8 ms·

Yes, definitely. I barely use Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies at all (because USD works great for everything I do), but cryptocurrencies are perfect for this

Yes, definitely. I barely use Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies at all (because USD works great for everything I do), but cryptocurrencies are perfect for this industry because they are - fast enough. 15 minutes to validate a transaction is sufficient for a porn site. - as certain as wiring money. There's no chance a customer can force money back from you once paid. - anonymous. Your wife won't find out in a bank statement, so less chance of "fake-angry" customers trying to force money back. - The money goes directly to the content creators. No need for sketchy middleman services. The disadvantage is that most people don't know how to use crypto. Therefore, laymen-friendly online wallets are the solution that basically baby users into uploading cash, clicking a big "send" button, and copy-pasting a wallet ID. I have not seen an online wallet simple enough for the average computer to use, but it's close. A quick Google search shows a few sites that accept Bitcoin, but they probably make up less than 0.1% of the market. Why don't major sites use cryptocurrencies at least as an alternative option? It seems like a quick and easy 100%-commission payment method to me for the customers that are capable of it.

lawn 8y ago
> fast enough. 15 minutes to validate a transaction is sufficient for a porn site. There's a thing called 0-conf where you accept a transaction even before it's included in a block. This is used by BitPay, the worlds largest Bitcoin payment processor, to accept Bitcoin Cash in just a couple of seconds. It's safe enough (there's always a risk/reward trade-off) for smaller purchases if you just use a few simple heuristics like requiring a sane fee and checking for double spend attempts for a couple of seconds.
- swift532 8y ago
  They can convert it back into a national currency through an exchange like Bitstamp, paying a fee of 0.25% for conversion to dollars/euros and however much the fee for wiring money is(it's surely less than 1%).
TheCoelacanth 8y ago
> anonymous. Your wife won't find out in a bank statement, so less chance of "fake-angry" customers trying to force money back. Right, she'll think you're buying drugs instead when she sees the charge for cryptocurrency.
- Fjolsvith 8y ago
  Or prostitutes?
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    Why would you need crypto (rather than cash) for any inherently in-person exchange?
    - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
      A prostitute of sufficient quality and reputation may actually require payment ahead of time.
    - Fjolsvith 8y ago
      counterfeit money?
- vortico 8y ago
  Very easy to defend, since there are infinite possibilities of what a Coinbase transaction in your bank statement could mean. "I wanted to try out crypto so I bought a takeout pizza" he might say. Not the case with CC-Bill or AcmeMiddlemanHoldings. And regardless of how the interaction plays out between the wife and husband, the end result will never be a chargeback, so the content provider wins anyway.
- tomjen3 8y ago
  "Honey I wanted to buy some bitcoins because if they go up we could make a mint.."
- Rjevski 8y ago
  You can just say you heard about all this cryptocurrency craze and wanted to try and get rich too.
pavel_lishin 8y ago
> The disadvantage is that most people don't know how to use crypto. To expand on this, it's hard to turn crypto into rent. You mentioned the friendly online wallets - they're almost a necessity if you want to accept bitcoin, and then turn it into fiat currency. The idea of directly paying content producers is great (mumble mumble some middlemen do add value), but it doesn't do them much good if they can't buy a gallon of milk or a pair of shoes.
- vortico 8y ago
  The customer doesn't need to use crypto for rent or milk. And the customer shouldn't care about the idea of paying content producers directly, that's not the point. The customer uses a fiat -> crypto exchange/wallet combo service, sends a payment in crypto to the content producer, the content producer exchanges it back to fiat currency. The overhead of this is much less than 30-60% as mentioned in the article, and it's an extra 10 minutes of effort required by the customer, which is nearly identical to the 8 minutes of effort to type a credit card directly into the payment provider. With this approach, the content producers win big time, and the customers lose 2 minutes, which can be further minimized by laymen-friendly online crypto wallets.
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    Right, sorry, I wasn't clear. The producer is the one who's going to have a problem. If I'm SquirtyBoy on PornoTron, I still have to convert BitCoin/Ethereum/Whatever into cash so my landlord doesn't kick me out onto the street. (Unless you mean consumers should be paying PornoTron in cryptocurrency, which PornoTron then exchanges into fiat currency, and then pays SquirtyBoys in that. I think I mistook what you meant by "middle men" - I thought you meant things like PornTube, whereas you apparently meant Stripe/Paypal/etc.)
    - vortico 8y ago
      No company that accepts Bitcoin I'm aware of holds cryptocurrency for more than a day. Even my own company cashes out in a matter of hours via BitPay. Of course, they would exchange every day to their USD bank account. This is completely automated at such companies. See the article for what I mean by middlemen. Stripe/Paypal are not middlemen for adult entertainment companies.
bena 8y ago
> fast enough. 15 minutes to validate a transaction is sufficient for a porn site. And what happens in that 15 minutes? Does the user have access to the site in that time? If so, what happens when the transaction doesn't validate? Just lock out their access? Ok. You can download quite a bit in 15 minutes. And then you can just run another fraudulent transaction to regain access. > - as certain as wiring money. There's no chance a customer can force money back from you once paid. Which is great for actual fraud. Especially when you make it super easy to do. Like buying coins online and clicking a button. You do realize the issue is that neither side of a payment fully trusts the other, right? We can't just pass the ball to whichever side when it's most convenient. Cash works because it's in person. You see me, I see you. I hand you cash, you hand me a product/perform a service. > anonymous Bitcoin is not anonymous. It's at best pseudonymous. Not to mention, if the bitcoin can reach you, you are reachable. It can be made difficult, but no matter what there has to be a path back to you in order for you to receive the coins. And you are ignoring that crypto is incredibly volatile. I think bitcoin went from near $20,000 to $6000 in this year alone. Imagine losing 70% of your value just because. That that $5 you collected from Joe Shmoe in January became $1.50. It's why a lot of businesses started backing off of it. It's just too volatile to be used as a currency. And let's not pretend that there's any other crypto worth talking about other than bitcoin. Ethereum, Litecoin, BCH, etc all follow bitcoin.
- vortico 8y ago
  >And what happens in that 15 minutes? They can beat off to a free site I guess. Nobody's in that much of a rush. In fact, most pay sites take a few minutes after a CC transaction is made because as the article suggests, their transaction passes through a number of middlemen. Most customers are in fact surprised when they can access a pay site immediately after closing the payment window. Most are happy to wait a few minutes for the email containing their password. >You do realize the issue is that neither side of a payment fully trusts the other, right? There are many reputable porn sites and many review websites and communities that support their reputation. The customer cannot be trusted by the website at all, but it is the norm, not the exception for the customer to trust the website. >Bitcoin is not anonymous Yes, but for this discussion, it is completely anonymous. Your wife cannot figure out the owner of the porn site's wallet ID. For all she knows, it's a pizza parlor. >And you are ignoring that crypto is incredibly volatile You're missing the point. In the day between when the Bitcoin arrives in someone's Coinbase account and when they purchase the subscription, the value is going to change less than 1%. At the end of the day, it's a USD -> USD transfer, just with much much lower overhead than 30-60% as described in the article.

