Crypto is an important solution for the decade long struggle of the porn industry with the U.S. government, payment processors and banks. Sex working has been deemed illegal, adult entertainers have been denied bank accounts, and payment processors refused services to porn businesses. This week Paypal highlighted the situation once again and proved that cryptocurrencies offer a solution to the problem.
PayPal has decided to no longer serve adult entertainment website Pornhub. As a result many models are in search for new means to receive their hard earned money. Several cryptocurrency projects have responded to the news. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao sees 'an opportunity for crypto', while Tron CEO Justin Sun underlines that Pornhub already accepts payments with TRX.
No matter what one thinks of Paypal, Pornhub should've seen this coming. Paypal also has a long history of denying services to the adult entertainment industry. On top of that the service can't be used to buy valuable gems, because of money laundering issues. Other things you can't buy with Paypal are guns, drugs and Nazi collectibles. Oh yes, and you generally can't use Paypal to buy cryptocurrencies. A block on drugs and weapons I can understand, but adult entertainers are people who actually do legal work.
Last year Pornhub already announced a partnership with cryptocurrency project Verge. People can pay for content on the website using Verge, even though the pricing was in dollars. The news about the block by Paypal made the value of XVG go up more than 20 percent. As a result this already suggests that the relationship between Pornhub and cryptocurrencies is a logical one. Pornhub and the Brazzers Network also accept Horizen for example.
In the comments to Pornhub's announcement tweet there are plenty of cryptocurrency projects shilling their solutions. Tokenpay suggested to Shyla Jennings to use their payment solution instead. While adult entertainment payment portal SpankPay also jumped in and said 'somebody deserves to be Spanked'.
In an ideal world Pornhub needs to take care of all the payments, perhaps they should have a look and install a BTC Pay Server. Obviously there are other solutions as well. Spankchain launched its payment tool SpankPay this August. It's a payment platform aimed at the adult entertainment industry, serving both viewers and entertainers. SpankPay supports a variety of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum, zcash and monero. The payment platform is already being used on adult services Just For Fans and SkyPrivate.
In addition there's also PumaPay. Two months ago PumaPay added dash to its list of accepted cryptocurrencies. This payment processor is already implemented on a variety of websites including Pornhub, Live Jasmine, Bang Bros, Nubiles and Adult Empire. PumaPay adds the ability for recurring payments, which is interesting for merchants that offer a subscription model. This just shows that there are plenty of payment processors in the cryptocurrency space that can fill that gap that Paypal left behind. However, it also needs to be easy for the models.
Cryptocurrencies offer lots of benefits to those who decide to accept them as a payment. Customers remain private, but still receive their product or service. In addition cryptocurrency transactions never have to deal with payment delays or chargebacks, something that happens a lot with credit-card payments. This also means that payment processors can transfer cryptocurrency transfers directly into dollars. But in that case you're dealing with banks again.
The big problem is getting that money from your online crypto wallet onto your bank account. In the past decade there have been plenty of reports about banks denying banking services to people working in the porn industry. Banks and PayPal consider the porn industry 'high-risk', because they don't want to offer services to businesses to do illegal things. This is happening in the United States, but also in Australia.
Five years ago banking company Chase closed bank accounts from porn director David Lord, former porn star Teagan Pressley and porn actress Veronica Avluv among many others. It was just one example of the financial system turning its back towards people who do legal work and pay their taxes. Even Amazon has a grudge towards XXX performers, as the shopping company terminated wish lists created by adult entertainers.
Adult entertainers could get a Wirex crypto debit card, so they never need to use a bank account again. After all, the banking world is not that keen on the adult industry anyway. If the adult entertainment industry still wants to embrace that good ol' fashioned bank account, they could embrace crypto payment processors like CoinPayments, Bitpay and OpenNode.
Even if adult entertainers aren't able to exchange cryptocurrencies and transfer dollars to their bank accounts, there are plenty of options to spend your earned crypto. There are startups offering services to fulfill bill payments using cryptocurrencies. In addition many online shops accept cryptocurrencies, even Starbucks is jumping in. While many retailers in France will accept bitcoin starting from next year. Bitcoin fever is spreading. Quite frankly, there are plenty of ways to survive on crypto without the need for a bank account.
