Kim Dotcom has said the new site will reinstate all the old user accounts and logins from the original Megaupload and will give the 100 million old users premium access for the new site.
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The tweets suggest that the new Megaupload service will involve the Bitcoin virtual currency.
Kim Dotcom’s legal troubles began in January 2012, when police raided his home in Coatesville, near Auckland, New Zealand, which led to the shutdown of his file-sharing service Megaupload. The website will be resurrected on January 20, 2017 – five years after the United States government took down the site accusing it of piracy.
Kim Dotcom has revealed that when his new venture finally goes live in January 2017, Bitcoin will be central to its business operation.
Emails will be sent to those who used to use MegaUpload, informing them that it’ll be ready to use.
The content sharing platform, first established in 2005, will come back with 100GB of free cloud storage and no limits on data transfer, Dotcom said in a series of tweets outlining his plans.
He added: “To former Megaupload and current Mega employees”. The site’s popularity quickly surged, leading to over 150 million registered users and 50 million daily visitors at its peak.
Since 2012, Dotcom has spent most of his time living in New Zealand, where he tried his hand at politics and also tried to launch another file sharing site called Mega, although he resigned from the board in 2013, complaining the company was subject of a hostile takeover.
An FBI-led investigation rendered charges of internet piracy and money laundering against Dotcom and his partners.
The original Megaupload site hosted a total of 25 million GB of data, much of which has now been deleted, and at one point Megaupload was the 13th most visited site on the Internet.
During the trial, Dotcom accused the U.S. law-enforcement agencies for deliberately mistranslating statements he had made in German in order to create a case against him.
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Megaupload 2.0 arrives not only in the wake of the original Megaupload, but Mega NZ as well.
