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Visa and MasterCard ban Pornhub over abusive videos
- lucasyvas 6y agoPerhaps the killer app for cryptocurrency will be paid porn? Might be a stretch, but it's hard content to moderate and the demand for it is huge.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoThe first killer app is already here: decentralized exchange. The highest volume DEX, Uniswap, had trading volumes that rivaled those of the largest crypto exchanges, like Coinbase Pro and Kraken, over the summer. It provides a user experience that in many cases is superior to that provided by traditional exchanges, with nothing more than a MetaMask extension on the browser needed to trade Ethereum-based crypto assets, and with no requirement to hand over custody to a trusted third party.
- omarchowdhury 6y agoHow much of that is wash trading?
- CryptoPunk 6y agoEach Uniswap trade on Ethereum costs several dollars in gas fees, so I'm guessing almost none of it is wash trading, as opposed to traditional exchanges where wash trading can be financially viable.
- dredmorbius 6y agoI'm sure an opaque nonreversable transaction, and nonmodifiable permanent globally-readable transaction ledger will fit that application perfectly, against LEO, blackmail, and fraudsters. </s>
- totony 6y agoThere are more cryptocurrencies than bitcoin
- im3w1l 6y agoWould you mind stating your point plainly? Because I don't get what you are trying to say
- crowf 6y agoop is saying that cryprocurrency will allow shady sites to receive payment and not provide a service with no ability to perform a charge back, and that the payment record will be public and _can_ be traced back to the buyer
- im3w1l 6y agoI see it as fairly unlikely that a website as reputable as Pornhub would pull something like that. But if they do, there is always law enforcement.
- crowf 6y agono need to disagree with me with the content of op's comment. I was just explaining. although just to comment on your point, it is much easier to get a charge back from a cc company than to sue a company.
- im3w1l 6y agoSorry, but I must reject any rules of debate that allows someone to state a point without anyone allowed to reply to it. If you don't hold the opinions yourself that's fine by me, I will still reply. I agree that it is easier, and consumers prefer this if they have a choice. But now that they don't have a choice anymore, I think it will turn out that it's not a dealbreaker and they will put up with marginally less safety. The bigger question is if people can be bothered to acquire bitcoin for the purpose of paying pornhub. It may be annoying enough that would-be customers turn to piracy.
- RoyTyrell 6y agoI'm guessing that unless they can reverse the decision of Visa and MC, either they'll have to transition to an ad-only model or they'll soon be going out of business.
- totony 6y agoMaybe porn will be the first business to adopt cryptos. Would love for it to happen and it seems quite easy considering Pornhub already has some infrastructure for fraud detection
- mtnGoat 6y agoThey'd probably like it in that light. Less fraud to detect with crypto payments. No charge backs are possible.
- totony 6y agoChargebacks are a safety-net on top of payment systems. It gives peace of minds to users. I don't think they will launch a full-fledged cryptobacked anything, but if they do, chargebacks are a nice thing to support to boost adoption.
- StavrosK 6y agoI don't disagree, but consider how much more useful is the ability to chargeback in a pull-based system where anyone with a semi-public piece of data (your credit card number) can take money from you, versus a push-based system where every single transaction must be initiated by you.
- piracy1 6y agoWhos carding pornhub? Why?
- mtnGoat 6y agoThe "under banked"? You'd be amazed how many guys wives call in to these charges... Claiming "He would never!"
- disown 6y agoHow odd. Right after a state propaganda organ, I mean news organization, went after pornhub. Given how depraved the media industry is, I bet they knew all about the illegal activities on pornhub too. Of course we have to hold our tongue because they are the protected privileged class we aren't allowed to offend. There seems to be a pattern. State propaganda targets company or person X immediately followed by physical or financial deplatforming or state/federal/international legislative/regulatory action. If there are illegal activities on pornhub, shouldn't that be a legal matter? Why is visa or mastercard involved in this? What's next? Visa and mastercard will ban certain organizations that supported illegal wars? Won't be holding my breath on that one. Edit: And of course the insta-downvote.
- mtnGoat 6y agoVisa and MC are in fact removing themselves from the situation. The downvotes are probably because the comment shows a lack of understanding of a few things.
- scottlocklin 6y agoThe downvotes are because people don't want to accept that's what actually happened. And for a change, I actually agree with the state propaganda agencies. Somehow they were able to chase the daily stormer off the internet basically for talking like my grandfather when he'd watch the news, meanwhile dehumanizing pedophile rape wanker website is muh freedumb of speech.
- dredmorbius 6y agoNicholas Kristof's NYT article and HN discusion, from 6 days ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25301913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25301913
- vincentmarle 6y agoKristof’s follow-up article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/pornhub-news-child-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/pornhub-news-chil... He accomplished a lot in a week!
- dredmorbius 6y agoThe article certainly has a kick, yes.
- billo-ollib 6y agoWill this lead to the rise of crypto as a proper currency as opposed to a gold-like investment vehicle?
- SCUSKU 6y agoIt is possible! We have seen the porn industry adopt many video standards early and push them mainstream. Perhaps this will help propel crypto to the mainstream.
- billo-ollib 6y agoThey have been at the forefront for other technologies as well (I think that I saw this first in the sitcom Silicon Valley). A few examples include : VCR, secure online payments, affiliate marketing, streaming services, video conferencing, social media (?) etc. Even today, they are working on virtual reality, sex robots, etc. Ethics aside, it's fascinating to note that porn has had such a disproportionate impact on tech.
