In 2013, several popular torrent sites added the option to donate via Bitcoin.
The Pirate Bay was one of the first to jump on board and within a day the site’s users had donated a total of 5.5 bitcoins.
At the time one bitcoin was worth $125. This means that the site earned roughly $700 in 24 hours, which looked promising. At today’s exchange rate we can even call it spectacular, but more on that later.
While Pirate Bay users quickly embraced Bitcoin, copyright holders were rather concerned. The RIAA even informed the U.S. Trade Representative about this looming threat that could make it harder to crack down on pirate sites.
“In April 2013, the site started accepting donations from the public by Bitcoin, a digital currency, which operates using peer-to-peer technology,” the RIAA wrote, adding that “there are no central authority or banks involved which makes it very difficult to seize or trace Bitcoin funds.”
As time went by, the TPB donation rate started to drop off from its early highs. In the years that followed the daily average hovered around $10 worth of bitcoin per day. The torrent site also added Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, but those didn’t really move the needle.
Earlier this month, the Bitcoin Cash option was swapped for Ethereum. In addition, The Pirate Bay added a new Bitcoin address to its homepage, which prompted us to take a look at the current donation rate.
After reviewing dozens of transactions that came in over the past year, we found that the total amount in donations was roughly 0.07 BTC. This, once again, is the equivalent of roughly $10 per day.
The average donation amount per day is nowhere near the hundreds of dollars that came in on the first day. However, Bitcoin has become much more valuable over time. The $125 from 2013 has grown to more than $50,000 at the time of writing.
This means that if The Pirate Bay has HODLed all the donations, it’s sitting on a massive pile of cryptocurrency today.
Between 2013 and 2015, Custos Media Technologies estimated that the torrent site earned a massive 126.64 in Bitcoin donations, and a year later we reported that another 8.21 had been added. From 2017 onwards the Bitcoin price rose quickly and roughly one whole coin came in since.
Based on this quick calculation, which isn’t exhaustive or perfect, we can conclude that The Pirate Bay has earned about 135 in Bitcoin donations over the years.
If the people behind the site have kept all these coins, which is highly unlikely, this would now be worth $6.8 million. That would translate to more than $2,000 per day over the past 8 years. The 5.56 BTC in donations that came in on the first day back in 2013 is worth more than $278,000 today.
If anything, this hypothetic windfall shows how well Bitcoin’s value has grown over the years. The same can’t be said for The Pirate Bay’s own TPB coin launched earlier this year, which has significantly gone down in value since.
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*The calculations above are based on transactions to TPB’s public Bitcoin wallets. There is no way to verify that these all come from outsiders.
