A lot of th epromise of crypto to a lot of enthusiasts is freedom - freedom from traditional oversight. This can be both good, like being able to send money to people in countries with awful currencies, or bad, like when you don't have regulations to protect people. So it is kind of disappointing to see Coinbase basically reinvent traditional banking but on the blockchain, because then, what's the point?
You don't need Coinbase to move crypto. Sex workers were some of the first to use Bitcoin as an alternative payment. Meaning, a direct wallet to wallet payment.
However, some have indicated that it's not great. Many of their customers supposedly are drunk men. They greatly struggle to make the payment this way, and you can imagine that in this context it can't take too long, or the "mood" is gone.
They are trying to get normalized with mainstream America, not get normalized with the usual crypto fanatics. That means they need to have access to fiat financial systems which in turn means they need to not be associated with anything the old guard generally doesn't like. That includes adult content.
Sex work isn't controversial, it's just a magnet for fraud. The first thing someone does with a stolen payment method is usually go and spend it on porn - or if you're advanced, sets up a money laundering scheme to spend it on "porn" and circulate it back to themselves. It's just the nature of the business.
Really? The first thing someone does with a stolen credit card is to go pay for porn? I would guess so few people pay for porn willingly that that would be a great way to trip all sorts of fraud alarms.
Anecdotally, I had a credit card number get compromised a few years ago. They used it at a Babys-R-Us on the opposite coast. I'm pretty sure they weren't buying porn.
I think this is thinking about it backwards. The payment industry are discriminating here on the proportion of payments to porn sites which are fraudulent or disputed, not the proportion of fraudulent or disputed charges which are to porn sites. It can be simultaneously true that the vast majority of fraudulent/disputed payments are not to porn sites and that a very large portion of payments to porn sites are fraudulent or disputed.
A stolen credit card number doesn't generally go and "spend big" - they go buy luxury items they want. There's no end of "my credit card got done and they went and spent $50 on gas and beer" stories.
At the other side of that there is equally no end of "went and signed up for premium porn content" or PPV cable or whatever - and that's what payment processors tend to get unhappy about.
That makes sense. I've tripped fraud detection alarms on one or another of my cards a few times, and, almost every time I can remember, it was at a gas pump.
