Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in the porn industry

For some time now, bitcoin and cryptocurrency payments have been gaining popularity in the porn industry. 

Nowadays, in fact, most adult websites accept cryptocurrencies as a means of payment, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and TRON, or those with a high level of privacy such as Monero and Zcash. 

In addition, some of them, including Pornhub, pay their “artists” using cryptocurrencies, such as Tether Dollar (USDT) via the Cosmo Payment or TronLink payment app.

There are even some websites that only use cryptocurrencies, such as the Spankchain webcam hosting platform that uses its own SPANK cryptocurrency on SpankPay to pay performers with only about 5% commission, compared to the 50% usually held by the most common platforms. 

Some pornstars have also become cryptocurrency supporters. For example, Brenna Sparks gave an interview in which she talked about the transformation of this industry thanks to bitcoin. 

Even Allie Eve Knox has expressly asked that the bitcoiner community advocate for more people to use cryptocurrencies, in the hope that this will help spread the use of crypto to the most sceptical people, such as seniors and boomers.

Knox herself has revealed that activities in this sector are still considered to be high risk, even from a financial point of view, to the extent that artists are burdened with exorbitant costs for processing payments or credit card charges. 

PayPal itself has publicly admitted that it has closed several accounts due to sex-related transactions.

As a result, cryptocurrencies are in fact a very useful solution for artists in this industry, due to the absence of restrictions on their use, and very low transaction costs.

On top of that, they also allow maintaining a good level of secrecy for the users who use them on these websites, avoiding, for example, the discovery of where they spent their money, details which can be found on credit card statements. 

However, it seems that the habit of making cryptocurrency payments on adult websites has not yet become widespread.

The marketing manager of CoinGate’s payment processor, Veronika Mishura, revealed that during the whole of 2019 they processed only 1,400 payments via Lightning Network on porn websites such as LiveJasmin and CooMeet, with an average amount of only 12 euros.