Porn Sites and Cryptocurrency Are a Match Made in Heaven
A win-win for privacy and cryptocurrency.
The internet can be quite the unpredictable place, but one thing that you can be certain about is that at every second of every day there are millions of people watching porn. This isn’t a secret, but ironically it’s everyone’s “dirty secret.” No one wants their co-workers, friends — or oh god — parents to know the racy videos they’re looking up or even paying for online. This is exactly why on Tuesday Pornhub, one of the most visited adult sites in the world, announced it will begin accepting Verge, a privacy-centric cryptocurrency.
Pornhub is by no means the first website of its kind to accept digital currencies to pay for content. However, the fact that it chose Verge over bitcoin or Ethereum is a testament to the site’s diligence to keep their users’ activity as private as they can. Moreover, this is a stride forward toward the adoption of cryptocurrencies as more of a tender than as an asset.
Just over a year ago, Pornhub began using HTTPS encryption — or that little green padlock at the upper lefthand corner of your browser — to make sure visitors aren’t being spied on while perusing the site. The adult site’s vice-president, Corey Price, is adamant about giving everyone a chill porn sesh with no worries that anyone is peeping.
“Over the past couple of years we’ve launched Virtual Reality (VR), to provide our users with the most immersive experience possible; a Bug Bounty program, which offers monetary rewards to security researchers for finding bugs on our platform; and HTTPS, to provide a more secure user experience,” he said in a statement. “Our acceptance of Verge is an affirmation of our dedication to innovation and privacy, which recently has caused much concern and been at the forefront of all tech consumers’ minds.”
Verge will keep any record of a Pornhub subscription payment off of users’ credit card statements. Verge is a run on Wraith Protocol, this masks users’ IP address as well as gives them an option to save their transaction on a private ledger instead of a public one. This doesn’t mean a record of the transaction won’t exists, the exchange is still saved on the blockchain but the parties involved will be anonymous. This option might be appealing to Pornhub subscribers that share credit card statements with others and don’t want their internet habits written on paper.
Incentivising people to use a cryptocurrency because it provides some kind of benefit that other payment methods do not is exactly what is needed to turn digital currencies into something you spend instead of something you hodl. Now, we’ll have to see if people actually use Verge to pay for their Pornhub subscription.
