The file-sharing wars are heating up, with Kim Dotcom announcing that his new storage service Mega has become the latest website to start accepting payment via the virtual currency Bitcoin (BTC). The news comes just days after the launch of a new rival service from BitTorrent which blows Mega out the water with a whopping 1TB of free storage space to entice new users.

One of Mega’s biggest draws has been that up until now, it’s offered by far and away the largest amount of free space to its users, with the 500GB on offer being more than enough for the casual user. But aside from this, those who need more space can choose payments plans for an additional 500GB of space, all the way up to 4TB. Mega’s cheapest plans starts at just $9.99 per month, meaning that if no discounts are offered for Bitcoin users, those who decide to use the virtual currency will be able to sign up for additional space for the price of just over half a Bitcoin. Kim Dotcom said on Twitter that payments can be made via BitVoucher, one of Mega’s reseller partners.

As well as the monthly packages, users can also sign up for yearly membership and take advantage of big savings of 17%. Yearly membership starts at 5.44 BTC for 500GB of storage space, 10.88 BTC for 2TB, and 16.32 BTC for 4TB per year.

Aside from the free space and its competitive prices, Mega’s other big selling point has been its proclaimed high level of security. Kim Dotcom likes to refer to Mega as “The Privacy Company” due to its unique security system, and while this has drawn criticism from some quarters, there haven’t been any high profile security breaches so far. By adding Bitcoin as a method of payment, Mega has arguably just taken its already cast-iron security up a notch further, and could help it to win over a considerable number of netizens who place more trust in the virtual currency than they do with other forms of online payment.

BitVoucher’s FAQ page goes into more detail on how Mega payments will be handled, and explains how the prices will stay relative to Mega’s current fees in Euros, given that Bitcoin’s value still tends to fluctuate quite erratically.

BitTorrent Launches SoShare Rival with 1TB Free Storage

While security and privacy-conscious users might be tempted to spend their Bitcoin with Kim Dotcom, those prefer to ‘take’ as much as they can without giving anything back might well be tempted by a new digital locker service from BitTorrent.

Named SoShare, the new file-sharing service’s most obvious draw is the whopping 1TB of free storage space that’s offered to new users, which dwarfs the miserly 2GB of free space offered to new Dropbox users, and is twice that of Mega’s already generous 50GB offer.

SoShare is likely to appeal to professionals and enterprise users that regularly need to send large files to their clients and don’t want to compress and email them, or exceed their storage limits with other file-sharing services. It’s currently still in beta, being just the latest project under the BitTorrent Labs initiative, meaning that the service will likely be developed and expanded upon according to feedback received in the BitTorrent community.

Anyone can sign up for SoShare, although it’s necessary to download a special plugin for the software to work. The plugin works with all four major browsers – Chrome, IE, Firefox and Safari – and allows users to easily send files, including images, songs, movies etc, to the BitTorrent cloud. One of the coolest features is the thumbnail gallery, which means that other users can view snippets of your work without actually accessing your files, something that might appeal to professionals. As well as this, other features include a notification system that lets you know when your files have been accessed by someone else, plus the ability to share public links on sites like Facebook, meaning that it isn’t necessary for other users to sign up to SoShare to view files

Given that it’s still in beta, users may come across the occasional bug with SoShare to begin with, but once these are ironed out by BitTorrent’s 170-million strong community, we could well have a very worthy competitor to the likes of Mega and Dropbox on our hands.