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The Pirate Bay is counting down

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Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#27
post #3

They should try putting the BTC address in a format which you can copy and paste.

It has to be an image, how else would they ensure that it shows up in Comic Sans in all browsers?

Not sure if that was a joke or not, but this problem has already been solved in CSS (@font-face). Though the downside to that would be that they'd then have the issue of hosting copyrighted content (ie the typeface).

Re: The Pirate Bay is counting down

#30
post #3

They should try putting the BTC address in a format which you can copy and paste.

I wish the myth that people donate to BTC addresses would hurry up and die. There are few examples of projects that receive significant donations, as far as I know. I'd love to be proven wrong about that, but when I looked at a bunch of donation addresses 6-12 months ago, no website or project got more than spare change from it.

There have been some high-profile donations made using BTC, but that's not the same thing. Rich people will give large donations regardless of the format. It wasn't because of BTC, but rather because they wanted to donate.

Some of the donation addresses received huge amounts of BTC. These obviously weren't from donations. Probably from the account holder shuffling their own money around.

I wouldn't be surprised if BTC donations were far less frequent than, say, "likes" on YouTube videos. For the average video with half a million views, ~20,000 likes isn't uncommon. And people only do that because it's free. So if, for any given "thing that half a million people look at," only about 200 of them actually donate, you can see how pitiful the returns are compared to ads. But putting up ads to profit from copyright infringement is blatantly illegal, whereas BTC donations aren't. Yet nobody will take BTC donations seriously for the same reason no one considers panhandling a sustainable living.

It probably sounds like I'm bashing Bitcoin, but I'm only trying to point out a surprising phenomenon. BTC donations seemed to have a lot of potential, yet fizzled. The reasons why are important to study.

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