Porn Will Be Bitcoin's Killer App

An anonymous reader writes "In December, porn.com started accepting Bitcoin for its premium services, and the virtual currency quickly came to account for 10 percent of sales. At the start of January, a post on Reddit's Bitcoin subforum boosted the figure to 50 percent, before settling down to about 25 percent. The tremendous interest has led David Kay, the marketing director at porn.com's parent company Sagan, to talk very positively about the virtual currency: 'I definitely believe that porn will be Bitcoin's killer app,' he told The Guardian. 'Fast, private and confidential payments.'"

Comments

seems reasonable

[wbr1]

Porn is what made VHS win the format war.

Re:seems reasonable

[Thor Ablestar]

Does it mean that no other formats can contain the porn?

Re:seems reasonable

[The New Guy 2.0]

Porn couldn't get its hands on anything Betamax, so they released everything on VHS only. Beta had the better tech, VHS had the better content.

Re:seems reasonable

[SuricouRaven]

Partially true. Porn helped, yes, but VHS's longer playing time was an even greater advantage. Together they offset Beta's higher image quality.

Re:seems reasonable

[Ginger Unicorn]

Depends what you mean by better tech. Betamax traded picture quality for running time. VHS had longer running tapes that you could fit an entire movie on from day one. Betamax didn't get that till later. Sony probably made the tapes too short for a movie deliberately as a form of DRM (that's a joke)

Re:seems reasonable

[Zocalo]

You joke, but I'm not so sure there may not be some element of truth in that. When the specs for the audio CD were being thrashed out CBS/Sony president (and later CEO and chairman) Norio Ohga all but forced Philips into changing the format to accomodate his favourite piece, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, in its entirety. Before the change to 12cm diameter disks, Philips had been proposing 11.5cm and a playing time of one hour exactly, but the longest running version of Beethoven's 9th was Furtwangler's 1951 Bayreuth Festival recording at 74 minutes, requiring the extra 0.5cm. If Sony's audio division could use the length of pieces to dictate technology specs, then why not the video division?

Re:seems reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop spreading that fucking myth. It's not true.

Re:seems reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

Moron.

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3089/vhs-vs-betamax-how-influential-was-the-pornography-industry-in-the-format-war

Re:seems reasonable

[Paradise Pete]

Beta had the better tech, VHS had the better content.

Oh yeah, let's please start up that argument again.

Re:seems reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn couldn't get its hands on anything Betamax, so they released everything on VHS only. Beta had the better tech, VHS had the better content.

Citation? I looked around for proof and even wikipedia has nothing... Sounds made up.

Re:seems reasonable

[nurb432]

No, Sony is what made the lesser quality format win...

Re:seems reasonable

[neilo_1701D]

VHS had a simpler tape path, too. A Betamax machine needed to unspool the tape 3/4 around the head drum, and had other mechanisms that needed the tape to move out, too. If something went wrong, despooling the tape became problematic. VHS, on the other hand, spooled tape out in a "M" fashion: two arms pulled the tape out and achieved a 1/2 wrap of the drum head. Because of that pattern, if the tape failed to retract getting it out wasn't as hard.

Serviceability played a major part in VHS winning the format wars, too. If you needed to replace a Betamax head, you needed all sorts of aligning jigs, test tapes and oscilloscopes to make sure the head was in exactly the right position. VHS heads, on the other hand, simply required 4 wires desoldered, the head lifted off with a single tool, the new head being slid into position and those 4 wires soldered back on. 10 min job with a quick clean + cost of head; easy money.

In truth, Betamax wasn't that much better than VHS in terms of signal quality. Betamax put a high frequency "ring" in the signal when there were abrupt changes in the luminance signal. This gave the appearance of a higher definition, as the edges seemed sharper than they actually were. VHS simply blurred the same scene.

Re:seems reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is there no "-1: urban myth" mod?

Re:seems reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simply not true. VHS was better: it had longer recording time. Go back to your Amiga and leave us alone.

Re:seems reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

And what about HD DVD? Porn went to it first, and it won, right?

Re:seems reasonable

[Zocalo]

I actually tend to side with Snopes, "Status undetermined" on this, and we'll probably never know for certain. That said, a lot of the key components of the story are demonstrably true, making for an awful lot of coincidences that all add credibility to it, including a retelling on Philips' own website and marketing materials of the time specifically mentioning the Furtwangler recording. Here's a link to a story by one of Philips' own engineers on the development process, documenting a sudden (and quite drastic) design change from Sony that had to have been triggered by something. All in all, I think there probably is some truth behind it, but were it a court of law most of the "evidence" would probably be classed as circumstantial, and I also suspect it may have been exaggerated after the fact by the marketing departments of Sony and Philips; it's a nice story, after all.

Re:seems reasonable

[westlake]

Porn is what made VHS win the format war.

Disney won the format war.

Disney and Warner Brothers ("Maverick") jump-started the infant ABC television network. Disney's move to NBC and color production rocketed sales of color TV sets.

Disney's automated stage shows introduced millions - tens of millions and hundreds of millions --- to the potential of computers and robotics, beginning with the New York World's Fair in 1964.

The geek needs to let go his obsession with pornography in order to see family entertainment as a driving force in technology.

Re:seems reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn also adopted HD-DVD over BluRay first, making it appear who the clear winner in the war was going to be. We all know how that turned out.

Re:seems reasonable

[Solandri]

If they really wanted to put more music onto a single disc, the easier way would have been to encode the audio's amplitude on a logarithmic scale rather than linear. The current CD format is linear in amplitude and wastes a lot of bandwidth by recording very fine grades of amplitude differences in very loud sounds, not enough for very quiet sounds. Digital telephony uses logarithmic encoding because it's such an easy way to reduce bandwidth.

The Beethoven's 9nth story is probably popular among the record labels' marketing divisions because it counters the conspiracy theory that they picked inefficient linear PCM coding to deliberately reduce the amount of audio which could be stored on a CD, to try to make it better match the two-sided LP (about 45-50 minutes for both sides). Customers would have been up in arms if they found out the record companies were producing CDs with 35 minutes of music on it when the CDs could hold 2-3 hours. Since these things were usually sold at about $15-$18 per disc (not per song), consumer demand to "fill up" the discs with more music would have been devastating to their revenue stream.

Regardless of whether that conspiracy theory is true, it sowed the seeds for the success of MP3s. Because the CD audio format was uncompressed and so bloated because it was encoded linearly, it compressed fantastically (roughly 10x) once people were able to get their hands on the digital data and do what they wanted with it, rather than have to live with whatever format the labels preferred. It's a good lesson in giving customers what they want. If you try to force them to accept what you want, you just sow the seeds of your own demise.

Re:seems reasonable

[John Allsup]

Though I tend to be sceptical of skeptics.  They tend to reason things through with evidence until it is close enough to supporting what they want to believe, and then stop.  Often there are subtle issues they have missed, or they have oversimplified things, or made unwarranted (though reasonable sounding) conclusions in their arguments that, on closer inspection, do not hold.  Take skeptics with a dose of salt: be skeptical of their claims and let them convince you.  I hope a good skeptic would want nothing less (and would tear their hair out if people blindly took their words at face value).

Re:seems reasonable

[ColdWetDog]

Me love you long time?

No, that can't be right.....

Re:seems reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

At the time CDs were released, computing power and DAC circuitry was still a costly commodity ("digital telephony" was not a widespread technology). Fancier encoding schemes such as logarithmic data representations might store more data, but they would also be significantly harder to implement in hardware. Early CD players were already fairly expensive; jacking up the cost would only slow adoption even more (even with longer-playing discs).

Re:seems reasonable

[jd2112]

Depends what you mean by better tech. Betamax traded picture quality for running time. VHS had longer running tapes that you could fit an entire movie on from day one. Betamax didn't get that till later. Sony probably made the tapes too short for a movie deliberately as a form of DRM (that's a joke)

That was before Sony became a content provider. It was also when Sony made good stuff, easily worth the price premium over its competitors.
Sony's downfall corresponds to about the time they got involved in the movie and music production buisness.

Re:seems reasonable

[Cruciform]

A friend's father kept his Betamax machine because he found that he could copy VHS rentals with Macrovision on them without and of the signal distortion they usually had.

Re:seems reasonable

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

So what you're saying is, we needed the extra runtime on VHS to accommodate Peter North?

Re:seems reasonable

[AK Marc]

Yes, the more "logical" people tend to exhibit confirmation bias more than others. They have no less bias or greater impartiality, but do so in a way acceptable to themselves.

