Mega will now accept Bitcoin, to eventually expand to email, chat and voice

Trust Kim Dotcom to come up with larger than life ideas and work on them. After launching his controversial file-hosting website Megaupload's successor Mega, Dotcom is now aiming to make it more than just a clone of the erstwhile website.

Dotcom took to Twitter over the weekend to announce a slew of new features he intends to add to the New Zealand based Mega, including email, chat, video support and Bitcoin-based membership to the site. While renewing his vows towards Mega's commitment to privacy, Dotcom said that New Zealand is a safe haven for companies competing with 'insecure' US providers and could be a jurisdiction protecting the privacy of users a '100 percent'.

Big promises (Image Credits: Kim Dotcom on Twitter)

Dotcom teased that in the coming years Mega planned to expand from secure cloud storage to secure email, chat, voice and 'mobile'. The colourful entrepreneur took to Twitter to advise his followers to steer clear of hosting anything on US based servers or use email services based in the country.  "Because the US govt. says if you do, they can extradite you (sic)", said Dotcom apparently talking about hosting suspect material on websites and emails on servers based in the US.

He also went on to particularly name Gmail, iCloud and Skype as services that have to 'provide (by law) secret and untraceable NSA backdoors to all your data'. The rant started with Dotcom targeting the US government over privacy with a mock tweet that he said is supposed to be extradited to the US.

A proud Dotcom also announced that while it took competitor Dropbox two whole years to reach the landmark of three million users, it took Mega merely four weeks to reach the same.

Dotcom also announced Mega's support to Bitcoin, the decentralised digital currency. "Mega now accepts Bitcoin via our newest reseller Bitvoucher," Dotcom wrote. There are six ways to buy Mega services using Bitcoins on bitvoucher.co. These include three monthly, and three yearly options.

Mega Pro I: 500GB of data storage and 1TB of bandwidth for 0.5184 Bitcoin per month or 5.1888 Bitcoin per year.
Mega Pro II: 2TB of data storage and 4TB bandwidth for 1.0373 Bitcoin per month or 10.3781 Bitcoin per year.
Mega Pro III: 4TB of data storage and 8TB bandwidth per month for 1.5563 Bitcoin per month or 15.5674 Bitcoin per year.

The digital currency is very widely used as an alternative to common forms of money that is being accepted by more and more websites every day. Since Bitcoin has no central issuer and no single authority, there is no way certain users or countries can be locked out of the network.

This is rich coming from Dotcom but we can expect him to stick to his word like we've seen him do in the past. Even as the service started, it was revealed that Mega was riddled with bugs. Dotcom announced a bug-bounty contest where he said that he would pay users to spot bugs in Mega.

Last week Dotcom announced the winners of the first round of the vulnerability program that saw seven bug fixes and Dotcom awarding cash prizes to all those who noticed them. He also said that the program will be continuing.