Porn sites, while very cutting edge in a lot of ways (which generates more revenue for them), are extremely slow to adopt changes to their source of revenue because they are very protective about that aspect (for obvious reasons).
Not only that, but the sources of revenue are all deeply intertwined with their affiliate networks, which drive the traffic to the sites in the first place. Shaving is a huge concern, so these sites have to use 'approved' software that everyone else uses for this.
One of the largest used pieces of software is called NATS [1] and it is a trainwreck of complexity. Everything is directed through their integrated billing options [2]... which as you can see is extensive. Why? Because credit card companies will routinely shut down your merchant account randomly... because p0rn.
For the company I worked for (early 2000's), we developed a micro currency that was HUGELY successful and was used for all sorts of interesting things, like pay per minute billing. This was all early/pre days of blockchain adoption and had we used a low cost blockchain of some of this, it might have allowed for earlier more interesting experiments.
Anyway, the full answer is that this is a lot more complex than it appears on the surface and you have no idea what you're talking about here with a comment like that.
I was thinking of the "indie" side, namely people using sites like onlyfans who constantly get banned from PayPal and such and so don't have access to money transfers.
Oh interesting! I didn't know that bit of history.
From the engineering side, the software was beyond horrid. Different versions of their software would re-use the same column in a database for different things! They'd do things like if id>=5000 { do something else } in their code. I always wanted to rewrite it and produce something that was actually sane.
But, being in the p0rn industry, it made it super difficult to hire talented engineers because people were afraid to talk about where they worked (or just had issues p0rn) and I myself left without ever having the chance to do so. Funny enough, I see a similar hiring issue with crypto today.
Right—but, considering that porn sites famously have tons of trouble with traditional payment processors, if crypto were both practically workable for normal people as a payment method, and actually good for that, in terms of having significant advantages over their halfway-adversarial traditional payment partners, it should be dominating the industry.
I can't believe I'd never made that connection, but it's dead on. If crypto can't even take over porn payments, which are practically an ideal case for the technology, it's not taking over anything else meaningful, either. Now that it's been pointed out, it seems obvious.
( note to self: keep an eye out for headlines re: Mindgeek or similar creating a crypto currency, and invest in it pronto if that happens, because it'll mean they found a way to make it broadly useful )