Re:seems reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather weak story, given that they could have easily dropped the size to reduce capacity. The production process started out rather expensive, plus the established compact cassette format was about half the size. Now there was an 8 cm CD standard, so the idea of smaller discs had come up - it's just that they didn't hold enough music. If log coding could have combined lower manufacturing costs, a portable format and still the same 75 minute capacity, it would have been an easy decision.

So why linear coding? It makes for cheap D/A converters. Remember, these have to run at 16 bits/ 44 kHz using 1970's technology. It's rather astounding when you realize that "CD quality" has been the standard by which MP3 has always been judged. They got that pretty much right on the first attempt. Every improvement later on (such as SACD) failed hard.

Re:seems reasonable

[grcumb]

Philips had been proposing 11.5cm and a playing time of one hour exactly, but the longest running version of Beethoven's 9th was Furtwangler's 1951 Bayreuth Festival recording at 74 minutes, requiring the extra 0.5cm.

So, just to bring this back on topic: What you're saying is that the size of your Furtwangler[*] DOES matter?

-----------------
[*] I'm assuming that's the German name for it....

Re:seems reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

I read something about a corer on a cached talk page on Wikipedia, but could you still better explain your third paragraph? If you don't mind.

Re:seems reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

If they really wanted to put more music onto a single disc, the easier way would have been to encode the audio's amplitude on a logarithmic scale rather than linear. The current CD format is linear in amplitude and wastes a lot of bandwidth by recording very fine grades of amplitude differences in very loud sounds, not enough for very quiet sounds. Digital telephony uses logarithmic encoding because it's such an easy way to reduce bandwidth.

Logarithmic encoding gains dynamic range at the expense of increased distortion, and makes dithering more difficult. It's acceptable for voice, because distortion doesn't affect intelligibility much, but is unacceptable for music. Without dithering, 8-bit linear sounds severely distorted (think Amiga, Sega Genesis, etc). With dithering most of that distortion goes away and becomes a quite audible hiss, about on par with bad compact cassette at 44.1kHz. At 12-bit it sounds more like good compact cassette with dithering, and still quite distorted without.

So, they could have made CD hold 50% more by degrading the quality considerably (12 bit), or 100% by making the product unmarketably bad (8 bit). Given that practically all albums in their back catalog were around 35 minutes/side, it was a reasonable choice to go with the higher quality choice.

Because the CD audio format was uncompressed and so bloated because it was encoded linearly, it compressed fantastically (roughly 10x)

WTF. Moving to an 8-bit log format only gets you 2x density, and as I explained, totally dogshit quality. The invention of MP3 roughly 10 years later, and requiring PC level computation to decode has nothing to do with anything.

Re:seems reasonable

[Agripa]

No extra processing would have been required. ADCs and DACs at the time already supported a-law and u-law encoding for telephone systems which essentially allow 12+ bits of dynamic range to be encoded into 8 bits.

Now could an accurate higher resolution converter with a logarithmic transfer curve could have been produced? I doubt it and if it could, so what? It would only have saved about 4 bits at the cost of not being able to use existing linear converters.

Re:seems reasonable

[ncc74656]

Disney and Warner Brothers ("Maverick") jump-started the infant ABC television network. Disney's move to NBC and color production rocketed sales of color TV sets.

ABC was spun out of NBC because the government believed NBC (owned at the time by RCA) was getting too big.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC#Red_and_Blue_Networks

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had, since its creation in 1934, investigated the monopolistic effects of network broadcasting. The FCC found that NBC's two networks and its owned-and-operated stations dominated audiences, affiliates and advertising in American radio. In 1939, the FCC ordered RCA to divest itself of one of the two networks. RCA fought the divestiture order, but in 1940 divided NBC into two companies in case an appeal was lost. The Blue Network became NBC Blue Network, Inc. and NBC Red became NBC Red Network, Inc. Both networks formally divorced operations on January 8, 1942, and the Blue Network was referred to on the air as either Blue or Blue Network, with official corporate name Blue Network Company, Inc. NBC Red, on the air, became known simply as NBC.

After losing its final appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court in May 1943, RCA sold Blue Network Company, Inc., for $8 million to Life Savers magnate Edward J. Noble, completing the sale on October 12, 1943. Noble got the network name, leases on land-lines and the New York studios; two-and-a half stations (WJZ in Newark/New York; KGO in San Francisco, and WENR in Chicago, which shared a frequency with Prairie Farmer station WLS); and about 60 affiliates. Noble wanted a better name for the network and in 1944 acquired the rights to the name "American Broadcasting Company" from George Storer. The Blue Network became ABC officially on June 15, 1945, after the sale was completed.

Di$ney acquired ABC sometime in the '90s IIRC, decades later.

Pay for pr0n

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Heaven forbid. Hell, they are giving it away.

Re:Pay for pr0n

[crutchy]

only morons pay for porn

Re:Pay for pr0n

[r2kordmaa]

If your business focuses on morons you will never lack for customers, seems like a great plan to me.

Re:Pay for pr0n

[HuguesT]

At some level everybody is a "moron". Most people confuse ignorance and stupidity, and everybody is ignorant of something.

Re:Pay for pr0n

[crutchy]

pure gold my friend :-)

Re:Pay for pr0n

[bahco]

Mistakenly modded this as redundant. Posting to undo mod and to say Insightful.

Re:Pay for pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

At some level everybody is a "moron". Most people confuse ignorance and stupidity, and everybody is ignorant of something.

More than that; Everybody is ignorant of most everything, especially of that.

Re:Pay for pr0n

[mrbluze]

At some level everybody is a "moron". Most people confuse ignorance and stupidity, and everybody is ignorant of something.

More than that; Everybody is ignorant of most everything, especially of that.

...Morons!

Re:Pay for pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody is ignorant of most things, I would say. Though it takes the least ignorant to understand the scale of their ignorance, somewhat ironically.

Re:Pay for pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

and only morons use Bitcoin! Its a match made in heaven!

Re:Pay for pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

That seems to be the point of this article. Morons/Ignoramuses pay for pr0n (increasingly with bitcoins). The everyone else pirates it.

Re:Pay for pr0n

[Hognoxious]

http://thinkexist.com/quotation/he_who_knows_not_and_knows_not_he_knows_not-he_is/149147.html

Re: Pay for pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but those are probably the same morons that use bitcoin

Re:Pay for pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

Only morons don't pay for porn. Your broadband costs, say, $300 a year. Your porn subscription costs, say, $100 a year. If you save $100 by going to xvideos and youporn, you get super low quality super highly compressed porn that is only good to see what a particular porn site sells. For your $100 subscription you get more Full HD content than you can watch. It's amongst the best value entertainment around, and is often less than a deadtree magazine subscription.

Re:Pay for pr0n

[Anonymous Coward]

excellent!

Re:Pay for pr0n

[rrohbeck]

Well there is always illegal porn.

lolwut?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone ever pay for pr0n?

I should start a pr0n site. --newspaper cat

Re:lolwut?

[nukenerd]

Why would anyone ever pay for pr0n?

Some idiots do, like the one featured here :- Plumpy

Otherwise, there is enough free stuff to occupy anybody 24/7.

Why would anyone ever pay for an operating system?

Re:lolwut?

[HuguesT]

The same reason why people pay for Windows instead of using FreeBSD?

Re:lolwut?

[Anonymous Coward]

...because it's the path of least resistance? No, free porn is much more convenient. Because it's more user friendly? No... free porn is much more convenient. Because it has better support for commonly used tools? That doesn't even make sense!

People pay for windows for many reasons, but your analogy just doesn't work dude.

Re:lolwut?

[fisted]

because it's the path of least resistance? No

Yes.

Re:lolwut?

[M. Baranczak]

People pay for Windows because it comes preinstalled on most new PCs, and there's no way to buy them without Windows. Imagine if the porn industry got a sweet deal like that...

Re:lolwut?

[Anonymous Coward]

And imagine free vs non-free arguments then!

"At home I do just fine with NSFW sub-reddits, but my college had Naughty Coeds, so I had to get a subscription too - at least they had student discount..."

"At my company we use Plumper Pass, but we started migrating to RedTube recently and it works out so far..."

Porn is everything's killer app

[Neo-Rio-101]

It started with video.

Pretty much any new gadget takes off when it's meshed with porn in some way.

Re:Porn is everything's killer app

[Anonymous Coward]

Except HD. The porn companies had some significant issues adapting to HD because they used the lower quality to hide a lot of imperfections in the performers.

Re:Porn is everything's killer app

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey!, this reminds me a recent new about the most searched keywords related to porn and sex in some developed countries where: mature, granny, amateur and so on...

