I'm one of those vocal sceptics on HN. I agree with you! Here's finally a huge industry that is consistently shunned by the mainstream payment providers.

I'm not being facetious. I believe it's a one of a kind opportunity for crypto currencies to step in, show the middle finger to the established payment pipelines and prove that a smooth, reliable and safe payment system can be operated even for the adult industry.

According to the Guardian[1] the adult industry clears between $10bln-$100bln a year. That's a lot turnover and clearly they are not being served well by the current providers. I'd imagine the fees are also acceptably higher (due to the increased fraud, etc..) so the profit margins should also be potentially higher.

You're right. I'm sure somebody is working on cryptonlyfans already.

I'm already preparing myself to be appalled by whatever the NFT scene does with this.

What is stopping MasterCard and Visa from banning Coinbase and others if this happens

If bitcoin didnt get banned over drugs and murder-for-hire schemes, i cant imagine porn will be the tipping point.

My sense living in America is that sex-related issues are taken more seriously than, say, gun violence, murder, etc.

Well yeah, gun violence is our primary export.

I'm not sure if that would have any effect at all. I put money into Coinbase and pull it out of Coinbase with a bank account. Buying crypto with a credit card isn't a great idea.

Does coinbase even take credit cards?

https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/getting-started/add-a-...

They can't ban everything, since at the extremis you could buy crypto from eBay sellers.

But in the long run you are right: to avoid MasterCard and Visa we should move everything to crypto. It is the only way to control our own destiny.

>They can't ban everything, since at the extremis you could buy crypto from eBay sellers.

This is against eBay's policies. All items sold through their site must be delivered physically. If you type "bitcoin" in today you'll only get hardware or novelties, not the coins themselves.

Okay, then sell a hardware token with the bitcoin on them, or the coins as QR codes printed on artisinal paper or whatever.

Or do the sale on some other platform that is similar to ebay.

Most exchanges do ACH, wires, or other methods. Kraken is opening its own bank eventually, and will take direct deposits.

most of the folks I know fund their exchange accounts via ACH and not their card

We don't need them.

So why do you think they decided to ban sexually explicit content rather than use cryptocurrency?

because the payment providers have 99% of market share?

And why is this the case when a variety of cryptocurrencies are trivially available to the public.

Maybe because they had 30 years in establishing complete domination of global online economy and all traffic even the one that ends up in crypto goes through them ... Also there is nothing trivial for the public.

and 99% of their revenue was from porn so i guess this business-ending decision is close to cryptopayment-parity

I imagine their options were:

* switch to crypto entirely

* keep credit cards, but block sexually explicit content

I doubt there was middleground where they could accept crypto for sexually explicit content, but still accept credit cards for everything else.

Which makes me think that a smart move here would be to spin off a second company that does allow this content, but only accepts payments in crypto. I suppose if they don't, there is a opportunity ripe for a competitor to take advantage of.

HN often touts that crypto is either a Ponzi/MLM scheme or has as its only use criminal activity.

If you make basic payment processing for services criminal, then, by definition, cryptocurrency's primary use case is for criminal activity.

Porn isn't criminal... ?