It's how your data is actually stored that protects it, not whether you've paid for the storage in tinfoil shekels or picodollars.

The "truly paranoids" probably have plenty of bitcoin burning a hole in their digital wallets.

As others have said, this depends on your definition of paranoia. If you're paranoid right here and right now, you can always go to your local 7-11/Walgreens/etc and get a prepaid credit card to pay for this.

A true paranoid would go to a store as far as possible!

... except that serial killers have been tracked on the basis of which areas they avoid (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_profiling).

If your opponent uses geographic profiling, you want to pick a point far away from you and then go to stores far away from that point -- then they'll identify that far-away point as being your origin. If your opponent is a game theoretician, on the other hand, you want to pick stores to visit completely at random, in order to avoid providing any information.

I'm considering taking BTC in the future. If coinbase were easier to integrate I would have done it already, in fact.

Perfectly serious snarkless question - how would that work, financially? You're reselling S3 storage with your value-added service on top - obviously you set your prices in a way that pays for your costs, time and generates some sort of profit. Short of adjusting your prices on a daily (or hourly!) basis, how would you be able to accept payment in a currency of such extreme volatility?

This is why I don't accept BTC yet -- unless the exchange rate settles down I'm only going to be able to do it via a service which lets me say "I want X USD; make it happen".

Coinbase comes close -- the only thing they don't do is allow me to specify at run-time how many USD I want; for some odd reason they need you to "create a button" with an API call before displaying that button on your site, which is a pain to deal with when you have variable payment amounts.

Why not add a simple public page to the Tarsnap website that allows the visitor to gift x dollars to the foo@example.com account? That way, bitcoiners can use bitspend.net etc. as a proxy payment provider for the time being.

Not leaking metadata on credit card statements that allows to infer that valuable data is stored at Tarsnap (and approximately how much), would be a practical increase in security: Such a leak might prompt an attacker to allocate more resources towards compromising the Tarsnap user's client computer.

IIRC you can say "I want users to pay $5 for this" and have Coinbase figure out how many BTC that is.

And I don't get why they should use Bitcoin. You're trying to secure your data, not obfuscate your financial transactions.

I'm guessing it suggests that those who are truly paranoid about others snooping into their tarsnap-saved data may want to make their tarsnap payments anonymously as well.