Re:Porn is everything's killer app

[myowntrueself]

It started with video.

Pretty much any new gadget takes off when it's meshed with porn in some way.

Google Glass. A HUD for sex, much needed by geeks?

Re:Porn is everything's killer app

[jawtheshark]

First-Ever Google Glass Porn . (Yes, obviously it's not "real", but funny nevertheless)

Re:Porn is everything's killer app

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it is much older than that. Recently I've read (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_de_la_monnaie#La_transgression_des_rois_lydiens) that when modern money (normalized coins) were invented and popularized around 700 BC, the prostitutes around were among the early adopters

Re:Porn is everything's killer app

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

And now, the punch line.

I wonder what kind of porn you can buy with doge coins?

Re:Porn is everything's killer app

[tlhIngan]

Yep, and the "Netflix of Porn" SugarDVD announced that in December, PS4 users watched 3 times as much porn as Xbox One users. While they anticipate more viewing through the Xbox One later on (perhaps it's the "family friendly" advertising on the Xbox One versus the "hardcore gamer" marketing of the PS4 for the difference) as it matures as a media gateway, the initial results are in.

PS4 is the porn machine to get! Heck, weren't there PS4 twitch streams that were full of porn as well?

Re:Porn is everything's killer app

[eric_harris_76]

Yep. Apparently, that's part of the cycle for every new technology: first comes porn. Or if not first, at least soon after the first. Photography. Instant photography. Home video. Maybe even the printing press.

A few years back I read a book that makes a pretty good case for it, anyway. For the life of me, I can't recall the title. Seems like it had the word "sex" in the title, and maybe some reference to food and drugs. Maybe it was "lust", instead, and maybe "violence" and/or "greed", too.

In a fit of trusting paranoia, I told my public library not to record my borrowing record, so I can't look it up that way. And I doubt the NSA would be of any help, even though they might have the information.

Re:Porn is everything's killer app

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm quite certain you won't find many ladies who like being poked in the thigh by a cold, angular piece of metal and glass.

Re:Porn is everything's killer app

[myowntrueself]

I'm quite certain you won't find many ladies who like being poked in the thigh by a cold, angular piece of metal and glass.

Yeah but the HUD could help the guy find the clitoris...

Re:Porn is everything's killer app

[RyoShin]

You laugh, but someone has already combined the Oculus Rift with something like the Novint Falcon attached to a strap around the crotch to create a sex simulator (anime-themed, of course, so probably a Japanese company.) I'd search for the video of it in action, but I'm at work so it would probably be a Bad Idea. :)

Throw a Fleshlight in there somewhere with a stable (and modular, for various positions) housing and, boom, you're a step or two below a holographic sex bot as seen in something like The 7th Day. By 2020 I bet many porn shops will replace their video booths with virtual hooker booths, where the guy picks his "girl" of preference (oh, I can just smell the lawsuits over using the likeness of actresses, models, and video game/fictional characters), puts on the headset, and gets busy with a box.

Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[Chas]

Can this stupid Ponzi scheme just crash and burn NOW so we stop seeing all the Slashvertisment for it?

Fuck Bitcoin.
Fuck "cryptocurrency" in general.

It's a damn pipe dream (something for nothing), and we'll all be better off when people wise the fuck up.

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[crutchy]

why do you care about bitcoin at all?
why are bitcoin slashvertisements any worse than all the rest?
methinks you invested during the highs and crashed and burned... sucker :-)
only idiots buy high and sell low
q: why is the u.s. stock bubble is still going on?
a: because there are plenty of idiots in america

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[Payden K. Pringle]

Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrency) is essentially a stock (probably a better term for it, but it's very similar).

What gives value to the stock is people's interest in it. Investment. The difference between Bitcoin and stocks for companies is that companies can turn profit. However, you could think of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as an investment by the people of the internet (and other organizations) in a special currency specifically for the internet. How mining would play into that, I don't know.

I'm just saying. It has value because people say it does. The same reason USD has value. So no, I would say it is not something for nothing. If you have such a problem with BTC, I would say you should have the same problem with the stock market in general. It's basically getting something for nothing (I invest. I wait. I take profits.)

YMMV

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[maxwell demon]

why are bitcoin slashvertisements any worse than all the rest?

Because it comes up more often than any of the rest.

There was a time when every few days there was a Slashvertisement for Apple products. The result was people complaining as much (and even more) about those as they do now about Bitcoin stories.

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[crutchy]

maybe i have a mental or optical bitcoin story filter, or i just have a higher annoyance threshold than you, but i don't see that many of them in the listings (including the new ones).

how many have cropped up in the last week?

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[maxwell demon]

The last week was unusually quiet with only two stories. But in the last five weeks, there were on average four Bitcoin stories per week, which makes a story about every two days.

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[Anonymous Coward]

It has value because people say it does. The same reason USD has value.

Bitcoin "value" and USD value aren't really the same thing at all.

Consider USD. The same government that issues USD collects taxes in the same currency. Those taxes comes from income and investments. Therefore there is some minimal real-world value backing the dollar. The rest of the USD valuation comes from investors' belief in USD stability. Investors believe that the US government will have the sufficient motivation and ability to do the "right thing" to maintain USD stability. That includes making policy to protect from over-inflation, pay debts, etc.

Fundamentally, investors believe that the US government will be around in 10 years, and therefore value stored in dollars is relatively safe.

On the other hand, all Bitcoin value is based on some variant of greater fool theory.

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[maxwell demon]

Consider USD. The same government that issues USD collects taxes in the same currency.
If that's the problem, I've got a solution: I hereby volunteer to tax anyone in bitcoins. To make it easy, I'll just say everyone owes me ten Satoshi per year. ;-)

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[Anonymous Coward]

USD has value because if you don't think so you get bombed. De Gaulle made it clear after second World War; americans could do whatever they wanted with USD because they had strongest army. Rumors said Saddam wanted to trade EUR for Iraq's oil... then guess what happened.

US had similar debt ratios as Greece but nobody would ever say the truth because of fear. Guess what happened to the head of the first rating agency who dared to downgrade US bonds by just one notch.

Please stop illuding yourself, bitcoin is no worse than USD and USD is no better than bitcoin from a market point of view.

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Interest" isn't what gives value to a stock. You're thinking of Beanie Babies or Pokemon cards. Capital assets, profits, and earnings potential give value to a stock.

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[Registered Coward v2]

Can this stupid Ponzi scheme just crash and burn NOW so we stop seeing all the Slashvertisment for it?

Fuck Bitcoin. Fuck "cryptocurrency" in general.

It's a damn pipe dream (something for nothing), and we'll all be better off when people wise the fuck up.

While I generally agree with your sentiments porn could solve one of bit coins serious shortcomings, illiquidity. If enough people buy Bitcoins that will introduce enough real currency into the system that it becomes a viable way to conduct payments.

It doesn't address the volatility issue, however; which really causes issues for both sides of the transaction but especially the content provider. Exchanges would need to convert at whatever the daily rate was when the purchases were made. exchanges could time their buy sell to get more per Bitcoin when the purchaser turns currency into Bitcoin and pay the provider when Bitcoin is higher in value; essentially getting extra Bitcoins to conduct the transaction. This is different then simply have a buy / sell price and doing the transaction instantaneously since the exchange could manipulate the timing to their advantage.

The volatility also means the exchange would have to decide do they want to assume the risk that they will wind up with a lot of withdrawals at a higher price then they paid and thus risk running out of funds if enough buy orders don't exist to cover withdrawals? If that happens and they freeze withdrawals they will cease to be a viable transaction mechanism as companies cannot afford to have freezes on cash flows.

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[Bert64]

A currency is meant as an enabler of trade, it is not a commodity in and of itself but is rather intended to be temporarily held until you exchange it for something else. Indeed, holding on to most currencies is an extremely poor investment because inflation will gradually reduce their value.

A currency has value because you can use it to buy goods, services, and trade it for other currencies. There are many sites now such as the one mentioned in this article which will exchange goods or services for bitcoins, and there are several advantages to paying for services using bitcoins over other forms of payment.

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[fast turtle]

The real Value of the USD is the god damn Marines. It's got nothing to do with taxes or anything else as there isn't enough gold in Fort Knox to back even a tenth of what's out there. Just look at Iraq - we sure as hell didn't need to send the troops over there to protect the people. Let em keep killing each other. The only reason we did was "Oil" as Haliburton wanted to ensure they were the one's pumping and transporting it. Corporate Expansion at it's finest (East Indies Company for those historically minded).

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[Chas]

And you're not paying directly in bitcoin on most of these sites.
You're paying into a service that immediately converts the bitcoin to real currency.
So yeah, no "exchange of goods and services".

