The Pirate Bay has been both an early adopter and a pioneer when it comes to cryptocurrencies.
More than seven years ago the torrent site added support for Bitcoin donations, with Litecoin and Monero following later.
The Pirate Bay was also the first large website to start mining cryptocurrency by using the computing resources of is visitors. This was a controversial move, but one that was followed by many other sites.
Bitcoin Scared Copyright Holders
The fact that cryptocurrency transactions don’t involve any banks or other authorities was a scary thought for rightsholders. Early on, the music industry’s anti-piracy group RIAA alerted the US Government to this emerging threat.
“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 informed the US Government.
“There are no central authority or banks involved which makes it very difficult to seize or trace Bitcoin funds. In May 2013, the site also started accepting Litecoin, another peer-to-peer based internet currency.”
The RIAA was right to state that Bitcoin does indeed make it harder to seize funds. That said, tracing Pirate Bay donations isn’t all that hard. In fact, all transactions are transparent and visible to the public at large, allowing anyone to see how much ‘money’ users are tipping the site.
Bitcoin Donations as Lunch Money, and More
Late April, when The Pirate Bay came back after over a month of downtime, it started using a new Bitcoin address so we decided to take another look at this revenue stream. As we’ve signaled in the past, cryptocurrency donations alone certainly can’t keep the site afloat.
The first transaction to the new Bitcoin address, a sizeable 0.007 BTC, came in late April. Since then, 23 donations followed, totaling 0.042 BTC. That equates to roughly $450 the current exchange rate.
This is less than $5 per day. Even if we added the Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash donations, which are much lower, the $5 barrier would not be reached.
In other words, Bitcoin donations are not the threat copyright holders envisioned early on. As we have shown earlier, it’s still nothing more than lunch money. Apparently, millions of Pirate Bay users are not that generous.
Still, TPB does outperform the competition when it comes to donations. For example, 1337x, which also prominently lists a Bitcoin address on its site, earned roughly $0.50 per day over the past several months.
That said, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may still be instrumental in keeping pirate sites afloat. Donations aside, they allow site owners to pay for servers and hardware relatively anonymously. This makes it possible to counter the follow-the-money approach many anti-piracy groups use.
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Fetured image: Steve Garfield (cc 2.0)
