[vortico]

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.

[TheCoelacanth]

> 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.

[Rjevski]

You can just say you heard about all this cryptocurrency craze and wanted to try and get rich too.

[tomjen3]

"Honey I wanted to buy some bitcoins because if they go up we could make a mint.."

[Fjolsvith]

Or prostitutes?

[sokoloff]

Why would you need crypto (rather than cash) for any inherently in-person exchange?

[ghostbrainalpha]

A prostitute of sufficient quality and reputation may actually require payment ahead of time.

[Fjolsvith]

counterfeit money?

[vortico]

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.

[lawn]

> 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]

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%).

[bena]

> 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]

>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.

[bena]

There is a huge difference between 1 minute and 15 minutes. And "use a free site" is not an acceptable alternative.

I'm talking about payments in general. In a transaction online, there is a certain level of distrust. Both sides are trying to verify to the other that they are legit.

> Yes, but for this discussion, it is completely anonymous.

Why not make credit card vendors completely understanding and customers completely trustworthy as well for the discussion? Then they can just use Visa.

> Your wife cannot figure out the owner of the porn site's wallet ID.

Bit sexist. Assuming that it's the man purchasing the porn and the wife isn't savvy enough to realize that either there's no damn pizza or that you paying pizza half with regular currency and half with bitcoin is just kind of dumb. And would effectively make it double the price since the charge on the card is the price of a normal pizza. If you're going to lie, do it right. Just say you invested a small amount. And when questioned later, say it tanked, good thing you only tested $100 or so. That might buy you 5 months of a site that charges a $20/mo subscription fee. After that, you're on your own.

> the value is going to change less than 1%

You hope. Bitcoin has dropped over $1000 in 1.5 hours. And you're ignoring the transaction fee of the payment and whatever the exchanges charge for cashing out. So you're looking at probably around 30 minutes turnaround from the customer saying "I will pay you" to you collecting any actual money.

[slededit]

You can check the balance of their BTC account. If the balance is there and the tx fee is high enough then there is a high probability the payment will post. Its a credit risk for sure, but for only a short period and the consequences of default are relatively benign.

[pavel_lishin]

> 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]

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]

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]

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.

[pavel_lishin]

Yeah, I was just using Stripe/Paypal as an example of an payment intermediary. What you're saying makes a lot more sense to me now.