this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 6 days ago (5 children)

Soliciting donations and using fucking bitcoin of all things is mind blowing to me. How are you gonna get your money out without everyone tracing you?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Bitcoin is pseudonymous - Transactions are transparent, yes, but the addresses are not linked to any PII - The exception comes in when the user uses a Centralised Exchange that does exactly this, it bridges anonymous addresses with PII via KYC.

Bitcoin can be sold anonymously using P2P DEXs (decentralised exchanges), where the fiat transaction has no link to Bitcoin.

That's assuming they even would want to sell.

All in all, it comes down to how the user uses the tool. Bitcoin can be as privacy preserving as anyone wants. But if they KYC, they can kiss any privacy goodbye, and really, that's the misunderstanding that has reached most non-Bitcoin users these days. Experiences based on a lack of understanding.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Wow, seriously why are they using bitcoin? XMR is untraceable, why use a traceable currency?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Unless the site has been high jacked by the feds and they want to be able to track people 🧐

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Would they go to all that effort to nab a few downloaders? They don't even get prosecuted if caught, usually.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

Just off the top of my head, they could be using the evidence of a person donating to a torrent group as probable cause to see what other illegal activity that person has been up to…

I was mostly joking in response to why a torrent tracker would be asking for donations in a cryptocurrency that can be traced…

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Could you not do BTC to XMR then to w.e else after that? And if youre donating you should do XMR to BTC.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Another problem with BTC is the extremely high transfer costs. Donating XMR directly makes smaller donations viable, while BTC is only attractive for large donors.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Not exactly. Lightning makes it super cheap and instant.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Interesting. I thought Lightning was a fork like BTC Cash, not a feature compatible with BTC itself.

On another note I just noticed it's gotten harder to buy Monero in the EU, at least Kraken no longer offers them (damned money laundering, sadly the laws are necessary). Luckily thanks to legalization I no longer use it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Lightning is indeed NOT a fork of a Bitcoin, it's essentially a Layer 2 for Bitcoin (if you think in terms of the Internet's TCP/IP model). It solves pretty much every use case created by any Altcoin when competing with Bitcoin, as Bitcoin chose security and decentralization over scalibility in its base layer (on-chain).

As for buying Monero, I only deal with Bitcoin, but I'm pretty sure you can easily buy Monero still as long as you don't use centralised exchanges (permissioned), and instead use Decentralised ones (permissionless). That'll be the case for any altcoin that still has decent popularity for the foreseeable.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

I know absolutely nothing about hosting a site like this, how much does it actually cost? It doesn't seem like a particularly resource intensive application?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago

The cost might go up significantly if they're actually hosting the .torrent files. They could save space and bandwidth by only hosting the magnet links like The Pirate Bay did.