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[waveclaw]

Porn may tip the favor for a particular coin but there is one market that can make Bitcoin or any given altcoin an huge (relative to current) market.

Marijuana is a Schedule I drug no matter what any State's laws say. This Federal classification means that banks cannot do direct business with dealers, transporters, processors or growers of it. Several publications have covered this problem.

People in the trade are either working in very grey banking situations or dealing with large amounts of cash. Having to pay your $20,000 taxes this quarter with a duffle bag of twenties is a perfect situation for robbery. Pot dispensaries on Colorado, USA are starting to figure out that they don't need banks to deal with Bitcoin or other altcoins. Right there could be a real Business-to-Business revolution for digital currency.

Sure, today a digital coin is mostly useful for transactions. A business would have to convert between cash and coin at the ends. And even when you can go bitcoin from customer to suppliers for your business you'll still need to get out cash.

Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!

[Antonovich]

Interesting point about the MJ suppliers.

However, nothing you say even implies your last statement has validity. I first properly realised "what money really is" less than 10 years ago when I started reading about gold and monetary systems and the parent is completely correct (and already +5!). It is simply an enabler of trade. Anything can be used, as long as the buyer and seller have trust in the tokens used. Clay pellets also work. In today's society we have governments that want their piece of the action but to date there don't seem to have been too many anti-crypto-currency government campaigns, so unless that changes then the future is bright. If a currency can be traded for a particular good or service then the currency is logically and functionally equivalent to any other for the purpose of trade.

Money doesn't even need to be backed by anything real/physical - almost all of today's currencies are proof of that. Governments/banks can simply create ex-nihilo 10s of billions in $ equivalent every month - as long as trust is maintained then the system continues to work. Rulers long ago realised that controlling the currency was a very, very effective means of controlling the population but it hasn't always been that way and certainly doesn't need to be.

Think for a moment what it means for someone outside of the US (and a few puppet states) to have a US dollar account. They can't withdraw that money and buy a loaf of bread - they can't even buy goods/services from US-owned companies like McDonalds! Does that make it "as worthless as bitcoin"? According to many, yes, but we all know that USD is not (currently) "worthless" and that is because people still have trust in it. You don't get taught this in high school economics though...

Quick tip

[Anonymous Coward]

You can follow @bitcoinprice in Twitter to receive hourly updates of current Bitcoin value relative to USD.

Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[Anonymous Coward]

My tinfoil hat is heating up.

Why is it that so many of these stories about Bitcoin claim it to be anonymous. It is anything but. Every transaction is public, by design.

Can't wait for first scandal where some famous name has his porn purchases with Bitcoin are traced back to him...

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[maxwell demon]

Most people only care that the persons they deal with daily don't know about their porn habits. And if you are not prominent, you can be fairly sure that no one does an extensive investigation on it, especially if they don't have any suspicion otherwise. I wouldn't expect it to be anonymous to the police or the NSA, so I certainly wouldn't use it for illegal stuff (well, I wouldn't do anyway, but the point is, even if I were doing such stuff, I certainly would not use bitcoin for it).

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[SuricouRaven]

The transactions are public, but also hard to follow - most of the wallets are transitory. The path of payment for a typical porn purchase might go something like this:
Buyer buys coins from exchange.
Coins go from exchange to buyer
Buyer spends them on porn, via a one-use payment address.
Coins are transferred from there on to an exchange again to get dollars with.

So identifying a coin purchaser would need to know:
1. A coin the purchaser owns at the time. This could be found out by an insider at the coin-for-dollars exchange, or by someone giving coin to a publicly posted address.
2. Confirmation that the one-use payment address is being used to pay for porn. As it's a one-use address, only someone inside the porn distribution company or the exchange could know this. Unless the company mixes all their payments into a single pool prior to dollar-conversion.

So it could be done, but it's not trivial. You'd need someone inside the exchange willing to compromise confidentiality, which is the same thing you'd need to compromise conventional finance.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Until people start shaming people for buying porn. Can you imagine some fundamentalist group posting the names of buyers of porn?

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[TubeSteak]

More importantly for the porn companies: no charge backs.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[artor3]

Not really, no. Who would even read their posting? Who would even care?

Maybe in some Taliban-controlled country it could be a problem, but I doubt they're buying much internet porn over there.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[SuricouRaven]

That too.

I'm always amused and annoyed by some anti-porn crusaders talking about how the evil porn companies target children. Why would they do that? They have no credit card to pay with.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[mendax]

Not really, no. Who would even read their posting? Who would even care?

Maybe in some Taliban-controlled country it could be a problem, but I doubt they're buying much internet porn over there.

Oh, you'd be surprised. Several years ago, a friend of mine worked in Iraq doing computer forensics on computers taken from Islamic whack jobs. One of his jobs was to watch all the porn videos looking for other video that might have been embedded in it. There was a lot of it. It wouldn't surprise me if there's plenty of porn on Taliban computers.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[waynemcdougall]

Several years ago, a friend of mine worked in Iraq doing computer forensics on computers taken from Islamic whack jobs. One of his jobs was to watch all the porn videos looking for other video that might have been embedded in it.

My wife would kill me if she caught me watching steganography.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[myowntrueself]

You actually have some evidence that most purchases are from one-time use wallets?

Also, the money has to go into the wallet somehow. This would mean they would buy the exact amount of bitcoins they needed for that particular transaction and that then goes into the wallet they intend to use for that transaction and then delete the wallet. I think that is too short-term for most bitcoin users. Who in their right mind would buy bitcoins day by day as needed? When the value fluctuates so wildly?

I think its more likely they have a bunch of hoarded bitcoins (that they bought when there was a dip in price), maybe transfer some into a one-use wallet and then use that wallet for the dodgy purpose, being unaware that the wallet this bitcoin was transferred *from* is easily determined.

The potential for mischievous use of the block chain is awesome. Could be a marketers wet dream. Especially as less tech-savvy people start using bitcoins.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of his jobs was to watch all the porn videos

I can't imagine what such a job would be like.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[SuricouRaven]

Not from. To. That's how merchants confirm who is paying for what. So you can find out a celebrities bitcoin wallet address and see how much they have in there, and you can see them spend the money... somewhere. But you can't tell who got it, unless they gave it to someone else who published their address.

It'd be easier to tell if they donated to a tip jar though. I can imagine that with easier payments some porn sites might use that business model - come, look at the porn and ads, and if you like it throw a little bitcoin to the address on the bottom of the page.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[SuricouRaven]

I doubt he ever found any true stenography in there.

A few experts years ago found an effective way to detect commonly used forms of stenography in jpegs, and tried feeding two images from ebay through the detector, plus another million from usenet. Not a single one had any stenographic information that they could find, and their detector was demonstrated as very reliable.
http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/detecting.pdf

The NSA leaks did reveal that they have an interest in porn though: They've been monitoring the porn use of some unnamed 'radical muslims' in the middle east were planning on using it to blackmail them into silence or destroy their credibility. It's not clear if they actually pulled off the blackmail or discrediting part though, the leaked document is from the planning stage.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25118156

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[Tim the Gecko]

Steganography, not stenography.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[fast turtle]

I'm not dumb enough to pay for porn when there's so much freely available on the net and shaming me? I'm fucking shameless so if they don't like it they can get the fuck off my lawn and quit peeping in my windows.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[SuricouRaven]

Awkward words of similar spelling but quite different meaning do lead to confusion. How'd that mess of a situation come about? I'll have to find an entomologist to ask.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't be able to shame a Taliban. This is people who, when someone reports rape, decides to punish the woman.

So if you expose porn use in Taliban country, they might shoot the porn star. . .

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then get a philatelist to donate money to fix the problem.

Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just don't ask an endocrinologist.

Hate to rain on your parade

[trifish]

I fail to see how Bitcoin is private and confidential. All the transactions are public (inherently by design). And if you buy bitcoins somewhere with your CC or paypal or bank, it is possible to link the bitcoins to your name.

If you buy them with cash, you could as well buy one of those cash coupons that porn sites might accept too. Then, you gain TRUE anonymity and, as a bonus, you and the seller avoid the massive volatility of the currency (100x decrease/increase in value over a day).

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't need to be 100% untraceable. It just needs to be less traceable than the status quo, which is credit cards. Also, I wouldn't exactly trust porn sites with my credit card info.

Realistically, as long as your bank/exchange doesn't spill the beans about the account holder linked to the bitcoin address, you should be fairly anonymous against everyone except the government. And you should be more worried about your S.O. than the government.

