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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

This juxtaposition near the end makes me chuckle.

“I understand that especially creative people are desperately looking for ways to make a decent living and selling NFTs looks like a very simple way to make some serious cash. I get it. We need to find a mode of life that allows people to work on their art or whatever else they want to do and still be clothed, fed, sheltered and otherwise taken care of. Comfortably.”

...

“Take a second to support tante on Patreon!”

ITS RIGHT THERE, Patreon is working just fine to keep a lot of creators paid with no ultra-inefficient distributed databases or cryptocurrency or whatnot. Just some profoundly unsexy credit card/PayPal/stripe transactions.

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Problem is that you can get booted of those platforms and payment processors. Or they unilaterally change their terms of what kind of content creators they want on their platform (a la onlyfans wanting to distance themselves from sexual explicit content)

That’s a feature, which rhymes with the author’s argument: that there are politics and that people decide norms, and whether or not you agree with the decisions, having immutable code just go ahead and enforce/permit/control whatever is a dystopia that we should not want.

Sometimes laws are not just and governments are not aligned with their people. Some examples:

sci-hub is not legal in most jurisdictions despite its immense positive benefits. Since being deplatformed, their primary means of receiving donations has been crypto.

Then there are the unplatformed (from a global transactions perspective), where the cruel realities of poverty, scams and fraud means the majority are punished as collateral damage for the actions of a minority. Poverty means a cost benefit calculus has deemed fine-grained distinctions are not worth it. I can understand the justifications but still feel it as deeply unfair.

When social media are used to highlight and organize protests of corruption, extra judicial killings and more, governments will ban social media and block the financial accounts of anti-corruption organizations. Coupled with being in countries where global transactions are already high friction, crypto provided real benefits.

A non-crypto example is having to use VPNs to access certain university websites because its administrators subscribe to a lazy service that has blanket banned IPs from certain countries.

Not unlike Tor, it's one of those things whose main use is by criminals in sane regimes but a high positive option in despotic or oppressive ones.

The unstated argument here is whether the extra-judicial quasi-ethical use-cases for crypto (donations for SciHub, payments for NSFW artists) are worth the current valuations in the space.

I don’t think so. Most NFTs I’ve seen are not for art that would get booted off Patreon or DeviantArt. Is the additional complexity and weirdness and loss of legal protections worth the extra hassles that crypto brings even when existing payment workflows work well - I say no, but we’ll find out.

Is it worth the current violations? My personal opinion is no, but the price movements also don't make any sense to me.

But I also feel I might value it more than you? As it depends on where you're coming from. There are parts of the world (like where I live) where there is no meaningful sense of legal protections or rule of law. Things hang together because people are in general, not that foolish or malicious.

The added complexities, risk, instabilities can be more worth paying given for example, heavy inflation (for such people participation is not speculative as price stability is more important than rise) or friction in global financial transactions.

You’re not wrong, you’re just missing the point. It’s that laws should be enforced by people, not by machines.

The laws aren't enforced by machines, merely augmented or providing more options for the global disenfranchised (such as access to scientific material or easier access to global markets).

Payment processors wanting to distance themselves from porn is a constant fight and I think it's really telling that porn has not embraced blockchains, crypto, or NFTs as a way to get paid.

>I think it's really telling that porn has not embraced blockchains, crypto, or NFTs as a way to get paid

Uh, how do you think Pornhub accepts payments? Crypto has been the only option for paying for Pornhub Premium for several months now.

(I know this because I read a news article on it, just to be clear)

Edit

Sorry, ACH is also an option, my mistake. But Pornhub Premium's sign up page says they don't accept credit cards.

I applaud your propriety, but it looks like your information is incorrect. Their FAQ states they accept credit cards from Probiller: https://www.probiller.com/

Edit: and it doesn't mention crypto.

The signup page says "Unfortunately we are unable to accept credit cards at this moment" and has ACH/SEPA and Cryptocurrency as the payment options.

One can also pay through ACH, so it's not like they're completely cut off from the traditional financial systems.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of their users use each payment method.

Sure, and to be clear, the payment experience with cryptocurrency is still pretty terrible.

That being said, it's getting better quite quickly and you're now seeing big tech players like Stripe enter the market.[1]

[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/13/payments-giant-stripe-says...

And then we've completed the full circle and we're back to the beginning of the discussion about payment provider's censorship power…

Crypto's terrible payment UX makes it practically unsuitable for porn companies because it makes everybody use centralized intermediary instead of using the crypto itself directly.

I just want to point out that you can also get booted off crypto platforms under the right circumstances. This is what happened to Ethereum after the infamous $60MM hack. [0] The key difference is only that the community has to agree, rather than a single entity — however this isn't strictly true, since founders and core devs hold outsized sway.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/ethereum-hack-blockchain-for...

It may be that a plurality of people prefer a web where rules may exclude those people lacking a certain civility, leaving web3 to be a haven of the banned and otherwise unhostable. Freenet has been doing that for 20 years now so its unclear that crypto really adds anything to the basic social dilemmas of sharing platforms with people you wouldn’t give the time of day to.

sidebar but onlyfans banning porn may have just been a genius marketing move that made them a household name - a porn site banning porn, what late night host could resist?