lawn 8y ago

> fast enough. 15 minutes to validate a transaction is sufficient for a porn site. There's a thing called 0-conf where you accept a transaction even before it's included in a block. This is used by BitPay, the worlds largest Bitcoin payment processor, to accept Bitcoin Cash in just a couple of seconds. It's safe enough (there's always a risk/reward trade-off) for smaller purchases if you just use a few simple heuristics like requiring a sane fee and checking for double spend attempts for a couple of seconds.

swift532 8y ago
They can convert it back into a national currency through an exchange like Bitstamp, paying a fee of 0.25% for conversion to dollars/euros and however much the fee for wiring money is(it's surely less than 1%).

TheCoelacanth 8y ago

> anonymous. Your wife won't find out in a bank statement, so less chance of "fake-angry" customers trying to force money back. Right, she'll think you're buying drugs instead when she sees the charge for cryptocurrency.

Fjolsvith 8y ago
Or prostitutes?
- sokoloff 8y ago
  Why would you need crypto (rather than cash) for any inherently in-person exchange?
  - ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
    A prostitute of sufficient quality and reputation may actually require payment ahead of time.
  - Fjolsvith 8y ago
    counterfeit money?
vortico 8y ago
Very easy to defend, since there are infinite possibilities of what a Coinbase transaction in your bank statement could mean. "I wanted to try out crypto so I bought a takeout pizza" he might say. Not the case with CC-Bill or AcmeMiddlemanHoldings. And regardless of how the interaction plays out between the wife and husband, the end result will never be a chargeback, so the content provider wins anyway.
tomjen3 8y ago
"Honey I wanted to buy some bitcoins because if they go up we could make a mint.."
Rjevski 8y ago
You can just say you heard about all this cryptocurrency craze and wanted to try and get rich too.

