Month: May 2021

The Pirate Bay has been both an early adopter and a pioneer when it comes to cryptocurrencies.

More than eight years ago the torrent site added support for Bitcoin donations, with Litecoin and Monero following later.

The Pirate Bay was also the first large website to start mining cryptocurrency by using the computing resources of its visitors. This was a controversial move, but one that was followed by many other sites.

TPB Promotes PirateToken

This week, we can add another cryptocurrency-related development to this list. After suffering three days of downtime The Pirate Bay came back online yesterday, with a small twist. The homepage now features a PancakeSwap icon hovering over the iconic pirate ship logo.

Both images are linked to PancakeSwap, a decentralized exchange where people can trade cryptocurrencies from user-generated liquidity pools. In this case, Pirate Bay users are linked to a page where they can buy the previously unknown PirateToken (TPB).

In a time where cryptocurrencies are all the rage, some people may be eager to jump on this offer, but this isn’t without risk. At the time of writing, there is no background information on the purpose of the coin and The Pirate Bay hasn’t made an official announcement either.

Just an Ad?

In fact, it’s not even clear if this PirateToken is controlled by the TPB team. In the past, the site’s operator has temporarily sold the main logo space for advertising purposes, which certainly is an option here as well.

TorrentFreak reached out to our contact close to the site to gather more info, but thus far we have yet to hear back.

What we do know is that the PirateToken was released just recently and that a single wallet owned all coins. There are 100 million coins available and unlocked, which are constantly being dumped.

Despite the lack of information, there are already buyers. In less than a day, the number of TPB coin holders exceeded 200. Tens of thousands of coins were sold but the original creator still controls and owns more than 99.9% of all tokens.

$800 Million Market Cap

The PirateToken price varies. Yesterday a Reddit user reportedly paid $15 per coin and they currently sell for $8. That translates to a market cap of $800 million. However, that could easily drop to 0 in the future.

Again, we have no confirmation that this is an official Pirate Bay project. Anyone can easily create their own token and the PancakeSwap site actively warns people that its interface can “load arbitrary tokens by token addresses.”

For what it’s worth, we’re not buying any PirateTokens and wouldn’t recommend people to do so. Unless they have too much money and fancy extreme gambling.

The Chain Bulletin notes that this could very well be a ‘rugpull’. This means that the creator of the token may eventually pull the rug and abandon the project. After cashing in of course. Proceed with caution, and then some.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Colonial Pipeline said it restarted operations on Wednesday afternoon after a five-day outage brought on by a ransomware attack caused gasoline shortages and panic buying in East Coast states.

“Following this restart, it will take several days for the product delivery supply chain to return to normal,” the operator of the 5,500-mile pipeline said on its website. “Some markets served by Colonial Pipeline may experience, or continue to experience, intermittent service interruptions during the start-up period. Colonial will move as much gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel as is safely possible and will continue to do so until markets return to normal.”

Colonial temporarily halted operations on Saturday, after determining that it was the victim of a ransomware attack. The pipeline runs through 11 states, from New Jersey to Texas.

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Enlarge / Vizio's 65-inch 4K OLED TV. (credit: Vizio)

Over the past several years, TV-maker Vizio has achieved a reputation among home theater enthusiasts as the company that makes TVs that provide superior picture quality relative to their cost. While the most expensive TVs from Samsung and LG beat Vizio's in quality assessment by reviewers, Vizio is widely regarded as one of the best bang-for-buck brands.

But for consumers, those competitive prices may come with a downside: becoming subject to targeted advertising and monetized personal data collection. As reported previously on Engadget, Vizio just posted its first public earnings report, wherein it revealed that profits from the part of its business that is built around collecting and selling user data as well as targeting advertising at users totaled $38.4 million in the quarter.

That's less than the $48.2 million of profit generated by device sales in the same quarter, but data and advertising profits grew significantly year-over-year while actual device sales grew comparatively slowly. These digital products are still nowhere close to device sales in total revenue, however; the data and ad-related business unit (dubbed Platform+) added up to only 7.2 percent of global revenue.

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