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true, a visa gift card bought with cash has more anonymity than Bitcoin.

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[EETech1]

What if you used that Visa gift card to buy Bitcoin?

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[serviscope_minor]

I fail to see how Bitcoin is private and confidential.

It's muh more private and confidential thaan anything other than cash. In it's default form, you buy some bitcoins. Only the exchange knows the information to link your bitcoin wallet to your credit card, so someone has to get the exchange to part with the information.

The someone has to track your transactions through the blocklog.

Compare to a credit card bill which might look something like this:

1/1/2014 Large Breasted Porn Company Inc.......................$49.95

There's always a tradeoff between convenience and security (or anonymity). Bitcoin is not perfect, but it is a whole lot better than credit cards.

And that's ignoring the various mixing services available, or you could find a group of like minded people and buy each others bitcoins and exchange for cash, or you could buy some hardware and mine enough bitcoins for whatever you want.

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn sites have one of the best credit card security records. They know that their business depends on the confidentiality trust of their customers. Not like retailers like Target who say "sorry" and shrugh it off.

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[Anonymous Coward]

Please send URL for Large Breasted Porn Company Inc, it's urgent. Thank you.

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[SuricouRaven]

http://topicalisle.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/3200280414_69cbfa327a (NSFW-ish?)

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[SuricouRaven]

http://topicalisle.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/3200280414_69cbfa327a1.jpg (NSFW-ish, but with working link)

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you getting in exchange?

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

However if you mined them directly, it would be a lot more difficult to trace ownership.

Though it would probably be easier/cheaper to launder actualy money than successfuly mine Bitcoins at this stage.

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[Anonymous Coward]

I could buy some bitcoins, split them up, cycle them through a few hundred different wallets over a few days, spend them at will. How could anyone show that any future transactions were made by me?

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Porn sites and "sexy personals" sites gets hacked, and customers exposed. There are many shady short-lived porn sites.

Re:Hate to rain on your parade

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to see how Bitcoin is private and confidential.

A bit clueless hmm? I'll spell it out for you: it's private because the wife won't find out.

Wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

People still pay for porn?

Porn must have gone free...

[The New Guy 2.0]

See, unlike a second pizza... a second copy of a porn picture costs very little. Pretty much a fair trade for a Bitcoin. Come on, that thing has been downgraded to the point it's now being used for something so cheap it can't be paid for by Visa/Mastercard. They have a hard and fast rule that charges under 70 cents are always money losers. Apparently, the elemental unit of Bitcoins has fallen below 70 cents.

Re:Porn must have gone free...

[SuricouRaven]

Bitcoin doesn't have an elemental unit as such. Most people now thing in micro-bitcoins, because a single coin is worth too much for everyday use, but that's just an arbitary shift of the decimal point.

Re:Porn must have gone free...

[maxwell demon]

Bitcoin does have an elemental unit, the Satoshi. Yes, it could be changed, but AFAIU that would be a protocol update, that is, you'd need new versions for your clients in order to spend or accept them. Just like the cent is the smallest unit for the dollar, but in the (extremely unlikely) case the government decided a lower unit were desirable, they could e.g. add a "mill" at the value of 0.1 cent without the need to switch to a completely different currency (all the existing dollars and cents would remain valid, just as all existing bitcoins would remain valid if sub-Satoshis were introduced).

Re:Porn must have gone free...

[kasperd]

Apparently, the elemental unit of Bitcoins has fallen below 70 cents.

Given that a Satoshi is 10^-8 bitcoins, what you are saying is, the value of a Bitcoin has fallen below 70 million dollars. I don't think anybody ever traded one bitcoin for such a high price.

The value of a Bitcoin has not fallen below 70 million dollars, it was never that high in the first place.
The value of a Satoshi has not fallen below 70 cents, it was never that high in the first place.

Such a high price would have implied the size of the entire Bitcoin economy was worth 1.47e15 dollars.

Re:Porn must have gone free...

[egcagrac0]

Such a high price would have implied the size of the entire Bitcoin economy was worth 1.47e15 dollars.

For comparison, that would be about 140 times more dollars than there are.

Scroll down, look for the M2 number. (More recent data, with less explanation)

Re:Porn must have gone free...

[Anonymous Coward]

For comparison, that would be about 140 times more dollars than there are.

At first I thought 10^13 dollars in existence sounded like an unrealistic high number. Then I did the math and found that if there are only 10^13 dollars in existence, then I own more dollars than the average citizen of USA. And I am wondering, can it really be true that I as an ordinary European own more dollars than the average citizen of USA?

lol yeah right

[Anonymous Coward]

So, a system whose transactions are publicly tracked is expected to be used to pay for porn.

Really?

People still pay for porn?

[bloodhawk]

Seriously people still pay for porn? with so much freely available I gotta ask Why?

Re:People still pay for porn?

[thatkid_2002]

If you're into a specific thing and/or performer you can go straight to the source. Generally you only really need to pay once to get access to download the entire archive.

Re:People still pay for porn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's porn sites buying porn, hoping that they can resell it?

Re:People still pay for porn?

[SuricouRaven]

I suppose if you have a really uncommon and specific fetish, maybe? Or maybe it's a 'support the artists' thing? Show them their work is appreciated, and they'll make more.

Re:People still pay for porn?

[mrbluze]

I suppose if you have a really uncommon and specific fetish, maybe? Or maybe it's a 'support the artists' thing? Show them their work is appreciated, and they'll make more.

That's an interesting fetish... maybe there should be porn where the artists are spending money on porn whilst watching porn of people spending money on porn (recurring).

Re:People still pay for porn?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to "support the artists", consider getting in touch with Lily Thai:

https://twitter.com/RealLilyThai3

She's doing "private 1 on 1 bookings" NYC/LA/MIA. I am on the wrong side of the world to see her, sadly.

Re:People still pay for porn?

[AmiMoJo]

If you do want to keep your wish secret the BitCoin is not the payment method for you. All transactions are public and even if you use secondary accounts it's not hard to trace back to your primary one.

Re:People still pay for porn?

[jawtheshark]

As someone working in the business: no, video on demand isn't all that big. (Big enough, for it not to be ignored, but not exactly all that interesting) What seems to work best is live shows. People (well, mostly men) are willing to pay for that.

Another day another bitcoin article

[dbIII]

I know that bitcoin depends on lots of people joining to prop up the pyramid but don't people think the number of articles about this scam baited for geek are getting a bit excessive?

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[Anonymous Coward]

Timothy bet his house on bitcoin.

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin is a bubble and number of articles shows, that lots of people try to sell their assets for good price.

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[Flammon]

Bitcoin is not a pyramid. A pyramid is a scheme where a few at the top depend on a large base to keep it going. Bitcoin is a peer to peer system like BitTorrent. Hard to believe you got a score of 5 Insightful for such a non-insightful comment.

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[Flammon]

Myth: Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme

Bitcoin is nearly opposite of a pyramid scheme in a mathematical sense. Because Bitcoins are algorithmically made scarce, no exponential benefit is derived from introducing new users to use of it. There is a quantitative benefit in having additional interest or demand, but this is in no way exponential.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoin_is_a_pyramid_scheme

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[dbIII]

A pyramid is a scheme where a few at the top depend on a large base to keep it going

Precisely. The initial perpetrators designed it so that a large base would artificially increase the value of what they are sitting on. It is deflationary by design and a textbook pyramid ponzi scheme.

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[dbIII]

Saying it twice and linking to a very biased source does not make it so.

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[Flammon]

The truth is the same regardless of the source. I can't have an opinion on the sum of 2 + 2 just like I can't have an opinion on whether the Bitcoin network is a pyramid scheme.

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to make sure I understand that correctly: This is a deflationary ponzi scheme?

So, that means that the asset that you buy increases in value (that's what "deflationary" means), but you probably won't be able to cash out because the asset's value isn't sufficient to back the price (that's what "ponzi scheme" means)? Would you mind explaining how that makes sense?

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[Solandri]

Bitcoin is a pyramid. There are a total of about 21 million bitcoins which can be mined. The easier ones are mined first, leaving the harder ones to be mined later, forming a pyramid of mining rate. About 11 million have been mined so far, so we are about halfway up the pyramid.

It is not a pyramid scheme in the traditional sense, where the addition of new members directly props up older members. But its design causes the same thing to happen, just indirectly. You don't seriously believe bitcoins will remain viable once the last coin is mined? At that point (probably long before, as adoption rate far outstrips mining rate increase), it ceases being a currency and turns into a collectable - its value increases over time because more people want it, rather than holding relatively steady like a currency. And collectables are only worth as much as people want to collect it - there is zero reason to collect a string of numbers.

