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.'"
seems reasonable (Score:5, Interesting)
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Does it mean that no other formats can contain the porn?
Re:seems reasonable (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:seems reasonable (Score:5, Interesting)
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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?
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[*] I'm assuming that's the German name for it....
Re:seems reasonable (Score:5, Informative)
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The Beethoven's 9nth story is probably popular among the recor
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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).
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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.
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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 wit
Re:seems reasonable (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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Oh yeah, let's please start up that argument again.
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Partially true. Porn helped, yes, but VHS's longer playing time was an even greater advantage. Together they offset Beta's higher image quality.
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Me love you long time?
No, that can't be right.....
Doesn't seem reasonable at all to me (Score:5, Interesting)
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)?
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No, Sony is what made the lesser quality format win...
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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.
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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 [wikipedia.org]
Pay for pr0n (Score:4, Interesting)
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only morons pay for porn
Re:Pay for pr0n (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pay for pr0n (Score:5, Interesting)
At some level everybody is a "moron". Most people confuse ignorance and stupidity, and everybody is ignorant of something.
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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!
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http://thinkexist.com/quotation/he_who_knows_not_and_knows_not_he_knows_not-he_is/149147.html [thinkexist.com]
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Well there is always illegal porn.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Porn is everything's killer app (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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You laugh, but someone has already combined the Oculus Rift with something like the Novint Falcon [novint.com] 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.
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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...
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And now, the punch line.
I wonder what kind of porn you can buy with doge coins?
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Yep, and the "Netflix of Porn" SugarDVD announced that in December, PS4 users watched 3 times as much porn as Xbox One users [buzzfeed.com]. 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?
Hate to rain on your parade (Score:2)
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).
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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..................
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http://topicalisle.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/3200280414_69cbfa327a [wordpress.com] (NSFW-ish?)
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http://topicalisle.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/3200280414_69cbfa327a1.jpg [wordpress.com] (NSFW-ish, but with working link)
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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.
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What if you used that Visa gift card to buy Bitcoin?
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. W
I'm a cypherpunk and I work in porn. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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This is just one of the many paradoxes with Bitcoin. As you say, public percepti
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.
Who pays for porn? (Score:2)
isn't it mostly free one way or the other?
Drugs (Score:3)
I'm pretty sure drugs and hiring Russian botnet operators are already Bitcoin's killer apps.
Wait, it's 2014. People still pay for porn? (Score:2)
How is this a killer app? (Score:2)
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.
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Of course the porn sites benefit from the free advertising too.
Problem: Supply and Demand (Score:2)
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?
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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).
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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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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 [umich.edu]
The NSA leaks did reveal that they have an interest in porn though: They've been mo
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Re:Why is everyone claiming Bitcoin is anonymous? (Score:5, Funny)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly for the porn companies: no charge backs.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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 s
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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. [howstuffworks.com] (More recent data, with less explanation) [federalreserve.gov]
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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
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
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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.
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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! (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [psmag.com] publications [time.com] 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 [ibtimes.com] 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.
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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 ac
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Why would anyone ever pay for pr0n?
Some idiots do, like the one featured here :- Plumpy [tumblr.com]
Otherwise, there is enough free stuff to occupy anybody 24/7.
Why would anyone ever pay for an operating system?
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The same reason why people pay for Windows instead of using FreeBSD?
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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...
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because it's the path of least resistance? No
Yes.
He's talking about porn. (Score:2)
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 [amazon.com] 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 no
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You seem to have missed ze point here. (hint: try reading GGGP, then GGP, then GP, then your post)
Re:Another day another bitcoin article (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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 j
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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.
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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 wil
Re: Another day another bitcoin article (Score:2)
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Myth: Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoin_is_a_pyramid_scheme [bitcoin.it]
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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.
No, that's a self serving opinion (Score:2)
Wikipedia? Maybe. Scammer central? Most definitely not.
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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
Think of it as an alarm call to the herd (Score:3)
So no more slow than herbivores taking care when the carnivores are prowling around.