The Pirate Bay Now Accepts Bitcoin Donations | Hacker News Reader

The Pirate Bay Now Accepts Bitcoin Donations

torrentfreak.com

33 pointsLightning11 comments

> One of the advantages for the operators of the infamous BitTorrent site is that Bitcoin funds can’t easily be seized or traced back to a person.

But that last bit isn't true at all. It's trivial to trace Bitcoin transactions.

Only to other Bitcoin transactions.

You should read up about Zerocoin here: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/04/zerocoin-mak...

It's going to be presented at the ieee conference next month.

Sigh.. is any publicity better than none? I'm not sure. I am a little bit disturbed that sites that promote illegal or NSFW material are the ones that are quickest to adopt Bitcoin. It's already well-known for being associated with the Silkroad.

We need local businesses, or even corporations to start adopting Bitcoin! When this starts happening at a large scale, I think we'll see a tipping point in Bitcoin adoption.

IF that happens. There is still a chicken-egg dynamic at play (businesses don't plan on holding BTC and no one seems to reliably hedge against USDBTC volatility at a scale that justifies using it for business. Expenses are still in dollars so revenue needs to reliably exceed expenses. If that means grossly unfavorable prices, people will just convert BTC to USD first.)

i guess you haven't heard of https://bitpay.com/.

You clearly haven't bothered to learn about their service:

"To calculate the exchange rate for US Dollars, we pull up-to-the-minute BID prices from three exchanges. We take the 2 that are closest together and toss out the third, so that a bad feed from one exchange will not affect our calculation. Of the 2 rates that remain, Bit-Pay uses the highest BID price as our exchange rate. "

Companies don't end up changing prices every minute. Gas stations, for example, are prohibited from changing prices too frequently in many states.

A proper solution has to provide more than one minute of price stability. BitPay doesn't provide longer term price stability.

Isn't this similar to how VCR's, DVDs and BluRays were chosen by the porn industry?

the illegal industries push progress forward.

If all illicit/immoral/illegal transactions happened in BTC, the likelihood that "proper/legitimate" transactions happen in BTC is higher.

Because: - now people know how to use BTC - they are comfortable spending BTC - they have some BTC on hand (that they may typically spend on illicit goods)

Publicity is publicity is publicity

When it comes to donations, people will take boxes of used clothing. Better than nothing, right? Post something when Boeing will take Bitcoins for a 737.

> When it comes to donations, people will take boxes of used clothing.

People including the Pirate Bay?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com