Sex Workers Took Refuge in Crypto. Now It’s Failing Them | Hacker News Reader

Sex Workers Took Refuge in Crypto. Now It’s Failing Them

wired.com

43 pointsbelltaco52 comments

The money quote for me is:

> “You get on an exchange for as long as you can, until they shut your ass down,” says Knox (an independent sex-worker). “You quickly [run out of exchanges], so you sit on a lot of useless money. The whole ‘crypto is permissionless and censorship-resistant’ thing is a bunch of bullshit.” (Knox suspects she has ended up on a blacklist at Plaid, a provider of technology plumbing to large crypto exchanges like Gemini, Kraken, and Robinhood, leading to the repeated bans. Freya Petersen, spokesperson for Plaid, says no such list exists, but that all firms that wish to use its services are subject to a standard risk assessment process, factoring in the industry in which they operate.)

The only way around this would seem for sex workers to have their own wallet with keys that they control, but that still leaves them with no way to cash out, and landlords, car loans, and grocery stores do not accept crypto.

> but that still leaves them with no way to cash out

Which has always been the primary criticism of cryptocurrency as, well, currency. It's not currency by definition if you have to "cash out" to spend.

Well, if you have some zimbabwean dollars, in most parts of the world you pretty much have to "cash out" and convert to a different currency, if you want to spend these. If you have a "respectable" currency like EUR and, say, you need to pay taxes in the US, you still have to convert to USD, because the IRS only accepts USD. Are ZWL and EUR "real" currencies? It all comes down to the list of currencies that the other party accepts. Your bank can probably auto-convert EUR in your account to USD and make the payment seemless. But there are cards issued by crypto exchanges that can auto-convert your crypto for fiat payments as well

That’s like saying Esperanto is the same as English because both are languages, ignoring scale. Outside of a handful failed countries, most people can use their local currency for almost all of their needs. The problem for cryptocurrencies has been this is not true because they don’t offer enough of an advantage to shift that local currency usage and thus very few businesses accept them.

> there are cards issued by crypto exchanges that can auto-convert your crypto for fiat payments as well

The whole point of the article is that these are not universally available and that exchanges can and will shut you down. How does having a magic card that turns crypto in to fiat work if the exchange has banned you?

> How does having a magic card that turns crypto in to fiat work if the exchange has banned you?

It doesn't. That's the point of the article. However, this problem is not exclusive to crypto cards. The person in question turned to crypto in the first place because her bank/Paypal/etc blocked her. With crypto, at least there are non-magic alternatives: p2p, crypto ATMs, etc

Conversion (swapping actually) is a real operation and can’t just be abstracted away. It matters considerably.

The only real use-case for crypto was doing crime. Criminals flocked to use it, but obviously the government was going to be shortly behind. I'm surprised it took this long to close down the exit nodes.

She could still use it to pay people that accept crypto, but most cryptocurrencies aren't great currencies since they fluctuate in value a lot.

Our current financial system has issues, but the best system for 99%+ of people.

> Our current financial system has issues, but the best system for 99%+ of people.

I have to violently disagree with that statement.

For a good chunk of people (> 10%), the current system is a vampire on the efforts of people, draining them via transfer fees, account fees, overdraft fees & whatever new fee they can come up with today. Their failures are bailed out because "tHeY'rE tOo BiG tO fAiL", influencing politicians into using the funds of the State to give themselves a pillow to land on. They deem themselves to be above the effects of "the hand of the market" that everyone else has to go through. Screw that: They must be able to fail like the rest of us, with no soft landing given to them when they do so.

Those fees pay for all the services people need.

Account recovery, fraud detection, ATMs everywhere, etc.

Things noticably missing from the cryptoschemes...

You've got too much wrong in that comment for me to answer to all of them, but you don't sound like you know much about the banking world.

If they're charging fees, it's because it costs them something to offer these services. If they had their way, they just wouldn't offer services to poor people since it's more trouble than its worth. Neobanks like Chime are tackling that issue with pretty good success, but they're shifting the costs from consumer to merchant.

Nothing is perfect, but it's pretty darn good for most.

No one has to pay overdraft fees. Account holders can disable overdraft on any account if they don't want it.

And then you pay “rejection” fees (or whatever they call the fees they charge you when a payment bounces), which are in the same ballpark…

Chainanalysis reported in their 2023 Crypto Crime Report that only 0.24% of the volume of crypto transactions was for crime.

I would be curious how they could possibly estimate that, can you link to where they describe their methods for determining a criminal transaction?

Setting aside the fact that such a figure is obviously hard to determine reliably, keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of cryptocurrencies transactions are speculation and never leave the exchange. If you discount the speculation and just focus on the use of cryptocurrencies, then the figure is going to be appalling even if the .24% from Chainanalysis was accurate in the first place.

How does that percentage compare with non-crypto financial assets?

It’s thought to be a couple percent. You just make up a bunch of invoices, collect deposits from mules, buy real estate/luxury goods, then sell those to prove source of funds.

>The only real use-case for crypto was doing crime.

It was never any good at that, either. Cryptocurrency is somewhat hard to censor but easy to track. And in practice, people go through centralized exchanges because blockchains work so badly.

I don't know, people seem to have gotten good at buying drugs with it

People are pretty damn good at buying drugs with fiat, too.

It isn't, but it's still much better than traditional banks.

In 2017, the World Bank reported 1.7 billion people are unbanked globally.

The current financial system is very far from being best for 99%+ of people.