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[E-Rock]

You may not like bitcoin, but it isn't a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme takes money from new investors to make fake payments to the existing investors and fails as soon as there aren't enough new players to keep the scheme running. None of that matches bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a method of exchange. Some people take bitcoin directly in exchange for goods or services, some people accept it indirectly though a service that converts it to another currency for them. Gold is the best historical analogue and it'd be just as hard to buy a loaf of bread with a block of gold as a bitcoin wallet unless there was a merchant who will accept it directly or a middle man to convert it to a form they do take.

Bitcoin has no reliance on new people participating. Only that people are willing to use it as a method of exchange.

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[Flammon]

The Bitcoin network still works great even if everyone has an equal share of Bitcoins. There's no dependence on a base which is the key identifier of a pyramid scheme.

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[BitZtream]

Are you an Amway salesman too?

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[Anonymous Coward]

True, "Ponzi scheme" is not quite the correct class of scam --- it's more analogous to a pump-n-dump penny stock scheme. Early adopters get a lot of BTC cheap, then push how great an investment it is (wow! look how fast BTC values are rising! you'd be an idiot not to join in!) to inflate the value. While a BTC-like system could, in theory, be used primarily as a currency, the extreme rise and fluctuation of BTC values empirically proves that its primary use has been wild speculative gambling, backed by a massive distributed PR scheme to pump up the value (with smaller side-uses as a currency).

Re: Another day another bitcoin article

[tepples]

Once the last coin is mined, the reward will have shifted to collecting transaction fees, or tips for prompt inclusion of a transaction in the ledger.

Re:Another day another bitcoin article

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin is not a pyramid scheme; it is closer to being a pump-and-dump.

Help

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can I get some poon coins?

Fleshlight: I wish use of it would generate coins

[Anonymous Coward]

NT

That's a new one

[dbIII]

So you are going from saying "it's a currency" over and over to "it's a stock" because the marks are not buying the currency line?
Personally I see it like a limited edition run of "My Little Pony" plates or similar thing that gets traded between collectors. The interest of the collectors is the only thing that gives it value. The people behind it and involved in the trading need to stir up the interest of more potential collectors if they want the thing to maintain or increase in value. The crypto angle has stirred up the interest of people that read Crytonomicon (or similar geeks that got there on their own), loved the currency plot, but didn't wake up to the point that it was all backed by both gold and a complex web of trust (taking the role of Pony fans). Here we have no gold and nobody to trust - just a hot potato to pass on and hope, maybe dragging in others to keep the potato passing on if you are one of the perpetrators of the scam.

same reason USD has value

Not remotely the same because a lot of people have promised that it has value and people trust them. It's not even like the Zimbabwe dollar, where there were promises but zero trust so it collapsed.

Re:That's a new one

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you mind naming just one person who has promised that the USD has value (I suppose that that's supposed to mean "will have value"?)?

goodbye

[Anonymous Coward]

I might not be a registered user, but I've been a Slashdot regular for years. The overall decline of quality of submissions is nothing new, but this particular one puts me over the edge. Recently, Slashdot's become only worth it for the comments, but as even this section's become practically unreadable (and I'm not even talking about the changes to the layout), I guess I owe you a quick final goodbye as I proceed remove Slashdot from my RSS reader in favor of multiple, more specialized news sources.

-m
P.S. While I couldn't care less about my moderation, before anyone flags this off-topic, please consider whether there's any words at all that can be written ON-topic, given the submission.

Re:goodbye

[Anonymous Coward]

I might not be a registered user, but I've been a Slashdot regular for years. The overall decline of quality of submissions is nothing new, but this particular one puts me over the edge. Recently, Slashdot's become only worth it for the comments, but as even this section's become practically unreadable (and I'm not even talking about the changes to the layout), I guess I owe you a quick final goodbye as I proceed remove Slashdot from my RSS reader in favor of multiple, more specialized news sources.

-m
P.S. While I couldn't care less about my moderation, before anyone flags this off-topic, please consider whether there's any words at all that can be written ON-topic, given the submission.

Care to share what those news sources are? From what I've seen slashdot's decline is only representative of the internet as a whole.

Re:goodbye

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, we should post a story, on how to dump slashdot and what alternatives have emerged to be better

Re:goodbye

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many on topic comments above, that have already been modded up. Anyways, goodbye, you will not be missed.

Re:goodbye

[maxwell demon]

please consider whether there's any words at all that can be written ON-topic, given the submission.

Well, given that this is about porn, I guess it's one of the rare cases where a link to goatse would be on-topic (you might have to mention that you don't need bitcoins to see it, though) ;-)

Re:goodbye

[nurb432]

*wave* goodbye!

Who are you again and why do we care you are leaving?

Re:goodbye

[Anonymous Coward]

He's probably an old-timer. Somebody who worked in industry for many years, if not decades. Somebody with hundreds of times more knowledge and experience than some shit-for-brains JavaScript-loving hipster. Put simply, he's somebody who is smart.

Smart people are being driven away by the incessant stupidity seen here at Slashdot lately. The content is getting far shittier than it was before, and the godawful beta site sure doesn't help. But it's a shame to lose these smart people. They're the ones who made the discussion here at least tolerable. With them leaving, there's really no point in visiting Slashdot. The content isn't worth it, the presentation isn't worth it, and soon enough the discussion won't be worth it. It'd be pointless to stick around, unless of course you're a dumbass.

Re:goodbye

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't resist posting at least one more time, i see....

Re:goodbye

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to share what those news sources are?

Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/
(I'm a different AC to the OP BTW)

"Does it play porn?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Will be the new slogan instead of "can it run crysis" or "can it play doom?". Now it's all about porn, no wait it always was about porn.

Paying for porn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why pay for porn? Getting pussy is cheap. I get a little black pussy every time I get out of the shower, when I come home, and when I go to bed. She always crawls into bed with me and gets on top. She's ever so appreciative for all the attention I give her. *meow*

Re:Fleshlight: I wish use of it would generate coi

[maxwell demon]

That would give "proof of work" a wholly new meaning ... ;-)

Doesn't seem reasonable at all to me

[mellyra]

Currently the business model of most porn websites is based on subscriptions and not on pay per view. A large part of their customers do most likely not even use their product but have just forgot/don't bother to cancel the subscription. Currently there is no way to set up such automatically recurring payments with bitcoin.

Why would a porn company willingly throw away all these paying users that don't actually use anything (i.e. don't cause them any costs)?

Re:Doesn't seem reasonable at all to me

[icemanwol]

What prevents someone for paying for a 1-3 month subscription upfront to their account and then putting more bitcoins in whenever the need comes up? IPpreadtor has been doing this for a while now and it seems to be working for them

Re:Doesn't seem reasonable at all to me

[Anonymous Coward]

The counterpoint to this argument is why would customers, given the choice of using either bitcoin or credit cards, opt to use credit cards to buy porn when the industry behaves as you have described?

Sure there are counter incentives for porn distributors, but if the companies that do accept bitcoin start to take a disproportionate market share then they will have little option but to accept the coin that their customers are offering.

Re:Doesn't seem reasonable at all to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently there is no way to set up such automatically recurring payments with bit coin.

Check out coinbase.com... You can set up scheduled buys of bitcoins, sells of bitcoins, and payments to an address. Pretty neat actually.

You could be given a "personal" address at the receiving end to which you should submit payments and it's as easy as that. Coinbase doesn't even know what the address is, just that you want to send coin to it.

Re:Doesn't seem reasonable at all to me

[Anonymous Coward]

No chargeback fees and no fraud system. Vendors suffer all the financial risks with credit cards(Mastercard sure isn't going to lose money), so porn sites would prefer a payment system that doesn't let people claim their card was stolen after they regret signing a 1 year agreement with two-dude-4-holes.com

legislation to bring back firing squads

[Anonymous Coward]

is on the 'agenda' for US. sex crimes are worst crimes on tv worse than murder. free the innocent stem cells. creation is trysexual.. never a better time to consider ourselves in relation to momkind our spiritual centerpeace...

Ad hominem

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you and your ad hominem attack. Apparently bitcoin is so good, you have no intelligent argument against it.

I'm a cypherpunk and I work in porn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a cypherpunk. (On a good day, I might describe myself as a cryptographer if it's simpler to, but emphasise my slightly different fields of experience compared to my peers. I hang around a lot of cryptographers.)

I work in porn (fetish porn, both behind, and in, the scenes, and yes, it's risk-aware, consensual kink, and our content is legal both here and in the US and most other places).

