Actually, I'd prefer it if Bitcoin and pornography remained separate for now. Bitcoin still has a reputation for being associated with shady and often illegal activities such as drugs, gambling, hackers, assassinations, money laundering, ISIS, etc. Do we really need to add pornography to the list?
Of course fiat can be used to purchase porn and drugs too but fiat can also be used to pay your electricity bills or groceries at the supermarket - i.e. legitimate stuff. BTC doesn't quite have the same level of support yet. Businesses that accept BTC are still quite rare and having pornography become such a large part of the fledgling Bitcoin industry at this stage is probably going to hurt society's perception of the currency and possibly negate whatever economic benefits it may provide.
Anyway, that's just my opinion.
This extremely closed minded of you. How is pornography shady? It was only shady in the first place because of society and now society accepts amateur porn as a way to show intimacy with your partner. To lump drugs, gambling, hackers, laundering money in with assassinations that is insane. You go from money laundering to assassinations, which is like going form 0-100 in 5 seconds. I disagree with ISIS but I don't see them hurting bitcoin's reputation.
Just like rocket scientist use their minds that they were born with or train, porn stars use their body that they were born with or train. To say some people don't deserve the benefits of bitcoin is the opposite of why satoshi create bitcoin. To take the power the elites had over us and controlled what we do with our money. Also bitcoin is helping these people make a living, which we all should be able to do, without judgement. I was speaking to a model who would have to cam 16 hrs a day cause transaction fees took half of her earnings. With bitcoin she is able to to feed her family and actually live her life.
To be honest most people view bitcoin as a speculation currency and not something that will be used in real life transactions. Far from this picture you painted as a currency that is "shady". So you are so out of touch with people's view of bitcoins.
I was thinking from the perspective of society rather than from my own personal beliefs. For instance, I gamble at Primedice sometimes and have CLAMs invested at Just-Dice. Yet Primedice recently closed off access to its US-based users and Just-Dice abandoned BTC in response to Canadian gambling laws. Online gambling is outright illegal here in New Zealand so it's quite clear that the society that I live in doesn't approve of what I'm doing.
And I would say that gambling is still considered to be shady. It's just that "shadiness" is a spectrum with dice sites like PD on one end of the spectrum and assassination markets and terrorism on the other end. Drugs and pornography probably lie somewhere in the middle.
If you read news reports from mainstream news sites, then it's clear that they often lump all of those things together in order to make Bitcoin seem like something that is "underground":
But the anything-goes nature of Bitcoin has also made it attractive to denizens of the Internet's dark side.
One of the most prominent destinations for bitcoins remains Silk Road, a black market website where drug dealers advertise their wares in a consumer-friendly atmosphere redolent of Amazon or eBay -- complete with a shopping cart icon, a five-point rating system and voluminous user reviews. The site uses Tor, an online anonymity network, to mask the location of its servers, while bitcoin payments ensure there's no paper trail...
Drug dealers aren't the only ones cashing in on Bitcoin. The hackers behind Lulz Security, whose campaign of online havoc drew worldwide attention back in 2011, received thousands of dollars' worth of bitcoins after promising followers that the money would go toward launching attacks against the FBI...
It went on to warn that bitcoins might become "an increasingly useful tool for various illegal activities beyond the cyber realm" -- including child pornography, trafficking and terrorism...
Many in the Bitcoin community are frustrated at the attention paid to the shadier side of the virtual economy.
Atlanta-based entrepreneur Anthony Gallippi said the focus on drugs and hacking misses the "much bigger e-commerce use for this that's growing and that's growing rapidly."
Link:
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/04/11/bitcoin-electronic-cash-beloved-by-hackers/There has also been a lot of hand wringing about the dropping financial value of bitcoin- though it traded at a high of $1,150 per unit in December 2013, it ended last week trading at only $237 per unit, largely thanks to bitcoin’s criminal connotations. (Many bitcoin alternatives have sprung up as well).
But a growing number of investors wants to help bitcoin shed its bad reputation. The most high-profile bitcoin backers are Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss- they may be best-known for suing Mark Zuckerberg, but in recent years they have been two of bitcoin’s most ardent defenders. (In fact, they own one percent of all the bitcoin in the world).
Link:
http://observer.com/2015/06/bitcoin-can-be-a-legitimate-currency/Dale doesn't exactly look like an international crypto-criminal. He's soft-spoken, baby-faced, and a senior at an Ivy League college. But every couple of weeks the political science major logs onto the Silk Road, an online black market that has been described as an "amazon.com of drugs" to buy wholesale quantities of "molly" (also known as MDMA, a particularly "pure" form of ecstasy), LSD and magic mushrooms...
While Dale prices his party favours in dollars, he pays for them the only way you can pay for anything on the Silk Road: by using Bitcoins, an untraceable digital currency founded in 2008 by the pseudonymous "Satoshi Nakomoto"...
Unless you're a major tech geek or a regular patron of the shadowy computer underworld known as the dark web, you've probably never heard of – let alone used – Bitcoins. But below the "real" economy of legal tender and federal reserves, Bitcoins fuel a shadow economy that connects students, drug dealers, gamblers, dictators and anyone else who wants to pay for something without being traced. It has found a niche as the currency of internet vice, digital "pieces of eight" for modern-day pirates.
Despite these unsavoury associations, Bitcoin is increasingly winning a place on the internet as a legitimate currency, albeit one that will probably never quite shake off its dodgy past.
Link:
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/mar/04/bitcoin-currency-of-viceThe currency known as bitcoin - a much-hyped and much-doubted type of digital cash that can be bought with traditional money - has mostly attracted attention for its popularity in the black market, and for its wildly gyrating valuation.
But some entrepreneurs, investors and even merchants are eyeing a far more mainstream use for it. They are convinced that bitcoin, though not widely understood, offers a path to lower payment processing and more secure transactions. Instead of using bitcoin to buy illegal guns in the recesses of the web, they say, ordinary consumers will use it to buy legal goods from legal retailers - and as easily as they now swipe their credit cards or exchange paper bills.
Link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/technology/bitcoin-pursues-the-mainstream.htmlNote the two articles above are from 2013. Certainly the entrance of legitimate and mainstream businesses like Overstock and Microsoft into the Bitcoin economy in 2014 really helped Bitcoin enormously as it allowed it to shed some of these unsavory associations in the eyes of the public. My belief is that if Bitcoin wants to find mainstream success then it should be looking towards finding acceptance in places like supermarkets, retailers, and airports rather than the "underground" aspects of society which it is still largely associated with.