Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pavel_lishin 2869 days ago
> 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.
1 comments
vortico 2869 days ago
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.

link
pavel_lishin 2869 days ago
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.)

link
vortico 2869 days ago
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.

link
pavel_lishin 2869 days ago
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.
link