pavel_lishin 8y ago

> The disadvantage is that most people don't know how to use crypto. To expand on this, it's hard to turn crypto into rent. You mentioned the friendly online wallets - they're almost a necessity if you want to accept bitcoin, and then turn it into fiat currency. The idea of directly paying content producers is great (mumble mumble some middlemen do add value), but it doesn't do them much good if they can't buy a gallon of milk or a pair of shoes.

vortico 8y ago
The customer doesn't need to use crypto for rent or milk. And the customer shouldn't care about the idea of paying content producers directly, that's not the point. The customer uses a fiat -> crypto exchange/wallet combo service, sends a payment in crypto to the content producer, the content producer exchanges it back to fiat currency. The overhead of this is much less than 30-60% as mentioned in the article, and it's an extra 10 minutes of effort required by the customer, which is nearly identical to the 8 minutes of effort to type a credit card directly into the payment provider. With this approach, the content producers win big time, and the customers lose 2 minutes, which can be further minimized by laymen-friendly online crypto wallets.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  Right, sorry, I wasn't clear. The producer is the one who's going to have a problem. If I'm SquirtyBoy on PornoTron, I still have to convert BitCoin/Ethereum/Whatever into cash so my landlord doesn't kick me out onto the street. (Unless you mean consumers should be paying PornoTron in cryptocurrency, which PornoTron then exchanges into fiat currency, and then pays SquirtyBoys in that. I think I mistook what you meant by "middle men" - I thought you meant things like PornTube, whereas you apparently meant Stripe/Paypal/etc.)
  - vortico 8y ago
    No company that accepts Bitcoin I'm aware of holds cryptocurrency for more than a day. Even my own company cashes out in a matter of hours via BitPay. Of course, they would exchange every day to their USD bank account. This is completely automated at such companies. See the article for what I mean by middlemen. Stripe/Paypal are not middlemen for adult entertainment companies.

bena 8y ago

> fast enough. 15 minutes to validate a transaction is sufficient for a porn site. And what happens in that 15 minutes? Does the user have access to the site in that time? If so, what happens when the transaction doesn't validate? Just lock out their access? Ok. You can download quite a bit in 15 minutes. And then you can just run another fraudulent transaction to regain access. > - as certain as wiring money. There's no chance a customer can force money back from you once paid. Which is great for actual fraud. Especially when you make it super easy to do. Like buying coins online and clicking a button. You do realize the issue is that neither side of a payment fully trusts the other, right? We can't just pass the ball to whichever side when it's most convenient. Cash works because it's in person. You see me, I see you. I hand you cash, you hand me a product/perform a service. > anonymous Bitcoin is not anonymous. It's at best pseudonymous. Not to mention, if the bitcoin can reach you, you are reachable. It can be made difficult, but no matter what there has to be a path back to you in order for you to receive the coins. And you are ignoring that crypto is incredibly volatile. I think bitcoin went from near $20,000 to $6000 in this year alone. Imagine losing 70% of your value just because. That that $5 you collected from Joe Shmoe in January became $1.50. It's why a lot of businesses started backing off of it. It's just too volatile to be used as a currency. And let's not pretend that there's any other crypto worth talking about other than bitcoin. Ethereum, Litecoin, BCH, etc all follow bitcoin.

vortico 8y ago
>And what happens in that 15 minutes? They can beat off to a free site I guess. Nobody's in that much of a rush. In fact, most pay sites take a few minutes after a CC transaction is made because as the article suggests, their transaction passes through a number of middlemen. Most customers are in fact surprised when they can access a pay site immediately after closing the payment window. Most are happy to wait a few minutes for the email containing their password. >You do realize the issue is that neither side of a payment fully trusts the other, right? There are many reputable porn sites and many review websites and communities that support their reputation. The customer cannot be trusted by the website at all, but it is the norm, not the exception for the customer to trust the website. >Bitcoin is not anonymous Yes, but for this discussion, it is completely anonymous. Your wife cannot figure out the owner of the porn site's wallet ID. For all she knows, it's a pizza parlor. >And you are ignoring that crypto is incredibly volatile You're missing the point. In the day between when the Bitcoin arrives in someone's Coinbase account and when they purchase the subscription, the value is going to change less than 1%. At the end of the day, it's a USD -> USD transfer, just with much much lower overhead than 30-60% as described in the article.