Crypto/Bitcoin, in keeping with the relationship the Internet and adult content have. Congrats Coinbase, Venmo, and others enabling censorship resistant crypto payments on your revenue bump.
Coinbase, Venmo, and others are not enabling censorship resistant crypto payments. Coinbase does track who and where you send your crypto to, so in theory they can control what you do with it. The workaround would be to send your crypto to wallets not associated with them, even still.
Coinbase and Venmo's role is analogous to a bank that offers account holders debit cards that can access CC networks, not the organizations in control of the CC networks themselves.
You could say the same about, say, Amex or Discover being de facto not as censored as Visa and Mastercard. The pressure is on Visa and Mastercard because they're where the vast majority of the money flow comes from.
Hate to break it to you, but all these processors that are facilitating crypto are actively policing what you do with it. They will restrict you or kick you off their platform for using crypto for things they don't want you to use it for.
Can you explain what the features on this page are being used for? Are you suggesting that if you buy coins from coinbase and they later detect that you are using them to pay for adult content that they will block your account?
Transferring your coins to a tumbler flags your wallet address in tools like Chainalysis. They can't see where you sent them post-tumble, but they can see that you sent them to a tumbler, and that alone will be flagged on your account.
It took me minutes to setup a Coinbase account to send funds to SciHub. As long as OnlyFans isn’t hosting illegal content and they’re meeting financial regulations (no laundering, robust accounting), I don’t see a blocker. Yes, you’re going to have to meet up with fiat rails somewhere, which is where incumbent crypto exchanges operating legally come in (Coinbase, Gemini, Fidelity Digital Custodial).
I agree it's a ways off from a user experience point of view, but people are willing to put up with a lot of "effort" if it's something they really want. This very well could be the impetus necessary to make crypto used more broadly for payments.
With current tech this would just be a mobile wallet that holds stablecoins with some sort of built in funding mechanism.
> As long as OnlyFans isn’t hosting illegal content
The service promises huge amounts of money to, lets be honest, young women, to post nude photos of themselves. How much are you willing to be that every single photo, every video, of what has to be in the terabytes, is of someone over the age of 18. That no one 17 or younger, lured in by promises of big money, lied about their age to get it? That the platform's age verification system is 100% bulletproof and can't be fooled by photoshop.
But the issue is with traditional payment providers: how do you transfer from crypto to your employees bank account, how do you tranfer to the IRS for tax purpose, etc. Now you have two problems: you look shady as fuck transfer large crypto amounts and you're already flagged for profiteering off underage porn...
As usual crypto is a solution that didnt solve the problem: how do you detect underage porn so that you can mark your profits in general.
But that’s not the problem. The problem is payments for services that aren’t illegal (legal age adult content), merely taboo and unwanted by a payments oligopoly (Visa and MasterCard).
Yes, crypto incurs drag from fees and inconvenience for a platform to transact in it, but it can’t turn your payments off overnight.
Such a product could not be a credit card, as it would run on rails of your traditional providers (Visa, MasterCard, etc). If you want to avoid traditional payment rails who can financially deplatform you, it has to be crypto (much to my dismay). Could you use ACH or Instant Payments from the Fed? For as long as the banks that support those payment rails don’t give you the boot.
Think Privacy.com/Lithic.com but using crypto and instant fiat->crypto conversions when the payments are made. No chargebacks, no refunds. The crypto or stablecoin are decentralized rails.
> Such a product could not be a credit card, as it would run on rails of your traditional providers (Visa, MasterCard, etc).
You'd have to build your own infrastructure, but you could make an actual credit card. It would have to be super jank at first (you might even have to cut actual physical checks at first). Fundamentally, a credit card is just you paying for somebody's transactions, and billing them at the end of the month (and suing them if they don't pay up).
It would be slow, and the service would be horrible, but the people accepting your money don't have a ton of other options.
I think the market for that is growing, but they'd have to thread a very tight needle reputation wise. The credit card business relies heavily on trust, and the major networks like Visa have literally decades of reputation behind them.
And fundamentally the reason that credit cards have that customer trust is that they make it easy for customers to get refunds when the product isn't delivered, which is very hard to do for an Onlyfans-like business where there's no way to "return faulty goods" - standing in the middle between clients who think they didn't get what they paid for and sellers who think someone just wants to copy their pics without paying is not going to be a fun place to be.
Good point about exchanges with Monero. (It's also on Coinbase, of the others I listed.)
The "private by default" criticism is misleading:
- While this is important in a design which mixes your transaction with a limited set of other recent transactions, in Zcash the privacy set is all of the shielded transactions ever.
- It's not a "default" technically, it's a choice of transparent and shielded, both of which are useful. "Default" is a wallet UX question. I think the latest reference wallet auto-shields things so you don't have to remember to shield what comes in from a transparent transaction.
Somehow there is this meme that porn sites are technically impressive due to their scale/small video playback enhancements, neglecting that they have a slightly more captive audience that will forgive small hitches than most streaming video providers.
Having worked at a porn site and a FAANG, I’d say my porn work was more impressive — because payment processors / ad providers / hosting companies / etc are so anti-adult-content, getting anything done is a lot harder.
OnlyFans could be the exchange. You send their public wallet the crypto buying a “OF coin” stable coin or similar (gift card funds essentially), they handle the distribution internally.
Best practice would be for patrons and content producers to have dedicated wallets for OnlyFans transactions, to prevent data leakage from ledger analysis.
You still have to go through an on-ramp provider or OF does the on-ramp but then probably lots of reg headache. Plus I bet impulse buying is the way to activate OF users. One way to solve this can be to find an on-ramp solution w/ UX on par with card payments and then handle pay-in and pay-outs via Zcash or Monero or using Aztec protocol.
If the problem is scrutiny from investors, I don't think it's a viable solution to become a payment processor and therefore attract additional scrutiny from banking regulators.
Crypto/Bitcoin, in keeping with the relationship the Internet and adult content have. Congrats Coinbase, Venmo, and others enabling censorship resistant crypto payments on your revenue bump.