The most famous torrent site in the world, The Pirate Bay, has just started accepting Bitcoin donations, placing a donation address on their front page. The initiative quickly proved to be very successful, raising over 10 BTC ($1,300) in little more than a single day, and other major torrent sites have quickly started to do the same thing. EZTV, OpenBitTorrent, PublicBitTorrent and istole.it have all added Bitcoin donation addresses onto their front pages.
In terms of promoting awareness, this is a fairly large step forward for Bitcoin. The Pirate Bay is ranked by Alexa as the 77th most visited site on the internet, placing it above all other Bitcoin-accepting sites to date except WordPress at 21st. However, the Pirate Bay’s use of Bitcoin, and that of the other torrent sites that have rapidly followed suit, is much more prominent. Unlike WordPress, Namecheap and Reddit, which do not make any attempt to advertise their acceptance of Bitcoin beyond an initial press release, the Bitcoin address on The Pirate Bay in particular is immediately visible to everyone who accesses the page. The message that The Pirate Bay is sending is clear: you do not need to be ashamed about supporting Bitcoin. Sure, Bitcoin is controversial, with some mainstream economists coming out outright against it, but what revolution isn’t? As an organization whose very continued existence has come to symbolize an ongoing victory against the pro-copyright establishment, The Pirate Bay understands this better than almost anyone else – except perhaps Wikileaks, although incidentally Wikileaks accepts Bitcoin too, and are actually doing quite well with it.
Of course, businesses like WordPress, Reddit and NameCheap are not charities, and essentially since have already made the bold step of accepting Bitcoin in the first place we should not demand them to more actively promote Bitcoin from the kindness of their hearts if they do not want to. Fortunately, however, at least in spirit The Pirate Bay is a charity, and as members of the Bitcoin community, we should be very grateful that such organizations exist. It is only through people and organizations continually and passively promoting Bitcoin in this way that the currency will reach any kind of significant cultural acceptance – simple news articles primarily lead to transitory interest that, in the case of the latest bubble, has already largely faded away. News promotes Bitcoin as something special; passive promotion promotes Bitcoin as something normal. The answer to which one evokes less hostile attention from regulators, more interest from casual users, and ultimately more willingness on the part of more traditional businesses to accept Bitcoin and show it, is clear.
When donating bitcoins in general, there is one security reminder that is important to repeat: don’t copy a donation address from anything other than the official website, and do not post a donation address without directly linking to the page that confirms the address as being legitimate. Posting fraudulent donation addresses is very easy, and it would be a shame if the Bitcoin community’s charitable nature were to be exploited by the most trivial of scams. Stay secure, stay safe, and feel free to donate a few bitcents today.
