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The Pirate Bay Gets a 'Massive' $9 in Donations Per Day (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: When The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites started accepting Bitcoin donations a few years ago, copyright holders voiced concerns about this new 'unseizable' revenue stream. Thus far, this fear seems unwarranted with TPB raking in an average of $9 per day in Bitcoin donations over the past year. While hardly a windfall, it's a fortune compared to the donations received by the leading torrent site KickassTorrents.
It's actually extremely easy to track who gave who bitcoins. That's the whole point of bitcoins...well, that, and the ponzi scheme.
Nine bucks is how much I pay for a skinny vanilla latte and a breakfast sandwich at Starbucks.
Gotta wonder why Netflix is so popular, huh?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That's a lot of work to give the pirate bay 9 dollars.
Bitcoin, in it's raw form, is the most traceable currency in existence. Thus if one is planning to engage in clandestine activity it might be unwise to set up a link between pirate bay's public key and your private key. Such a link would exist for all time. So if at any time your key get's linked to a real identity because for example you order a pizza ten years from now or the credit card you used to buy the bit coins from Mt Gox is in Mt. Gox's records under control of the Japanese police, then you are linked to Pirate Bay.
The saving grace I supposed it that in itself is not a crime. But that's not what on your mind if you were hoping nobody finds out.
You could of course use some tumbler to launder the transaction but then you are trusting the tumbler company.
Someday we'll all be able to buy a disposable bitcoin gift card in the super market with cash but until then there's always possible way to trace it back to you (in most cases).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I was about to post the same sentiment. When your entire business model revolves around a crowd of people who don't have the funds and/or desire to actually buy the media they consume - trying to obtain donations from such a crowd is a fool's errand.
I think it's more than that. It's one thing to donate to support a creator whose writing a comic or making show that you love, it's another to donate to someone trying to make money by facilitating media piracy. People might see TPB as useful or necessary, but it's hard to see them as people worthy of donation.
I stole this Sig
Any serious bean counters/market analysts looking for accurate data on how much of piracy actually represents lost sales (situations where the customer actually had money and would have paid for the product if there were an option to do so) well there's your numbers; 9$ a day.
Their site is plastered with ads, or at least was the last time I looked at it (doesn't load for me so I can't check; I've recently moved countries so maybe it's blocked in the UK).
Given its popularity I'm sure they're making thousands per month simply from ad traffic.
I have to wonder if the low donations is reflective of the fact that people are actually unwilling to donate to people/organisations when they know they're actually doing the "wrong" thing. People have no problems pirating content but they don't actually want anyone to profit off it if it can be avoided.
Although I recall an interview with Bram Cohen (BitTorrent creator) many years ago where he mentioned his father convinced him to put that "please donate" in the original Python client, and he said after that he was making hundreds a day. So maybe not.
People probably don't donate because their they're taking content for free. If they cared enough to donate, they'd care enough to just buy the shit they're taking for free.
What about people who can't "buy the shit" because of stupid region-based copyrights so that the TV show/movie/game they want has not been made available to them legally?
Of course this got modded into oblivion but the assertion on /. is that people turn to piracy for reasons other than being cheap. The fact that only $9 per day gets donated runs counter to this argument. If it truly were due to other reasons (content not available locally, et cetera), the donations would be much higher. I'm sure there *are* people out there who pirate for non-monetary reasons (there's an exception to every rule) but I surmise that the vast majority simply do it because they want content for free.
Why not instead support people who create content which is not region-locked? Why continue to consume content when they don't want your money?
This is a nonsense argument.
When I was young, I learned to like certain things, from shows like Star Trek to authors like Douglas Adams to music like Pink Floyd. I like what I like because of my experiences. Just because the properties I enjoy have been ensnared in modern distribution nightmares doesn't change what I like. If Star Trek were owned by a company that made access draconian, that wouldn't change my desire to consume it. If Douglas Adams (wasn't dead) wrote a book and his publisher made it massively difficult to purchase legitimately, that wouldn't extinguish my burning desire to read it. If Pink Floyd produced a bunch of awesome guitar-work but their label made me purchase a copy for every room I might listen to it in, that wouldn't diminish my want to hear it.
I understand fully that my wants and desires do not equate to entitlement. Problem is I'm still human and there's a really easy solution to the problem. Not liking what I like isn't it.
"Oh no... he found the