Item — HN Reader

> A chilling effect on free speech. Real alternatives to paypal and credit cards need to enter the market.

This would have been a huge problem in 2012, Now there are realistic solutions to avoid this. Just pay by cryptocurrencies on to a Coinbase Card and you can withdraw the cash and pay anonymously.

Job done.

5 comments

That is an extra step which will make people spend less money.

Imagine if every time you wanted to buy a cup of coffee or a video game you had to buy a special currency to do it? I bet less of both would be sold

Precisely. Bitcoin isn't a substitute payment system to Paypal.

People are more motivated to go through extra steps for porn than they are for coffee.

No they aren't, because porn is available for free in abundance everywhere. I can't download a coffee from a torrent site or stream it from a tube site.

The fact that people pay for porn at all is a small marvel.

I might be willing to accept that people would more motivated to jump through some hoops to get porn than they would for coffee if porn weren't available without that hoop jumping.

All this sort of thing will do is make it harder for independent content producers to profit

Your argument would work if porn were interchangeable. It's not. People don't pay for porn, they pay for specific porn.

I'm willing to accept that but I think it would still lower the amount of income significantly. Sure people would still pay for custom porn or specific clips that are hard to find (though even then I'd suspect quite a bit less than they do now), but they probably wouldn't join any subscription based sites for example.

As I understand it, this is less about subscription based sites and specifically about cam models on pornhub. While I agree that this extra step would be a barrier to a casual consumer, I agree with the parent that people who pay for porn will pay for specific porn. if a person is already paying a specific model (or models) on pornhub, they've found what they want and a fair amount will continue to pay for it even if it takes additional steps.

Coinbase has essentially become another bank. They go well beyond KYC requirements and have banned people for things they don't like.

Citation needed. Like not saying I don't believe it, just want details.

Search /r/Bitcoin/ for banned from coinbase and you'll get plenty of examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/search?q=banned+from+coin

Could you (or someone else) elaborate on Coinbase going beyond KYC requirements?

If you send BTC from Coinbase to an outside wallet they monitor it for activity they don't like (eg suspected dark market purchases).

Once you transfer outside of Coinbase it's none of their business what you do with it.

Coinbase is big, but not the best exchange.

Which is a huge hassle in a lot of places in the world, especially due to how cryptocurrencies are treated.

I've just discovered Coinbase Commerce [1], it's an awesome way to quickly start accepting cryptocurrencies, they offer hosted payment pages, payment buttons, webhooks, everything you want. It took me a couple of minutes to sign up and configure a hosted payment page to start accepting donations for my projects.

It's rare that I'm excited about a service, but this one appears to come with no strings attached, the wallet is even generated on the client-side.

[1] https://commerce.coinbase.com

This sounds like an advertisement.

It really isn't, you should check my profile. I have discovered the service shortly before posting, the parent mentioned Coinbase, and I thought it would be helpful to share this with others. People are sometimes genuinely excited about free services that don't exist solely to exploit them in some way.

Seems like a whole lot of trouble to pay for porn.