According to the World Bank then, in 2017 almost 79% were already banked.

And crypto will fix this?

And I'm talking about the developed world, not global.

I mean sure, if you make derivatives trading illegal, freeze bank accounts of people you disagree with and mandate transaction surveillance then anyone that wants to do what they want with their own money and not get spied on is a criminal.

If crypto is so not accepted in most places she'll get pennies on her dollar. It'll end up in company scrip all over again.

You sound like you don't know the pains to transfer money when you live in a country that does not have $ or € as their main currency, crypto has use for a lot of people in the world and it will regain traction once the scammers and the speculators will get tired of it

What's the timeframe on scammers and speculators deciding they don't want to make a profit from unsophisticated users/soft targets?

If they own the keys, they could at least find someone to do P2P transfers with (presumably at a lower rates than market)

Some crypto ATMs allow cash withdrawals (again, at a rate favorable to the ATM)

Running an all-cash business because you need to cash out your coins so the volatility doesn't kill you is really tough, especially when banks then won't deal with you depositing that cash into a bank account because they discriminate against your LEGAL business.

It just seems like cryptocurrencies are re-inventing the banking system without all of the pesky safeguards against fraud and abuse that hurts the first movers (not the actual plebs) while encoding their cultural biases into the tech that is supposed to be unencumbered by laws or cultural moires.

I suspect that this article is a propaganda piece that promotes these (false) ideas:

- crypto is for criminals

- it does not give you full control (false, custodial services don't)

- it is possible to ban all fiat exits

If you struggle with the last point, take a look at kycnot.me list.

“… to ban all fiat exits”

This doesn’t matter. Every fiat exit that is banned creates more friction. Like a shopping cart that has left the parking lot and has the wheels locked, the transaction system becomes so difficult to use that it approaches impossible to use.

If someone is banned from taking a loan from all regulated banks then they are forced to deal with loan sharks / organized crime. That loss of competition and choice comes with additional friction and strings attached to every transaction. Worse transaction fees, less security, less scrupulous counterparties, less convenience of location, less liquidity (one OnlyFans creator in the story was making $500k/mo), etc.

It’s not only the fiat exits that ban specific users. Cryptocurrency exchanges are known to ban transactions to certain addresses / wallets for reasons including (but not limited to) fraud, scams, sanctions. I imagine some of the exchanges that try to follow US law also do some basic due diligence and ban some addresses based on sex work. If the sex worker’s customers can’t easily transfer the crypto to their addresses, the same problem remains.

Just because you find something inconvenient for marketing purpose doesn’t mean it’s propaganda. These are real people hitting exactly the problems cryptocurrency sales guys said they could avoid by using it, and they deserve the respect of not having their lived experience dismissed outright.

If you want to help cryptocurrency, put your time into fixing the problems rstger than still more empty marketing.

> "crypto will bring freedom from oppressive financial systems"

< "crypto has the same problems"

> "propaganda"

LOL.

I have yet to see a real world use case for crypto that isn't about getting around legal restrictions in the financial space which usually are used to fund north Korea or a drug cartel.

Yeah, my metric for whether cryptocurrencies were useful is the continued existence of PayPal. Anyone selling things has horror stories about them so the bar is pretty low to compete with them, but the blockchain pitch of “slower, costs more, less safe but at least it’s hard to use” hasn’t met even that level.

Wow. This is the perfect way to describe it. If you're worse than PayPal how do you even compete?

Correct, you can't ban all fiat exits. However, this also undermines the argument for crypto about government control of fiat, since many of the exits of last resort rely on dealing with cash.

I've had several sex worker friends who all chose to do it, save one. She was a real sweetheart but (and she knew this, and was candid about it), wasn't very bright.

The backpage/kijiji thing hurt her bad. She had to start going off referrals more. Which is a bad thing because, as I learned- forming close relationships with clients is bad in that line of business.

Soon she was getting passed around by friends, treated worse and worse. She got pregnant, engaged several times. Beat up several times, pregnant again.

I tried to convince her that anything would be better- fast food, whatever. But how to support now two kids by herself on minimum wage?

Even though I no longer personally know anyone (to my knowledge) effected by this- we need to protect sex workers. Legalize it, or at least decriminalize it to remove the stigma. Like the war on drugs it hurts the wrong people, and if there wasn't a market for it, it wouldn't be one of if not the oldest profession.

There are also exchanges where you trade against other people between crypocurrencies and fiat. Chinese people all use this. These workers could use those.

They are like fiat-crypto dexes. How's your experiences with these?

There's no good reason not to have your own wallet these days.

Even mobile wallets support lightening network (like Muun).

Bitrefill is handy for getting the off gift card.

Someone should make a wallet app that advertises to these people directly. (And you know… actually lets them stay on the platform.)

No sympathy from me, (not) sorry.

Weird hateful energy.

Porn is a scourge to society and I'm perfectly OK with pornographers being shunned. They're little more than addictive drug peddlers.

What is wrong with you?

Although he’s out of line, he’s also right. Pornography has, does, and keeps on making it even harder for people to create meaningful connections, be fulfilled with “regular” sexual ideas, and messes with our body’s production of dopamine which in the end results in even more severe loneliness due to the inability to be more realistic in terms of sex as well as highten the chances of depression caused by the former. It is a disease, and the longer we try to destigmatise the situation, the worse effects it will cause for people and society as a whole

Too much 4chan

From guidelines:

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Oh wow, I don't care.

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