I strongly agree. We've been looking into accepting payments in BTC for some time. We hope to go live soon.

You have no idea - unless you also run an adult site! - just how much we hate payment processors, and just how much payment processors hate us. At best, we tolerate each other as a necessary evil business partner. But at worst...

They censor us. There is plenty of legal content that we cannot publish because if we do, they will pull service from us. (Sure, because that's what this industry needs - MORE censorship?!) They apologise profusely and say that this is because of Visa or MasterCard's rules, not their fault. Yet Visa and MasterCard claim to some that they do not have these rules, and to others the opposite. A large porn site based in California definitely gets to post content that we, not based in the US, definitely do not, even though it's totally legal in both our countries. It's not the large site's fault: they're doing the best they can and I appreciate their competition. I just wish we got a fairer deal, and I know the US State Department is heavily involved somewhere in all that mess. Wonderful. That's all we need. Fucking diplomats. (Actually, no, that might be a cool idea. Putting that in the notebook.)

They blame us for chargebacks. They apparently hate porn because they get chargebacks from people who buy porn, and then get buyer's remorse: jealous spouses, or something. Nope, not seeing that. That's not been our experience with our customers. We've only had 2 chargebacks from customers, ever. Our paying customers are very happy and enthusiastic about our content, which means we must be doing something right. Yay.

They blame us for card fraud. We have a very low rate of card fraud: lower than companies who sell computer parts. And it's easy to see why. If people want to steal our content they don't have to steal credit cards to get it. They just pirate it: it gets reposted on tumblr or sex.com or Bittorrent or RedTube or PornHub, or anywhere else, really. We KNOW that, of course: and we can either spend our time chasing around taking it down, or we can spend our time making more porn: I don't know about you, but I prefer the latter. There isn't anything we can do about piracy except hope they keep the watermarks and people see it, like it, decide they want more of our content, and come to our site and buy some, and so, it becomes promotional material. Is it sustainable? That's a business model problem. It is for us, right now. Though plagiarists who remove watermarks from stuff, or put their own on it? They can fuck off - that's just rude, and that's coming from a Pirate Party member. (Well, there's nothing we can do about it that doesn't involve being massive arseholes to potential customers - Prenda Law can eat a dick for giving our industry a bad name by using porn piracy as an excuse for outright blackmail!) You can't pirate computer parts (unless they've gotten REALLY good at 3D printing while I wasn't looking!). Result: we don't get carders, computer companies do.

Sure Bitcoin's value fluctuates compared to currency. Sure interchanges between hard currency and Bitcoin will likely be regulated (Bitcoin itself, of course, cannot be regulated in any useful manner). But the option to potentially remove a payment processor which is ultimately based in the US from the chain is a HUGE win. We can even pay our hosting and DNS directly with Bitcoin now. There are some things in life that hashcash can't buy. For everything else, there's Bitcoin. =)

It's not anonymous in the sense that it absolutely can't be tracked. Hell, the blockchain is public, and the US Govern

Re:I'm a cypherpunk and I work in porn.

[BitZtream]

You have no idea - unless you also run an adult site! - just how much we hate payment processors, and just how much payment processors hate us.

Actually, I do understand. Having dealt with people in porn and payment processors, its fairly clear.

Porn sites are about as scummy as they possible can come. Porn sites do everything they can to scam you into recurring payments that you really had no intention of doing. They prey on people with low self esteem on BOTH sides of the isle, the 'actors' and the customers. Porn sites are run by the lowest of the low.

So of course payment processors hate you, you fucking rip people who are stupid enough to buy your shit off, and of course you hate them, cause they stop processing your payments and take your stolen money away from you.

I don't actually think you need to be in porn or payment processing to be aware of that though.

So my point is ... stop playing the 'poor pitiful me' bullshit, porn and bitcoin go together because paying for either one makes you just a stupid douche who got taken to the cleaners.

Note: I've bought into the bitcoin scam simply as an attempt to jump ship before it goes bust like the petunia. I acknowledge the that the only why I win is if I leave someone else on the losing side of the equation.

Re:I'm a cypherpunk and I work in porn.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Sure Bitcoin's value fluctuates compared to currency. Sure interchanges between hard currency and Bitcoin will likely be regulated (Bitcoin itself, of course, cannot be regulated in any useful manner)...... .....
It's not anonymous in the sense that it absolutely can't be tracked. Hell, the blockchain is public, and the US Government, with FINTRAC, can most definitely see the money going in and/or out. (See above re: regulation.)

This is just one of the many paradoxes with Bitcoin. As you say, public perception is that this is an anonymous, unregulate-able, untraceable currency. Instead what we are seeing is a panopticon prone to speculative shocks and whose origins and now (post-NSA revelations) even basic algorithms are suspect.

The speed with which the mainstream has leaped aboard the Bitcoin bus has colored me skeptical. I don't believe that Bitcoin will survive widespread adoption intact.

Re:I'm a cypherpunk and I work in porn.

[Bob9113]

Excellent post. You present an uncommon perspective that is freighted with preconceptions and deftly shatter those biases with plain truth. Well done, you have added a bit of illumination.

Re:I'm a cypherpunk and I work in porn.

[Anonymous Coward]

You've either not been in that industry long, or you're not being honest.

In the early days of that industry (say 1996-2000), it was the "FREE" trails and the $30-$60 monthly recurring subscription fees that were (sometimes, from some vendors) near impossible to stop which initiated the momentum for regulation on the specific industry. This led to those "evil" 3rd-party processors requiring you to charge for the trial and CLEARLY disclose the number of trial days, and the cost of the recurring subscriptions - rather then bury this info in fine print.

Yes, VISA/MC got tired of customers calling asking for 6+ months of credits for $39.95 - $59.95 for a porn site they thought was "FREE" and stealthfully had been auto-recurring and billing their accounts. Don't forget - the card logo says "VISA" on it they're entitled to protect their brand and business model.

Long story short - If you don't regulate yourself (or the worst of your industry) then the service providers you rely on or the government will regulate you.

Re:I'm a cypherpunk and I work in porn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I should add -- in the early days with the fine print, I remember some of the more unscrupulous providers offering free trials would claim they only needed your credit card for "age verification" which made sense to some people, so they offered it up.

Re:I'm a cypherpunk and I work in porn.

[Anonymous Coward]

2 chargebacks, ever? Then I would estimate you have made about 100-200 total sales, and guess that it's on a clip site like clips4sale.

But I agree with your points. I run a paysite program with 7 solo sites. We get a lot of credit card fraud, but this is caused by organized Russian piracy and having an affiliate program. It would be nice to kill those methods off with Bitcoin.

Re:I'm a cypherpunk and I work in porn.

[Anonymous Coward]

The industry's changed since you remember it.

We don't do subscriptions - never have. We produce and sell our own content. No content farms, no affiliate bullshit, no subscriptions. There's a whole bunch of reasons why that works better for us and our customers. One of them is that our content is niche and can be very expensive to produce compared to basic stuff. There's competition, but it's friendly competition - we're constantly trying to find new ideas and new ways to out-do each other. (Our friend whose recent ropework features a pop star and is currently hanging in the Louvre has probably won that one. I don't think we can top that!)

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't have low self-esteem, and from the contact we have with them, neither do our customers.

Re:I'm a cypherpunk and I work in porn.

[Anonymous Coward]

We're not the Armory, but we're a bit bigger than a little clips4sale site. We fund, produce, and directly sell our own content - no affiliate stuff. (We do work via one trusted portal, but he's been around for decades, and he's never pulled any bullshit on us.) We also have some very good sysadmins.

We do not have a Russian problem at present, but that seems to be the advantage of producing niche content, I appreciate. (We've had an angry kid with a booter before, but like I said, very good sysadmins.) Almost all our piracy seems to be amateur, with the exception of a couple of real bastards who like to remove watermarks and repost stuff. That does annoy us, greatly - it's plagiarism!

Re:I'm a cypherpunk and I work in porn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm familiar with the problem you describe, which is why we have never done subscriptions and chose that from the very beginning. The industry was younger then, and it is changing a bit.

That approach is completely unsustainable for us, for a whole bunch of reasons. Not least of which that our content is high-budget, and, even not working through agencies, we do get the odd no-show (which is now just bad luck; we try not to work with unreliable models, otherwise we run the risk that one of us is stood here all dressed up with no place to go, or we've spend a day and a half doing scene prep and nothing to do with it!). We have a backlog of content in post-processing, but I think if we went subscription we'd tap the well dry very rapidly, of both our content and our customers.

