Pornhub Now Only Accepts Bitcoin and Crypto for its Premium Membership

If you don’t have anything better to do during the holidays, and you’ve thought about wandering around the beautiful grounds of porn sites, you might want to become a bitcoiner.

Recently, Visa and Mastercard —the two leading credit card companies in the world— revoked support for payment to Pornhub, after an investigation by The New York Times revealed that the website was being used as a kind of underground repository for videos of non-consensual, violent sex and even child pornography.

The magnitude of the investigation not only put the company’s financial stability in jeopardy in the short term but also changed the face of the porn industry, at least in the present: Searches for “non-mainstream” content such as incest, choking, feet, etc., are now more restricted than ever (in Pornhub and most of the mainstream adult sites), as it is the content uploaded by unverified users.

Cryptocurrencies To The Rescue

But being the giant that it is, Pornhub is not willing to give up. In the face of censorship from traditional payment companies, it has decided to resort to cryptocurrency as the only supported payment method for its premium services.

The cryptocurrency catalog showed by Pornhub is enough for almost any crypto enthusiast. The company supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Monero, Litecoin, NEM, XRP, Tron, Waves, ZCash, Verge, and the stablecoin USDT.

Cryptopotato was able to verify that Pornhub only supports payments in cryptocurrency on different countries; however, some discussions on social media indicate that they are the default option —not necessarily the only one.

Pornhub has not yet issued an official statement on its position regarding the decision of Visa and Mastercard. But the company did claim that such a discredit campaign was being promoted by anti-pornography groups.

“It is clear that Pornhub is being targeted not because of our policies and how we compare to our peers, but because we are an adult content platform. The two groups that have spearheaded the campaign against our company are the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly known as Morality in Media) and Exodus Cry/TraffickingHub. These are organizations dedicated to abolishing pornography, banning material they claim is obscene, and shutting down commercial sex work”

Is Pornhub the Magic Solution Cryptocurrency Enthusiasts Were Waiting For?

In the cryptocurrency circles, Pornhub’s decision was received with enthusiasm. In fact, some experts predicted this outcome even before it happened.

One of the first to speak out on the subject was Satoshi Nakamoto himself, who said Bitcoin could be beneficial for the adult industry:

Bitcoin would be convenient for people who don’t have a credit card or don’t want to use the cards they have, either don’t want the spouse to see it on the bill or don’t trust giving their number to “porn guys”, or afraid of recurring billing.

But even more recently, the founder of YCombinator, Pau Graham, said that credit card companies’ exercise of censorship policies could mark their death once customers switched to better alternatives such as crypto-currency.

Possible future scenario: Credit card companies become increasingly picky about who they’ll process transactions for, and this becomes the thing that tips the general public into using cryptocurrency in transactions, ultimately killing credit cards.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) December 11, 2020

The implications of Pornhub’s crypto-only policies are global. We are talking about the tenth most visited website in the world, surpassing Amazon, Netflix, and Reddit.

A report published in 2019 revealed that Pornhub receives more than 80,000 visits per second, transmitting more than 12 TB of information and benefiting a massive community of content creators and consumers. As an example, the videos of the amateur performer LittleReislin were viewed over 282 million times.

So, considering the circumstances, cryptocurrencies can be a very sexy business opportunity for Pornhub. But also, Pornhub can be an excellent doorway to the world of cryptocurrencies for millions of people worldwide.