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Comment by sleepychu | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to imagine how you could operate a successful torrenting site in 2017; they represent such a loss of income to so many people with expensive lawyers.

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Expensive lawyers yes, loss of income, probably not much. The majority of torrent users are not likely to suddenly pay for the same content.

sleepychu's point stands either way. It's not a question of whether there's actually a loss of income. If the people with the expensive lawyers think there's a loss of income then you're gonna get dragged into an expensive lawsuit.

Obviously it's not a 1:1 ratio of lost revenue to pirated material. But I bet many pirates would spend some money / watch commericals if they were forced to for entertainment.

I've seen some suggestion that they spend more on average than the average consumer. But I suspect they'd spend even more. And getting some content free and paying for others has discretionary effects.

> if they were forced to for entertainment

There is more free content made every day online than one person could consume in their entire life. Even when 99% of it is garbage, that 1% is still more than you can fill your time with.

I read a few dozen webcomics, most of which have patreons, but I don't get ads on my rss feeds for them, and there are thousands of webcomics. And artists. And musicians. There are dozens of websites for hobbyist, amateur, and even freelance professional games, animations, etc.

There is a fraction of pirates that will pay for content they would otherwise torrent because they want that content. But that doesn't imply they are more likely to buy entertainment. A portion probably just turn to free legal sources.

Heh, easily. If you are technically inclined enough to operate a successful torrent site, it shouldn't be very challenging to operate such a site anonymously.

Buying bitcoins, and then "laundering" the coins is relatively trivial, you just run them through a few of the more anonymity-inclined altcoins.

Using those bitcoins to get torrent-friendly hosting? Hit up Infium in Ukraine, they won't mind a few threatening abuse emails. https://infiumhost.com/

Domains you can get from Njalla, Namecheap and a plethora of Chinese registrars who won't even read English abuse emails.

Want to earn money? It gets slightly trickier. There's a few solutions here. If you get lucky, you might find a well paying VPN affiliate program that'll pay you in bitcoin. But the more common solution is setting up a shell company and bank accounts in a friendly jurisdiction to accept payments from different advertising companies until you find one that won't kick you off.

I suppose it might even be possible (probably not legal however) to do that in an anonymous manner, you can register businesses online with bitcoin (or if you need a mastercard, you can get an anonymous one from https://advcash.com right now!) and opening bank accounts over the internet isn't exactly impossible either. Later you'd just wire all that money to a bitcoin exchange.

I'd imagine that most people using them have adblockers on as well.

Define "successful". Many of them are only interested in floating as long as possible. User donations pay for the server and users have motivation to help keep the site running to keep the ability to pirate. Development and moderation is volunteer work.

For many of these sites just their continued existence is a success - however many years it ends up being.

I assume they just operate in jurisdictions where nobody can really hold them responsible.

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