Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Arch-TK 621 days ago
Neo900 is dead. Unfortunately. It was always on shaky ground (the nature of a hardware project) but what seems to have killed it was PayPal withholding its funds for long enough to take the wind out of key people's sails. PayPal just decided to abruptly lock out the project account one day after accruing a substantial number of down-payments, and refused to give the funds back for around a year. By the time some progress started being made again, the funds were no longer enough and the project was at that point based on seriously obsolete hardware (as opposed to the regular kind of obsolete most hardware projects have to work with).
1 comments
mmooss 621 days ago
Why do people trust PayPal with their futures? It's also Neo900's fault - everyone knows by now what PayPal does.
link
harry8 621 days ago
Why are paypal allowed to do this with impunity? You're not. I' not. Why are they allowed to break both the law and the social contract?
link
Arch-TK 617 days ago
Really 3 points:

* This was long ago enough that PayPal wasn't _quite_ as famous for its practices.

* In Europe people generally assume that companies big and small won't try to fuck you over because there are usually repercussions. Apparently American companies are exempt.

* When trying to get sizeable donations for a moonshot hardware project with high risk of failure it's ideal if donating didn't involve entering an IBAN. (Although I think kickstarter wasn't considered because the project was so niche that there was no chance of hitting a "milestone" in a reasonable time and the approach was to use funds as they came in order to allow the project to make steady progress. The idea being that people who were unconvinced earlier might become convinced later and you'd slowly attract enough support as you progress the project. I think the incident pre-dates crowd supply.)

link