Bitcoin for Pornography

[Vikki Jezebel B]

So, I just read on Reddit that MindGeek (erstwhile known as Manwin) is accepting bitcoin as payment for membership at their IKnowThatGirl.com website. My understanding is that MetArt has been accepting bitcoin (and offering a discount for using it via http://metartnetwork.com/bitcoin) for a while now.

So, anybody out there got bitcoins to through IKnowThatGirl.com's way?; MetArt's way? Is MindGeek going to start accepting bitcoins across their entire network of sites, or a significant portion of them, soon? Is the online porn purchasing demographic ripe for exploitation/being sold to, specificaly in terms of bitcoin? Will the world still spin round if all anybody does is operate huge ASIC mining operations out of their grandmothers's basements and use the bitcoins they mine for porn?

I personally am a "fanboy" of bitcoin so I love to see it spreading its tendrils into all niches of the world economy. Pretty much any and all adoption of it is getting me jonesed right now.

One thing that came to mind with this news is that I hope micropayments don't take over all the free porn that is out there on the internet and make it cost something. I like all this free stuff. If micropayment paywalls start going up between me and all the free porn I have had access to for the last 10+ years my lifestyle is going to significantly change, or at least my private pleasure lifestyle is.

 

[knowone]

There have been several discussions here about Bitcoin, you should search for them.
Everything I've read about it tells me it's going to collapse, completely because there is nothing backing its value.

 

[Harley Spencer]

It's really just not that popular of a payment method, so it's not as successful as other payment methods. Some adult payment processing companies offer it, some don't, and even for those who are using those particular payment processors, since bitcoin isn't that popular, they often just choose not to offer it on their paysite as a payment method. Instead they (we) offer visa, mastercard, checks, direct pay, etc., which are more popular and more widely used by consumers.

If you get more consumers expressing interest in bitcoin, then maybe it could take off. Otherwise, websites will always choose to accept the most popular methods. Unless of course they don't have enough money to afford visa and mastercard, as those can be pretty pricey, in which case they'll use the less popular payment methods.

 

[Rey C.]

No offense to those who like the idea of digital currencies. But what is the appeal? You take, let's say, $10 of "real" money and hand it over to an exchange, which gives you some amount of a digital currency. And depending on what happens with the exchange that issued your bitcoins (like Mt. Gox) you may or may not be able to even get to your money. And when you finally do, who knows what it's going to be worth?

And for those who have told me how much they've made by buying bitcoins over the past year, that's great. I've made a nice percentage return over the past few months after buying a "penny stock" called Clean Diesel Technology (CDTI). But I wouldn't suggest that my mother (or anyone else) buy a purely speculative stock like that, that I was prepared to see go to zero $/share if things went to pot.

Sorry, but if I'm going to have my savings or income tied to a currency that has no real value, I'm going to stick with the good old U.S. $. At least that's (mandated) legal tender in the U.S. And as far as I know, anything that can be done with bitcoins can be done with my credit card, using dollars - and I have fraud protection there. Anyone who can help me understand the advantages of bitcoin (aside from anonymity - I'm not part of a Mexican drug cartel or Israeli gun smuggling ring), I really would be willing to listen.

 

[Rey C.]

First Mt Gox went down a couple of weeks ago, now we have this story about Silk Road 2.0 either losing or stealing an undetermined amount of bitcoins. Sounds like their bitcoiners (is that a word yet?) will lose all their money... I guess. IMO, this is a worse idea than handing over your money to an online casino and wanting to use their digital poker chips as currency.

A squishy number of Bitcoins has either been hacked out of the dark-net market for illicit goods, or, as Silk Road's users muse, perhaps weaseled away by the site's own administrators.

The squishy part comes in when you try to put a price tag on the total worth.

Forbes's Andy Greenberg reports that a post put up on Thursday by one of the recently reincarnated market's administrators - "Defcon" - listed a series of Bitcoin addresses that Silk Road's administrators think were involved in the heist.

Those transactions apparently point to a single Bitcoin address containing 58,800 coins, worth more than $36.1 million (£21.6 million) at current exchange rates, but Greenberg noted that other estimates range from 41,200 coins by a Silk Road user and 88,000 by the Bitcoin news site.

More squishy still: an update to his original story notes that a researcher values the theft at only around 4,400 or so coins, worth around $2.6 million (£1.56 million).

The news temporarily melted Bitcoin's value, but by Sunday it was back up at about $656.

At any rate, that about does it for Silk Road 2.0, one of the copycat sites to spring up after the original Silk Road was shut down by the FBI in October.

 

[cestmoi2010]

First Mt Gox went down a couple of weeks ago, now we have this story about Silk Road 2.0 either losing or stealing an undetermined amount of bitcoins. Sounds like their bitcoiners (is that a word yet?) will lose all their money... I guess. IMO, this is a worse idea than handing over your money to an online casino and wanting to use their digital poker chips as currency.

It didn't take a Rocket Scientist to see this Bitcoin thing was a disaster waiting to happen. Might be proven wrong long term but I doubt it. There are some people who are gonna be out A LOT of money and they have only themselves to blame for falling for this Ponzi Scheme. This will make for some great studies in a few years when we look back at this and wonder how so many people were dumb enough to fall for this SCAM