- darig 6y agoThe same thing happened to me, but the only difference was I didn't do anything close to illegal. In the late 90s I made a massively multiplayer online drug dealing game. At its peak there were about 3M daily active users. I went through a few shared hosting companies as I learned to optimize and scale the stack. One of them cut me off, stole all the source code, and launched their own copy of the game. I couldn't afford to bring legal action against them. Eventually I had my own co-located servers in one of google's old datacenters in San Jose, and had everything humming smooth. The game was free, but I charged $1/mo for "premium" features that basically just let you skin your character or start a gang. No "pay to win" stuff... just gravy. I had direct payments from Visa and Mastercard, as well as PayPal that included Discover and AmEx I think. I got accused of running an actual drug marketplace. The DEA contacted me to let me know they were alerted of the claims, but after an investigation determined (fairly obviously) that it was just a game, and let me know that they enjoyed it, and many of the agents in their office were actively playing. A month later PayPal cut me off, seized all of my funds (that I have still not gotten back), and shortly after that my direct merchant accounts with Visa and MasterCard were cut off. Lesson learned. America's financial institutions are corrupt.
- HexagonalKitten 6y agoIt seems that this should be great cover for new ventures.
- darig 6y agoIt seems you're new here. Hacker News isn't about exploring the hypothetical ways revenue streams could be adversely affected; it's about presenting hypothetical revenue streams to venture capitalists, and cashing their checks as fast as they can write them.
- totony 6y agoPornhub has always had trouble with payment processors. They even had to make their own stripe. Porn is so ill viewed that this is hardly a surprise. Plenty of disgusting content is published to most user-generated content platform, yet the easy target is always porn. The old "protect the children" used yet again for some dubious purposes.
- mtnGoat 6y agoMade their own stripe? You mean cut out the middleman? Lots of companies with large processing volume do this. Pretty normal, it saves a lot of money, any gateways or ipsp dealing in high risk take hefty fees.
- jobigoud 6y agoCan someone explain what do payment processors gain by this? Do they gain new clients that were against the banned business? Is it PR related to moral panic? Is it because of chargebacks? What do they risk business wise by not banning them?
- 29athrowaway 6y agoProtecting themselves from a legal nightmare.
- gspr 6y agoThis is probably true, but I for one would like to see some kind of protection for payment processors. Not because I feel sorry for them, but because an ordinary person's day-to-day life can become massively disrupted or nearly impossible without them, and a company might be essentially punished without trial. Perhaps payment processors could be responsible only for banning customers that are on a government-maintained blacklist (where a customer would only be added after having been found guilty of a relevant crime, obviously).
- scoutt 6y agoThey do it to avoid both legal and PR consequences.
- dmix 6y agoIs there any examples of people legally going after Visa or Mastercard? I have a feeling this is just PR by the many examples I've seen of them doing this recently. The legal stuff just sounds like cover.
- cft 6y agoBut this does send shivers to the small business owners who have nothing to do with porn. The fact that they can be de-platformed by Visa on moral or political grounds. What happened to PH push to accept bitcoin?
- mschuster91 6y agoA sad move in the end, a situation that is neither as black nor as white as the participants involved try to frame it. Yes: Pornhub had a massive problem, not with child depictions, but with "revenge porn" and similar materials. They definitely needed a slap on the wrist for that one. But... this is not about children, not about "revenge porn". This is part of an organized, fundamentalist-Evangelical-Christian anti-sex-work campaign that goes back many years (https://theconversation.com/evangelical-women-are-shaping-public-attitudes-about-sex-work-89129 https://theconversation.com/evangelical-women-are-shaping-pu...), whose biggest successes to date were FOSTA/SESTA, and (in countries where prostitution is legal) who uses the current Coronavirus crisis to further calls for banning brothels and other sex work indefinitely. Make no mistake: the ones suffering at the moment are not the people behind Pornhub/Mindgeek. The ones suffering are the countless content creators that already had their lives screwed when Coronavirus restrictions made face-to-face sex work impossible, and now the biggest platform got hit with a payment cutoff. And this is intentional.
- mncharity 6y ago> goes back many years I've sometimes wondered what might have happened if 9/11 had occurred a couple of months later. My fuzzy understanding is that through 2001, US DoJ was working up a major effort, a "War on Porn". Mid September, shortly before kicking off, that focus became an embarrassing liability, and was quietly shelved. So instead of a big explicit declared War, with associated societal reflection, we've had a long quiet shadow war, with misdirection integral. Though hoping for societal political reflection seems increasingly quaint.
- playcache 6y agoPeople pay for porn?
- underseacables 6y agoI mean this in all seriousness: it amazes me that people still pay for pornography these days.
- tomjen3 6y agoSome people have spare cash that they would like to use on higher quality entertainment. You can (or could) find streaming sites that streamed most tv shows at no cost, provided that you could navigate seedy places on the internet and didn't mind the quality too much. Yet people still pay for Netflix.
- t0mbstone 6y agoAnd of course this happens shortly after all those people bought "lifetime" accounts with pornhub premium on Black Friday... Only for Pornhub to essentially have the writing on the wall for going out of business.
- dang 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25378155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25378155