Their reasoning was that you can't handle recurring payments without holding a lot of personal data.
Perhaps porn sites that want to offer inter-species furry porn should bite the bullet and only accept one-off payments, just so they can make effective use of crypto.
It’s not ideal for that type of derelict subscription business model (e.g. the gym), but neither are prepaid debit cards or virtual cards with predetermined spending limits, and they probably already contend with those.
With micropayments, the business model becomes (quite literally) pay-per-view.
> it sucks for recurring transactions.
The UX is bad at the moment, but with crypto there is this idea of "streaming payments", which work very well as a substitute for subscriptions. Basically, you make only one initial transaction to set up the "subscription" with a locked deposit. On every block (or on every X seconds if you are doing off-chain), a small transfer is made. You only pay gas if you need to "top-up" the balance or when you want to close the stream.
If your quota has insufficient Ether or you've deauthorized the contract, your "subscription" will be cancelled automatically.
All on-chain. This should be the way to go.
If there's one thing that evolutionary psychology has shown, it's that women's psychology for the mating market is not wired that way.
In a lot of ways, crypto makes perfect sense for porn payments. The anonymous nature is most likely a value add for most porn subscription holders.
With crypto is the same. Once you setup a crypto wallet and learn how to use it, you can pay for anything with it.
People already have credit/debit cards. That was my point. How else have people been purchasing internet porn for the couple decades prior to crypto taking off?
>With crypto is the same.
No, it's not because most people do not have the slightest clue how to set up a crypto wallet meanwhile are kind of required by society to already know how to use a credit/debit card to make purchases.
Also do you not realise this was the exact same argument against credit cards vs cash in the 80s? Do you not realise how technical adoption works?
https://www.mercuryminds.com/blog/preferred-payment-methods-...
It's from 2017, would be interesting to see if crypto has taken over so significanly since then.
Credit/debit apparently dominate in most parts of the world for online commerce, as well as other non-crypto mobile payment systems, like country-specific e-wallets (for example Yandex.Money in Russia).
30 million users is probably big in the crypto space but when talking about global populations it's not, so yeah, that's only a geeky niche and thus the assumption that the average porn watcher will most likely have a cc# (or equivalent non-crypto mobile payment) and have no idea how to set up a crypto wallet seems totally valid.
Yea 30M is still small now, it's the rate of adoption that matters. Metamask was at 2M users at the start of 2021, hit 10M at the end of August (https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/metamask-surpasses-...) and then 30M in March 2022 (https://decrypt.co/95039/metamask-consensys-30-million-users)
And this is just one crypto wallet, there are a handful of others too. It will probably slow during the crypto bear market, but that's insanely fast growth. I can see it being quite common for people to have either their own crypto wallet or one provided via their bank in the next decade. Having a browser plugin to pay for anything with one click (with 2FA for bigger purchases) is a much better experience than having to enter your credit card onto many different sites.
2. The above is stronger for areas that aren't well-served - women directed producers for example.
3. Parasocial relationships have become a huge driver of revenue for performers - hence OnlyFans and other Patreon-like services.
It's been done, to various levels of success; it has it's humble beginnings with cam girls via BTC (look up Girls gone Bitcoin), and then as alts got traction post 2017 things like CUM (Cryptographic Ultra Money) [0] try to make headway but failed miserably as most alts usually do.
After Onlyfans threatened to take down all the adult content it had a real chance of making itself a MVP in this ecosystem, unfortunately these projects live and die based on short-term price swings and as you can see the value has made it essentially unfavorable for anyone but pump and dumpers.
I'd argue that BTC can and has shown more promise for sex workers, I've gone into detail about my first hand experience when in the early stage of my startup I interacted with the 'ladies of backpage' when Visa and MC shutoff access to purchasing ads on Backpage on here before. I just think that sex workers have enough on their plates that it shouldn't be this hard to just to solve something so trivial which many pay for, espcially if either Visa or MC want to be puritanical it.
