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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.'"
Porn is what made VHS win the format war.
Silence is a state of mime.
Heaven forbid. Hell, they are giving it away.
It started with video.
Pretty much any new gadget takes off when it's meshed with porn in some way.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
More importantly for the porn companies: no charge backs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
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.
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.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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)?
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
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
http://topicalisle.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/3200280414_69cbfa327a1.jpg (NSFW-ish, but with working link)
I'm pretty sure drugs and hiring Russian botnet operators are already Bitcoin's killer apps.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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.
ayottesoftware.com
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.
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Steganography, not stenography.
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.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
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.
ayottesoftware.com
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.
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.
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.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."