It’s been three years since we last checked in on The Pirate Bay’s Bitcoin wallet.
While the torrent site may not be raking in the digital dough like it used to, the donations keep trickling in.
Back in 2021, we estimated that TPB was receiving around $10 per day in Bitcoin donations. Our latest analysis shows that this figure remains surprisingly consistent.
Over the past three years, the site has added approximately 0.196 BTC to its latest donation address. That’s a little over $20,000 now, averaging $15 per day since the last update.
This amount isn’t enough to sustain the site, obviously, and the tiny amounts of Ethereum, Litecoin, and Monero donations don’t offer any help on this front. The real spectacle is revealed when we go more than a decade back in time, adding up all donations over the years.
Silk Road & BitcoinTorrentz
In 2011, Bitcoin was mostly used on the dark web, where “Dread Pirate Roberts” popularized it through Silk Road. This direct payment option outside the traditional banking system also appealed to venues where added privacy was welcome.
The torrent download service BitCoinTorrentz.com was the first platform to combine BitTorrent and Bitcoin. The remote download service offered high-speed downloads at the modest price of 0.08 BTC per gigabyte. That was $0.25 at the time, but over $8,000 at today’s rates.
BitCoinTorrentz was a niche service. By July 2012, it had 422 registered users, who downloaded a modest number of files. At the time, it wasn’t seen as a spectacular success, but the 16.5 BTC it made in bandwidth fees that month would be a fortune today.
The Pirate Bay: Five Bitcoin in a single day
With Bitcoin’s spectacular price increase over the years, hindsight is a recurring theme. Paying 10,000 BTC for two pizzas was reasonable at the time, but with today’s price of ~$103,000 per bitcoin, that’s a billion dollar feast.
On a different level, earnings from The Pirate Bay’s early donation efforts also look quite spectacular.
In April 2013, The Pirate Bay quietly added a Bitcoin address to the site’s footer. This update didn’t come with an announcement or instructions, but those who were familiar with it started sending ‘donations’ right away.
The silent donation drive was quite successful. In 24 hours, 73 transactions were transferred into Pirate Bay’s wallet, adding up to a healthy 5.56 BTC. At the time, the exchange rate was roughly $125, so this $700 bonus was more than welcome.
$14 million
After this initial boom, incoming donations started to slow down but Pirate Bay supporters continued to tip the site in the years that followed.
Custos Media Technologies estimated that the torrent site earned a massive 126.64 in Bitcoin donations between 2013 and 2015, and a year later we reported that another 8.21 had been added. From 2017 onwards the Bitcoin price rose quickly, adding a little over one bitcoin in seven years.
Of course, the real story is what could have been. If The Pirate Bay had held onto all the Bitcoin it received since 2013, that stash would now be worth around $14 million. However, it’s highly unlikely the team resisted the urge to cash out at some point, or use the funds to pay for expenses.
Crypto Mining & Token
The Pirate Bay’s crypto experiments were not limited to Bitcoin. In 2017, many of the site’s users complained that their CPU usage increased dramatically when they browsed certain Pirate Bay pages. It was later revealed that the site had implemented a Monero cryptocurrency miner provided by Coinhive.
While using user resources isn’t chic, the potential monthly payout of $12,000 was certainly appealing. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that many other pirate sites, mostly the dubious ones, followed suit.
The Pirate Bay’s most recent crypto experiment came in 2021, when the site launched its own PirateToken, also known as ‘TPB’. Skeptics suggested that this could be a setup for a ‘rugpull’, but the site indirectly denied this.
According to an official statement, the token was launched to unlock new featured in the future. For example, it could be used to donate to uploaders and moderators, as well as unlock VIP content. These plans never came to fruition.
Instead, the PirateToken slowly faded into oblivion, with the rest of the ‘dead’ token projects. Apparently, not everything crypto-related turns into a goldmine.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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