This is said Siddarth Chandrasekaran. :) I proposed the first Stripe CTF, inspired by SmashTheStack (http://smashthestack.org/), but the resulting Stripe CTFs are the result of many, many hours of several folks' work (Andy Brody, Carl Jackson, Christian Anderson, gdb, Jonas Schneider, Jorge Ortiz, Ludwig Petterson, Nelson Elhage, Philipp Antoni, Steve Woodrow, and myself).

And yes, it's certainly a tradition that we hope to keep up!

Siddarth, any word on when the 2015 edition of CTF will be out? I check the stripe blog every week or so hoping for some mention of timeline. I loved CTF3. You guys do a fantastic job on these. THANK YOU.

What'd you love about CTF3?

Not the op, but it had great docs including links to interesting papers, referenced real world problems (git, cryptocurrencies, consensus), had a set of levels organised around the theme of consensus nicely graded from easy to quite hard, and was doable in about a day of solid effort. Even if you didn't complete it probably felt like a learning experience for most people. Also, it was fun. Finally, the meetup afterward run by Greg explaining their architecture and issues encountered was interesting.

Oh, I was just quoting gdb, who told me "he built all our CTFs" :-)

Oops, thanks for the heads-up: fixing! :)

(I work at Stripe.)

Yep, we have the same fees for American Express transactions: 2.4% + 20p + VAT per successful charge.

Can you tell us the corporate structure of Stripe?

Does Stripe have "operations" in the Republic of Ireland?

Will Stripe shuffle UK sales/transactions through Dublin in order to avoid paying corporation tax in the UK?

Quite a lot of people in the UK are sick of companies coming across the Atlantic and playing international tax games.

I think if Stripe decided to base their EU operations in ROI it would be quite legitimate as their founders, the Collison brothers, are Irish.

If a company genuinely operates out of Ireland, sure.

The issue that's caused a lot of grief is that a lot of companies set up what pretty much accounts to shell companies in Ireland, with the bare minimal operations they can get away with, and route massive amounts of revenue through it in creative ways that have nothing to do with where the actual operations and revenues of the company are.

Especially the "double Irish with a Dutch sandwich" arrangement has drawn a lot of ire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

I know you havent mentioned anyone specifically. But companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft employ hundreds if not thousands of people here.

Sorry 'bout that: scaling issues. Should be fixed now!

In now, thanks! :)

Also, this is a problem: http://imgur.com/K0d2z

Thanks - had an old version of the scan in from when we weren't correcting for the www.