Porn Will Be Bitcoin's Killer App 216
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.'"
Re:People still pay for porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous? (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly for the porn companies: no charge backs.
That's a new one (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
goodbye (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Pay for pr0n (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another day another bitcoin article (Score:2, Insightful)
Myth: Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoin_is_a_pyramid_scheme [bitcoin.it]
Re:Another day another bitcoin article (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Jesus H. Christ on a crutch! (Score:5, Insightful)
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:goodbye (Score:1, Insightful)
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:seems reasonable (Score:2, Insightful)
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:I'm a cypherpunk and I work in porn. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.