Around 20 years ago, I registered my account on a web based simulation game by putting a check in the mail. Around 7 years ago I verified an account by putting a dollar in an envelope and putting it in the mail. I am not sure why no one is putting their snail mail address on the site any more because this can still work.

>ITS RIGHT THERE, Patreon is working just fine to keep a lot of creators paid with no ultra-inefficient distributed databases or cryptocurrency or whatnot. Just some profoundly unsexy credit card/PayPal/stripe transactions.

Why don't you take a look at https://www.patreon.com/policy/benefits? Millions of creators are disenfranchised by Patreon.

Also, you need a credit card / bank account to accept transactions from Patreon.

With crypto, you can create a wallet in seconds and immediately start accepting payment.

> With crypto, you can create a wallet in seconds and immediately start accepting payment.

I think this demonstrates the massive gap between crypto people and the general public. If you already have all of the crypto stuff set up, secured, understood, in the right cryptocurrency, and ready to go then it can be a quick transaction (after waiting for the transaction to clear).

But for the average person, the overhead of diving into the cryptocurrency world is far more than "in seconds". It also comes with a lot of fees and issues at every step along the way. Sending BTC or ETH to someone is actually a very expensive endeavor right now, often more than just the $5/month Patreon tiers. And then there are transaction fees along the way to buy into crypto, and the recipient has to cash out the crypto, pay exchange fees, and deal with taxes.

In the theoretical all-crypto world where everyone agrees to use some future perfectly efficient, decentralized blockchain, this might make sense. In the real world, it doesn't hold up at all.

> you can create a wallet in seconds

My mother, who is only slightly technically inclined, who knows how cash and cards work (for her), would not be able to set up a cryptocurrency wallet, secure it, understand it, and use it, "in seconds" or otherwise "immediately".

This is the #1 biggest hurdle cryptocurrencies still have to solve.

And if the response is "well cryptocurrencies aren't for people like your mom", then cryptocurrencies have no benefit other than as a novelty.

fair point, but if that is the threshold for "nothing than a novelty", we'd have said the same about all kinds of technology along the way.

it's ok to say "this is really for younger people and future generations".

Even then it’s only for tech savvy people. A ton of younger people are relying on “that one friend” to tell them about crypto and what/how to buy. I see it on my Facebook, even, kids I went to high school with who have no interest in finance asking for help.

Look, I'm in no way a fan of crypto (certainly not the way it has turned out). But you're thinking too short term. If crypto ever actually becomes widespread, it will be common for a generation that is not even born yet. They will not be (by comparison with their peers) be "tech savvy", certainly no more than today's 5-35 year old's are with respect to using smartphones.

I’m not in disagreement, and I don’t really have an opinion either way on crypto I see it as a cool technology but I don’t care for politics, but I think the solution isn’t just that future generations will find it easier. I think that instead future generations will have an abstraction layer that makes using crypto as simple as using PayPal.

I'm not sure what is objectionable about that or who is being disenfranchised, most of those policies seem to be based around restricting gifting of illegal or highly regulated products which would also be illegal or require extra compliance steps to be taken if done using cryptocurrency. I can't imagine a comparable donation platform using cryptocurrency would be built any differently.

For creators trying to make a living, they still need a bank account to extract the money from their crypto wallet if they want to use that money to pay rent and buy groceries, and volatile currencies with high transaction fees like Bitcoin are a really bad choice for that; stablecoins may be an option there eventually but it's still unclear to me what benefit those provide over cash for the small-time independent creator.

> Also, you need a credit card / bank account to accept transactions from Patreon.

> With crypto, you can create a wallet in seconds and immediately start accepting payment.

And how are you going to use that to buy groceries or pay rent?

And how are you going to use that to buy groceries or pay rent?

The big American chain supermarket near my home has a crypto ATM at the front, next to the shopping buggies. So I guess you could get cash that way and buy groceries.

Rent? Good luck. Every building has its own methods, customs, and policies, even within a single company; and I've never seen one that takes crypto for rent.

> With crypto, you can create a wallet in seconds and immediately start accepting payment.

This is a half truth sure you can do that but if you ever want to use your crypto for anything legitimate you need to go through the whole KYC bullshit. That means there are now countless crypto exchanges with a copy of my passport, and they seem to get hacked a lot. I only had to do KYC once to get and use my credit card.

It works 'just fine' until you say something that someone doesn't like and then you're wondering how stupid was to entrust all your future to a platform that has no problem baning you because Mastercard or Visa said they would like that. Just like youtube works just fine until one day your adblocker doesn't work because Chrome has full market control and you see that youtube is unusable without it. etc.

I have looked at a lot of Patreon pages and almost of all of them the creator is making $10 - $400 a month (usually a guesstimate based on tiers and subscriber numbers). This is great in terms of an additional revenue stream, but it is no Medici family patronage.

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