Buyer initiates purchase, and the seller gives them a window of x minutes to send y btc to an address, where the price of the service is denominated in btc as of the trading price at that moment.
If at least 1 transaction doesn't show up on the btc network in the x minutes, that transaction times out.
If at least 1 does, then the seller waits for w confirmations to take place before the payment is recognized as valid, where w is set to their tolerance. I've seen as low as 3 and as high as 7.
It is not centralized as in a central entity needs to approve your transaction.
1. Relies on some central entity to buy/sell it as to peg/back it to another asset.
2. Relies on some central observer to sign exchange rates so that the system can automatically adjust its reward system.
I'm guessing it's the latter. But feel free to explain to me how it isn't centralized if you think you have a case for it.
The oracle is handled by Chainlink which is decentralized.
>The first is handled by arbitragers who can mint/redeem it for other decentralized assets (it is fully collateralized by a treasury of decentralized assets).
Sure, but the parameters of this mint/reward system are a function of the exchange rate, are they not? Even then, those decentralized assets are either other stablecoins, or non-stablecoins. If it's backed by stablecoins, then it's centralized. If it's backed by non-stablecoins, then it's non-stable.
>The oracle is handled by Chainlink which is decentralized.
You can't have a decentralized oracle in any meaningful way, it is like what truthcoin tried to do. I admittedly have no idea how chain-link works, but I am pretty certain that it is not decentralized. It is almost a truism that members of distributed system cannot verify arbitrary facts about the outside world (for example, exchange rates) without having trusted oracle/oracles. You can try to make the system reliant on many different oracles, but that is similar to classical consensus and there's no distributed way to prevent them from colluding. It is essentially the problem with proof-of-stake.
If you ask me, Fei looks like yet another ponzi system like USDT/LUNA. Why are stablecoin owners always rewarded for merely holding?
You can absolutely have price oracles of crypto assets without any interaction offchain, as you can use uniswap market prices and if they differ from any other exchanges arbitragers will make a profit by fixing that difference. But that is another oracle that is different from chainlink.
Chainlink is decentralized. It could possibly be attacked with enough effort and money to destabilize things but that is a totally different threat vector than the government restricting trading to services it doesn't like or censoring users.
Fei is backed only by decentralized assets.
UST was backed by nothing which is why it collapsed, Fei is over collateralized. You don't get any rewards for holding Fei.
Uniswap is only between cryptocurrencies. As I said earlier, those cryptocurrencies are either other stablecoins, or non-stablecoins. If it's backed by stablecoins, then it's centralized. If it's backed by non-stablecoins, then it's non-stable.
Chainlink is, from what I understand, a truthcoin-like system where oracles put down collateral. It is fundamentally a broken system because whatever group with the majority of the collateral just wins. What is stopping a government that can censor users and restrict trading from forcing oracles to collude and report false information?
I addressed your comment on Chainlink already, yes it could come under pressure or attack which would destabilize the network. This could be used to break many things, but it's not a vector for censorship / centralization because it has nothing to do with Fei's use as a currency and definitely doesn't make Fei centralised.
Fei's reward system is controlled by whichever party controls the oracles. You can outsource the oracles to a proof-of-stake-like system on chainlink, but that doesn't get rid of the fundamental problem.
Wife catches a weird pornhub charge on your monthly statement? Whoops! Those hackers are at it again. Call it fraud and charge it off.
The high cc processing rate accommodates the increased risk.
Btc solves this as no chargeback is possible.
It also doesn't explain why porn actors routinely find their checking accounts closed out on them, or they get blacklisted entirely.
It has nothing to do with risk, and everything to do with Christian fundamentalists in the banking industry exploiting their positions in industries we need, to force their morals on others.
PH didn't decide "we are only gonna accept crypto so we can circumvent the system" it was a position forced upon them as a punishment for their shitty behavior. Now they are trying very hard to moderate effectively in order to win back the good graces of the payment processors because they are probably going to eventually go bankrupt if they don't.
