With the new Mastercard regulations for the adult industry about to hit imminently, there has been some frantic changes in the past couple of weeks as sites roll out new ways to prepare for these.

There’s every chance the chaos could continue in the following few weeks if it appears sites are not prepared, and any grace periods or frantic changes “putting things right”.

Throw away comments like “we’ll just go to another site” become lost as – well, being card driven – all sites are affected.

So then the idea becomes “why don’t the sites just sack off Mastercard – why don’t porn sites just take crypto?”

I do think that crypto could have more of a role in the adult industry than it seems to have now, but it’s certainly not the silver bullet some seem to think.

So here goes. A non-exhaustive list of the problems a crypto-only platform or industry would have.

BUT SOME SITES DO TAKE CRYPTO

I think this is the simplest explanation. AdultWork accepts crypto, however, they don’t take very much of it. Fetlife said the same.
Kinkbomb took crypto and they disappeared.
Pornhub is currently accepting only crypto and SEPA as they try to overturn the ban that the cards placed on them.  They are also following the Mastercard rules presumably in a hope to get the cards back – if crypto alone was profitable enough, they probably wouldn’t have bothered with most of the changes they’ve made in the past year.

Pocketstars had a new crypto spin-off site, let’s all simp, but disappeared without a trace leaving investors shorted.

If nothing else that’s all you would need to know, if porn sites could afford to just take crypto alone, they already would.

IT’S JUST TOO VOLATILE

If you already make enough from things like real time sessions, and clip/cam money is just fluff on the side, you can probably afford the risk or the volatile nature.

If you are someone who relies on the online income in order to survive, as a lot of workers do, a sudden shock to the value is going to get in the way of you paying your bills.

It’s too volatile to be a reliable currency.

IT’S TECH EXCLUSION

People who do not have the technology, or certainly the knowhow, to use crypto – this would exclude a chunk of the customer base.

Which in turn reduces sales.

Receiving and converting payments would also be something sellers would have to learn.

A porn site which just accepts crypto would exclude those who don’t have the tech or knowledge on how to buy/use it.

IT’S ALSO QUITE SLOW – AND INSECURE

If you see a clip on a site you want to buy with a card, adding to your card, paying and receiving the clip takes seconds.

Have to go off site, buy some crypto, transfer to a local wallet and the transfer to the site. This is a process that can take hours.

This process could be sped up if you could buy or store the crypto directly on the site. Say, a cloud wallet with your account.

However if the site disappeared, so would the money in the wallet.

You would also not be protected with your bank and unable to get the money back.

The same if money in any other wallet or site went down or missing.

PEOPLE DON’T LIKE TO SPEND CRYPTO

People big up crypto, because they are speculating on the price. They therefore want more people to scramble for it to push the value they are holding up.

Unless the price actually stabilises to the point it’s usable as a currency (which will be after a big dip) there are people just happy to sit on it long term.

They will only really sell/spend when they’re cashing out or expecting a drop. Neither are beneficial to you.

WHAT ABOUT STABLECOINS?

There’s a lot of these but their less well know. It might be hard to get people to sign to a known coin, like Bitcoin, but harder again to sign to a lesser known coin. Especially with all the scams relating to crypto.

COMPETITION

If one site is taking card and another is only accepting crypto.  If the content is similar the majority of customers are going to use the one accepting card.  For accessibility, speed and convenience.

It would therefore require the type of content which couldn’t be gained elsewhere.

When a porn site just accepts crypto, this leaves them vulnerable to rivals who are still accepting card.

CRYPTO DOESN’T MEAN ZERO RULES

While some of the categories facing restriction are harsh or ambiguous (what is ‘extreme fisting’?) there are of course other things within the list that it would be difficult to argue in the defence of.

Anything with animals or minors. Actual rape. Anything where one or more people were not aware the content was being uploaded (which gets into a lot of revenge porn)

Sites would therefore still be, presumably, making their own rules on what content is permitted.

While some of the tedious frustrations can be ironed out (the banned keywords, poppers, is that fisting too extreme?) there would still be standards to be kept.

If there lacked sufficient checks there would be problems involving piracy, minors, non-consensual uploads.
And while you would hope the userbase could be trusted, it was userbases that could not be trusted which led to many of the bad faith arguments that ended where we are now.

THE SITE CAN STILL BE TAKEN DOWN

While erasing a website from the web can be difficult. It’s not impossible.

If a site is running up negative press due to say, poor response with underage or revenge porn – it can lose it’s hosting.
Unless it has it’s own private servers.
But even then it’s possible to be blocked.
Which then gets into a situation where proxy sites, or VPNs are needed to access it.

The problem with this is it gets expensive for the host. If you have a lot of access to finance then less of an issue.

But, especially when you are relying on money to keep going it becomes less accessible.

AND – OF COURSE – REGULATION IS INEVITABLE

Banks and governments are closely monitoring crypto and it’s only a matter of time before more regulation pushes requirements onto sites and wallets.
If there’s also one thing we should have learnt from all this is the cards can turn off certain types of payment.

If tomorrow the payment processors stopped processing the buy or sell of crypto, it would become worthless overnight.

There may even be a race to offload it and you suddenly wake up to find you’ve both made $1000 of sales, but that it’s in crypto currently worth $10 – and someone has all of your content, and you have nothing to show for it.

And, of course, this could leave porn sites that just accept crypto with egg on their face.