Our technology relies on anonymous people from all over the world to look for pirated content belonging to our customers, and claiming the bounties for themselves. When a bounty is claimed, we are notified via the blockchain, and we inform our customers about the details of the leak. The anonymity of our bounty hunters is sacrosanct to us. The most effective and successful bounty hunters will be those working from inside piracy communities, and we work hard to ensure that the bounty claim will not be able to be traced back to them. This, however, makes it hard for us to get feedback on our technology.

Captain Morgan, from the rum fame, was a successful privateer in a time before Bitcoin. Pictured here before his morning tipple.

Our solution is to run mock bounty hunter trials with groups of students, but with real Bitcoin. There are many advantages to these trials. Firstly, we get new people interested in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, of which we are all big advocates. Secondly, with every new trial we get new bounty hunters from a new community, building our network — the conversion rate from trial to active bounty hunter is over 65%. Thirdly, we get a fresh set of eyes looking at our products, and the feedback we have received has been invaluable.

With the trials, we try to get a small group of individuals, around 10–20, from a single campus, with a diverse set of technical ability and knowledge of Bitcoin. Below you can see demographics from a trial, where the participants graded themselves on a scale from 1–7 for their understanding of Bitcoin, and their technical proficiency.

Having such a spectrum of individuals is great. On the one end of the distribution, we test the ease of use of our product. We want to make the extraction tool easy enough for anyone to use, and this was the real test. Even the users in the bottom left corner were able with just an explainer document create a Bitcoin wallet, find the protected content, and extract the bounties with the tool.

On the other side of the spectrum we typically see engineering or computer science students who give us feedback on everything from the resource use of the extractor tool on their machines, to design feedback on the placements of buttons in the app. We’ve also seen some of these users build tools to help them claim the bounties, which builds on the command line tool that we have available. We love this! We hope to see individuals competing with their search algorithms and web crawlers to get to the bounty first.

But better than all this is the results we see from the trials. A typical trial consists of 4 rounds.

After signing mutual NDAs with the bounty hunters, we send them a download links to the latest build of the tool that we are testing, a short explainer document, and their first protected movie, which is typically the Blender video, Big Buck Bunny, a creative commons short, which by this time everyone in the company has seen at least a thousand times.

Big Buck Bunny

The objective of the first round is to make sure everyone gets the tool to install and work at least once, and to show them how easy it actually is. If they don’t have a Bitcoin wallet, we also include a guide on creating a wallet.

In the second round, we have each individual hunting for separate bounties online. We place bounties on social networks, pirate sites, and private university networks. This is already remarkable! The so-called ‘deep web’ is the part of the internet that you cannot find on Google.

Below the deep web is the dark web, that you’ve probably heard horror stories about. The bulk of the deep web, however, is not sinister at all. Everything from your private Facebook groups, to private file sharing sites, to university networks, to company networks, to your Dropbox are part of the deep web. Because search engines can’t index these sites, traditional web crawlers can’t search for pirated content here…but for a human it’s easy to get it. On their second try, our bounty hunters have already outperformed the best web crawlers in the world.

In the third and fourth rounds it gets competitive — here we use a substantially larger bounty, but only one per round. We give our bounty hunters a time frame (typically around 12 hours) and a list of possible locations where the media file might end up, and it’s winner takes all. The target sites include large pirate sites, university networks and social media. The results are amazing! We typically see bounties being claimed in less than 2 minutes, with some being extracted in as little as 30 seconds!

 Aaaand, it’s gone!

If you are a student and you and some friends are interested in participating in a bounty hunting trial, please contact me [email protected]. We are looking for students from all over the world. Thar be treasure!