In a world that stigmatizes the adult content streaming industry and other similar services, the blockchain-powered sex industry is gaining traction as an option.
Many stakeholders in the industry have had to deal with centralized forms of payments such as PayPal and Square-Cash that are characterized by notorious chargebacks and lack of anonymity.
Blockchain-powered sex industry advantages
Last year, Goddess Venus, a sex filmmaker lost approximately $2000 to an angry client who reported harassment and PayPal conducted a chargeback on the client’s payments to her site. The client reported her so that she would lose her PayPal account.
Fortunately, at the time of the incident, her friend had gathered interest in cryptocurrency and even had gone steps ahead to invest. Her friend advised her to try receiving her payments through Bitcoin, arrangements cryptically coined as sex on a blockchain.
Therefore, Venus continued recording her clips while opting for payments through Bitcoin. At first, the uptake among her clients was low but with time the number gradually rose and in the end, she preferred all her clients paying for her films through crypto.
Sex workers like Goddess Venus are faced with a challenge of exorbitant rates by the major e-wallets, and they are graduating into crypto payments evangelists. They confessed to our reporters that they no longer have to deal with society’s moral judgment and the precarious chargebacks obscured by niffy clients.
The cryptocurrency market offers a win-win situation whereby customers’ privacy is assured while the sex workers’ money is safe from chargebacks.
Blockchain-enabled payment systems
Popular adult site Pornhub has updated its payment options by adopting Tether cryptocurrency as a suitable choice. PayPal has withdrawn its support of the platform and Pornhub has found a suitable alternative in the stablecoin.
The blockchain space has also attracted many entrepreneurs who try to customize crypto payments for sex workers and recently, a token called Spank that is built on Ethereum was launched on its webcam site that aims to better serve the models that provide the content and provides credit card payments via Segpay.
Dedicated to helping adult content providers maintain a reliable payments provider in the face of a largely reluctant traditional finance industry, the new SpankPay service also allows users to pay with cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC), as well as the “privacy coins” ZCash (ZEC) and Monero (XMR).
The initial adopters of cryptocurrency in the sex industry like Venus reiterate that clients prefer their services because of crypto payment methods. The blockchain-powered sex industry is gaining traction sans discrimination.
Blockchain-powered startups like sexservice.io are revolutionizing online hookups where clients sort anonymity and the site has reported that crypto payments are much safer. Blockchain is free from moral judgments unlike banks and other well-known payment systems. Also, decentralized blockchain payment methods like Spank-Chain do not freeze users’ accounts.
In a nutshell, blockchain has revolutionized the world’s oldest trade through the following advantages:
- Keep service providers safe from chargebacks
- Efficient payment and records keeping systems
- Protection from scalpers and commission traders
- Privacy of transaction between client and provider
- Validate customer with a history of successful transactions
Legal setbacks of pornography
Despite porn’s gaining more mainstream acceptance, people who worked in the industry are still going to be treated the same by future non-porn employers and co-workers.
There was a time when adult performers who get work elsewhere can be fired if their past comes out — and there’s no legal recourse. A porn lawyer has said that employment discrimination cases involving sex workers are usually very, very difficult to win. When a proof is brought of an employee previously doing porn or currently doing porn, she or he can summarily be dismissed.
The porn lawyer warns:
Porn is like a prison. Everybody likes [the idea of] prisons, but no one wants to live, or work, next door to one.
The outcome of the discovery might be a case-to-case basis like being a schoolteacher or being in the army:
If I’d been discovered, I’d have immediately been dragged before a court-martial for “Bringing the Army into disrepute” (I forget the specific sections of the Army Act 1955), and receive just a dishonourable discharge if I was lucky.
And then, there are complaints and the whole setup tumbles down. Self-regulation should be the rule in decentralized space or the centralized authorities will come in and justify people’s fears that blockchain encourages criminality, or worse, covers up the tracks of the criminally-inclined.
Image credits: Pixabay.com