We don't need to cheat people to get repeat customers. We HAVE repeat customers: it'd kill the goose that laid the golden egg. They come back because they like us, and they like our content. If we produced crap, or if we pulled some kind of bullshit stunt like that on them, they wouldn't come back. There's always another site out there...

Dollars for Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn for dollars won the porn war.

Who pays for porn?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, really?

No need to schlep over to the local convenience store and pickup the latest Penthouse or Hustler any more.

No need to dial into your local BBS and wait a half-hour for a download.

Re:Who pays for porn?

[Anonymous Coward]

People pay for:

  - Brand loyalty, surprisingly enough there are a number of sites which put out decent content that are extremely difficult to find pirated. Otherwise you can find a few scenes scattered around, but you don't have the simplicity of access to the entire network in one go
  - Speed, torrents are very good if you're there at the right time, otherwise you're stuck with slow download mirrors. Lots of older torrents with 'classic' scenes are now dead. Frankly the top seeded stuff on TPB is a bit boring, commercial and samey.
  - Social networking, some websites let you talk to the models which may or may not float your boat
  - Live shows, webcams are booming, plenty of folks are into paying to watch people get naked (and of course now in HD). There is something to be said for personalised content
  - Quality, most sites push out HD content now and the picture sites like Met Art pump out ridiculously high resolution images.

Unlike TV companies, porn companies are largely there for the good of their customers. They know damn well that if their product and experience sucks, people will jump ship and get it for free or somewhere else. Thus there is an onus on them to make sure the pay experience vastly exceeds the free one.

Not to mention the fact that if you're enterprising you can pay for a month, rip the entire site and then have enough porn for a year.

titsforbitcoin.com amateur cam girls earn Bitcoin

[Anonymous Coward]

I have also been a Slashdot regular for a while, just never registered, but it is now time for me to give back some to the Slashdot community.

At www.titsforbitcoin.com amateur cam girls only accept Bitcoin payments its a pretty new site, only like a week old apparently but this definitely seems like the 'killer app' for Bitcoin + Porn - the payments are anonymous to the girls - the payments from the users are anonymous, its a win/win situation.

No need for recurring payments on this site, which is probably why it is 'a killer app' for Bitcoin/porn because most porn sites require a 'recurring payment' but this sort of site relies on 'adhoc' payments made by the users when they 'feel like it'!

 

Who pays for porn?

[Karmashock]

isn't it mostly free one way or the other?

Add this and the $30 million worth seized Btcs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the US gov can really help small and middle sized businesses for once!

Amateur cam girls now accept Bitcoin

[blockofchock]

At sites such as titsforbitcoin cam girls are now accepting Bitcoin, seems perfect because its anonymouos on both sides and there is no need for a recurring payment system, its all ad hoc payments when the user feels the need, pretty cool.

Drugs

[Tridus]

I'm pretty sure drugs and hiring Russian botnet operators are already Bitcoin's killer apps.

Fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure at every merchant I've spent coin at... it was slower than a credit card.

Quickly Came

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh.

No, that's a self serving opinion

[dbIII]

No, that's a self serving opinion. Truth can be found from those that gain no personal benefit from telling lies.
Wikipedia? Maybe. Scammer central? Most definitely not.

Re:No, that's a self serving opinion

[Flammon]

You're either a troll or I'm having discussion with someone who doesn't know the difference between objective and subjective. Must be slow morning for me. ATH1

He's talking about porn.

[denzacar]

And unless you're one of those borderline obsessed people who have to collect every single video or photo of their favorite porn star, sending them gifts and whatnot...
Paying for it is simply not the path of least resistance.

FFS... whenever I use someone else's computer, without all the add blockers I have on my own, I can't seem to open a torrent search engine without being recommended at least a window or two of porn.
It has come down to it that the path of lesser resistance for NO porn practically does not exist any more.

Re:He's talking about porn.

[fisted]

You seem to have missed ze point here. (hint: try reading GGGP, then GGP, then GP, then your post)

Paper wallets needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, Bitcoin is fine for online porn. But what about strippers? How could Bitcoin ever replace a good ol'-fashioned George Washington-in-the-G-string for anonymity and speed of transaction? So, it's time for a paper Bitcoin wallet that can be passed from person to person. Let's call it the "Naughtybitcoin".

Re:Paper wallets needed

[thewolfkin]

but dollar bills are reasonably private unlike a credit card. Long as you don't fill up at the ATM there you're pretty safe privacy wise when you use cash.

Christ on a Pogo Stick - Crypto currencies

[fast turtle]

and as I've got my filters set, this is the first discussion in bit/lite coin that I've bothered to read in the last 2 months so what's it got to do with the price of tea in china anyhow? It's like all the Apple slashversitements - I don't even see most of them as they're filtered just like most of the bit/lite coin articles.

In regards to the number of articles, they have served a useful purpose by explaining why it's so fucking hard to even find a Radeon 7850 at a reasonable price. Turns out that everyone is buying them for litecoin mining. I'm looking for one to replace an aging 5670 that's pushing 4yrs as the card offers the most bang for buck with a trippling of performance - that's right a 3x boost in performance for under $200, which is why I've been holding off replacing my little 1st Gen 5670 (discontinued 4 months after release - down rated 66xx series due to failing some DX10 tests but works fine otherwise).

Who pays for porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn is free and its everywhere.... no need to pay with real money or bitcoins.

People without credit cards

[Anonymous Coward]

For people with no access to credit cards (eg teens) or those who don't want "super hard gay xxx" on their monthly credit card statement bitcoin makes sense. They can make a paying customer out of somebody that would never pay in the first place, the rest can use their cards.

And teens less likely to be paying the electricity bill so can mine 24/7 to their hearts content.

wow

[Megane]

Now we really will be able to call it "buttcoin", and unironically, too.

Porn is the killer app for EVERYTHING

[Anonymous Coward]

eom.

Wait, it's 2014. People still pay for porn?

[sfled]

We should commission a study or something. Who are these folks? Good $deity, I haven't paid for porn since... since... (hang on, I'm thinking, dammit!)

Well, if you're THAT into it, maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd take issue with your statement that "only morons don't pay for porn". It sounds like you watch at least several hours a week, and you have specific tastes and a need for lots of new content. Fine. But if you're only watching an hour a week or less -- as I suspect most people are -- then you don't care about having thousands of hours of HD content, or access to a particular site.

How is this a killer app?

[DerekLyons]

So how, exactly, is this a killer app? Bitcoin is still just a fancy barter token (and I don't see anything that will change that). Anyone with intelligence will still buy BTC and spend them ASAP or recieve BTC and convert them ASAP. Etc... etc...

The only people who profit from this are the exchanges.

Re:How is this a killer app?

[DerekLyons]

The only people who profit from this are the exchanges.

Of course the porn sites benefit from the free advertising too.

Problem: Supply and Demand

[Maxo-Texas]

There is unbelievable amounts of every kind of porn out there now.
Rule of 34.

There are many sites with free porn in copious quantities. So where is the value to bitcoin?

trendy anuses

[Anonymous Coward]

nuff said

that's just what the porn industry needs

[thewolfkin]

a bigger head. I mean you thought the industry was stuck up before with their "we're the reason you used VHS" yada yada. Now with their 4K shoots and then bitcoin... yeah their heads just gonna get bigger and bigger. That said I don't think this is the same as VHS. Who knows I may be wrong I'm no techanalyst but there's obviously a big advantage to being able to pay for porn with an extremely private currency. Considering the amount of social stigma attached to the type of person who would pay for porn. I mean watch porn.

It's is backed by gold, if you will..

[Anonymous Coward]

The "gold" in this case is the difficulty of doing SHA256. And a nifty invention called the blockchain which, as a computer person, you should know about. The blockchain is the real innovation. It's this idea that we can build a complex web of trust by signing and resigning the same huge ledger with newly created keys. It's actually really brilliant and totally legitmate from a cryptographic perspective. Even Bruce Schenier says so. Now economically, who knows? You need supply and demand, of goods and services. That's already starting and really Porn is an ideal service for bitcoin because it's something people like to keep more private than other things, and they might be willing to jump through some of the hoops BTC and other cryptocurrency has right now to be a little more private.

Re:It's is backed by gold, if you will..

[dbIII]

No that's the window dressing. There is no actual value in it, only shiny bait.

Think of it as an alarm call to the herd

[dbIII]

You missed the third option of somebody being pissed off about an old scam modified to be baited for geek and seeing articles pumping it to search for fresh meat on a geek site.
So no more slow than herbivores taking care when the carnivores are prowling around.

the virtual currency quickly came...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they saying it came prematurely?

Paying for porn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why pay when you could go to something like yellingtoilet or bulktube?