たぽろだ (Taporoda)

» see up.moritapo.jp/tapoloda/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Most file hosts of this period made their money from the people downloading, through advertising or a premium tier that removed the waiting. A small number tried paying the uploaders, usually per thousand downloads and usually in dollars, with the predictable result that the service filled up with pirated films. Taporoda did the paying part without ever touching a bank.

It ran at up.moritapo.jp/tapoloda/ and it was built around Moritapo, an electronic currency issued by Mirai Kensaku Brazil, the company that operated 2channel's search service. Moritapo existed to be spent inside that company's own properties. A reader who wanted a file on Taporoda paid Moritapo for it, and the operator then credited that Moritapo to the account of whoever had uploaded the file, deducting a handling fee. The uploader could manage an instance on their own server.

What that produced is a closed economy with a real settlement layer and no legal tender anywhere in it. You could not buy into Taporoda from outside. To hold Moritapo at all you had to already be inside the 2channel world, which in practice meant reading Japanese and caring about a message board, and that single fact is why this design stayed inside Japan and never grew a version anywhere else.

~ the case file ~

~ paying in moritapo ~

Taporoda had a sibling with the same currency and a worse reputation. Moritapo Game Center sold chips at ten Moritapo each and ran three games with a heavy gambling flavor, and players traded chips and Moritapo between themselves on the side. It was moved onto a site called Mogera at the start of 2009 and switched off on 31 January 2012, which puts the two closures about fourteen weeks apart.

That timing is the most useful thing in the record. Mirai Kensaku Brazil was closing its paid side projects in sequence during the winter of 2011 and the spring of 2012, and Taporoda went out in the same clearing rather than on its own account.

~ the two days in may ~

The front page became its own obituary. From the closure the index served a short block of text under a heading that read, in translation, notice of the closing of Taporoda, with the page title carrying the date 20120508. The body says the service closed as of 8 May in the twenty-fourth year of Heisei, and thanks the reader for having used it. Whoever typed it wrote the month character twice instead of writing the day character, so the first-party record of the death date contains a small typo that nobody ever went back to fix.

The Internet Archive caught the shape of it precisely. Every individual file page, each one named for the date it was posted, answers 200 through early 2012 and then answers 404 on 10 May, two days after the stated closure. The index itself stayed up, unchanged, byte for byte identical across captures in September 2012 and March 2013. The copyright line at the foot reads 2008 to 2012, and underneath it the two links out still point at Moritaportal and 2channel search, neither of which would belong to the same people for very much longer: Jim Watkins took control of 2ch.net in April 2014 and Mirai Kensaku Brazil lost its access to the board its currency had been built on.

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