Its a forced position because PH very much wanted to continue to accept credit cards, which I suspect was where 99% of their income was from. However, the payment processors blacklisted them so they can't.
the post claimed that Pornhub has been targeted because of their industry.
i have never verified the veracity of these claims, but they seem plausible
Facebook is also orders of magnitude larger and has to deal with content that blurs the line between legal and illegal. It's a significantly more difficult task.
All of Pornhub's content blurs the line between legal and illegal, depending on the jurisdiction. Every single piece of content they deal with.
That's a pretty freaking blurry line.
From what I can tell they actually do more than anyone can expect.
If cryptocurrencies were useful for this problem, they'd have been adopted already. It's an sector whose businesses and workers are very savvy about anything that helps them evade repression.
is there a current place they're commonly used ?
So a point for Bitcoin then?
"New" means "new," it doesn't mean "not widely adopted yet." We don't widely adopt things that fail or have unacceptable side effects; that doesn't make them new again.
That's 10 years compared to Bitcoin's 14, with arguably far more in concrete financial activity (and quality of life) to show for it.
This is true, but also misleading: the physical Euro switch took place over months, and involved a coordinated public campaign to encourage millions of Europeans to exchange their physical bills. Digitalization helped with banking, but a significant human and policy effort occurred in parallel.
And there's another problem: it's really not clear what it would mean for "all USD to be converted to BTC." BTC has already been issued, and will continue to be algorithmically issued. The Euro switch could not be economically triaged per se, because it was an in-kind transition. No such transition is possible for cryptocurrencies, unless we allow a central authority into the mix.
The TL;DR is that blockchain scaling is a very difficult problem. There are scaling layers like ZKSync that are only possible because of cryptographic primitives that literally didn't exist in a usable form 14 years ago.
And I somewhat disagree with your premise – cryptocurrencies are actually used in the real world today. Most of the usage is to get around regulation, like when you want to send remittances or buy drugs, or bet on betting markets. But on the whole I do agree, it's disappointing that the technology is still so immature.
Disclosure: I work in the cryptocurrency industry
https://www.statista.com/statistics/275999/household-interne...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/275999/household-interne...
Depending how you define personal credit, its been around ~100 years (or more!), with the card format being adopted in the 60s. It's only been the last 15 years or so that not carrying cash has become a reasonable approach to day-to-day life.
So for bitcoin to become as big as it has as a brand new technology in only 14 years seems accelerated.
This is analysis complicated a bit by the fact that bitcoin is not a top-down tech like credit, there's no centralized group deciding who gets to use it. On the other side of that though - the tech infrastructure build-out that made credit cards ubiquitous also benefits and accelerates the potential adoption of bitcoin.
Standardized weights of specie are older than history; you can find different perspectives on how much they count as "money".
But history begins at a time when the role of money in society is still very much up for debate; Hammurabi's code (~1000 years after the beginning of history, give or take) includes a provision specifying that, if you run a bar, you can't require customers to pay in silver but must also accept grain.
Grain as currency continues across the world for a few thousand years after that, but grain is a terrible currency because it spoils very quickly. (Counting things like "rats got into the grain" as a form of spoilage.)
14 years ago the argument was "you just wait!"
Today, everyone in the US knows what "crypto" is, far more than know what "cryptography" is based on my casual conversations. The fact that porn hasn't moved to entirely crypto means that crypto has not survived the test of time.
There are plenty of other examples as well, the fact that Russian oligarchs (or even just regular old wealthy Russians) aren't creating massive demand for crypto to thwart sanctions is another example that crypto will never become an alternate, super-legal, currency.
It's honestly a shame that it doesn't work because, during the first wave of crypto hype, I rather liked the libertarian visions of an unregulated underground economy. I thought crypto enthusiasts were wrong then, but I at least hoped they were right.