buymeacoffee.com) are the most popular methods of supporting projects on the web these days. However these have always felt like a stop-gap solution compared to being able to, for example, click a button and have your browser send a payment of $0.01 to unlock an article.
Brave Browser (https://brave.com) seems to be a project which crops up frequently, although it prescribes a very specific model (use a specific browser, voluntarily view privacy-respecting ads, earn tokens and distribute tokens to enrolled websites that you visit). Is it likely that the Basic Attention Token (the "currency" that enables the interaction described above) will be included with other browsers?
Then of course there is the Bitcoin Lightning Network, which sidesteps some of the limitations of on-chain transactions. Strike (https://beta.strike.me) seems to be the missing piece, which provides an end-to-end solution for sending fiat currency by using the Bitcoin Lightning Network as the underlying payment transport.
There is also Stellar, which it seems is more concerned with providing a method of sending payments, than being its own currency, although the native currency "Lumens" are still required to complete a transaction (as I understand).
Stepping outside of the cryptocurrency world, there is also GNU Taler (https://taler.net/en/), a project to create a privacy-preserving payment system using existing banking infrastructure.
I decided to cash-out $3k-worth of Rocketrip points (a workplace scheme which rewards reduced-cost business travel) on Amazon gift-cards to purchase some things to furnish my new home in the US (just moved here – from UK originally). As a result, Amazon have closed my account, given a very vague justification of "address verification" and voided my entire balance.
I have called several times and have been led in circles on each occasion. When I was finally able to get through to a supervisor, he refused to give me the actual reason for my account closure and hung up after I repeatedly asked him to pass me to someone who could actually help resolve this situation.
I have filed a complaint with BBB, and emailed the second-line jeff@amazon.com address, but I'm not really holding out much hope for a reply / resolution.
Fundamentally I am rather upset that I am being made to feel like a criminal, when in fact my order was perfectly legitimate. Most frustratingly I would happily provide proof that I reside at this address, if only I were afforded the opportunity to do so! Furthermore, my Kindle is now absolutely useless, as is my personal AWS account (although I'm grateful I don't have anything important stored in the cloud – that could have been a lot worse!). Having been a customer of theirs for ~10 years, I'm astounded that they are not at all bothered about trying to sort out a resolution.
Does anyone have any further suggestions as to how I can resolve this situation?
Much appreciated.
Looking a bit closer to home, I should probably take a look at Code Club – a colleague had good things to say about it. I was hoping to find something which might (selfishly, perhaps) satisfy my sense of adventure too, however...
A friend and I have been building an app as a little side project for a few years. With work and real-life etc. it's been stuck in beta for quite some time, but we were actually hoping to launch this weekend.
Today we discover that a competitor launched with an identical concept. Fine, it's an obvious concept that I was surprised no-one had come up with already, and we lifted a large part of the UI from Tinder anyway. What I'm concerned about is that they also copied the name (changing one letter: Chowder (https://www.getchowder.com) -> Chowdr (https://www.chowdrapp.com)) and filed a trademark.
Is there prior art for trademarks in the US (we have been publicly visible as Chowder since ~February 2016, it seems their trademark was filed in March 2016)? I was able to find some info about the trademark (https://www.bizapedia.com/trademarks/chowdr-87042422.html) - of note is that they have a pseudo-mark for 'Chowder' as well.
While I'm annoyed that this person lifted the concept and the name, I am more worried that they will make a trademark infringement move on us as soon as we launch properly, which we cannot afford to defend against.
If it makes any difference, we have the option to become a registered company in the UK (where I am based), however we planned to launch in the US initially anyway, so I assume this would still classify as infringement?
Any advice would be appreciated. At this stage I'm thinking we should just rebrand.
