Despite investment from the likes of Samsung, Pelion, DCM, First Round, Horizons, and Andreessen Horowitz, cloud storage provider Bitcasa CEO Brian E. Taptich announced on the now-defunct firm's webpage today (archived) that the firm had lost its bet on the unending continuation of Kryder's Law to power its growth by bringing its costs close to zero.
Over $22 mn in 2011 – 2013 turkey dollars1 was poured into the firm, which employed upwards of 50 staff at its peak in its efforts to offer unlimited on-the-go cloud storage for USD $10 per month. Under pressure from "abusers" of the service, Bitcasa dropped the unlimited storage offering and shifted to a more typical per-terabyte pricing strategy in late 2014, putting it directly in competition with better funded rivals like Dropbox, Box, and Google, and dooming it to failure.
There's no word on where former clients such as Hong Kong's Hutchison Telecom have turned to in their time of need, or whether Mr. Taptich has finally admitted to himself the poisonous mistake of taking bad money.
This is a more important clarification than it may first appear. Consider that a dollar traded at parity with bitcoin in 2011 and was only about $100 for most of 2013. ↩