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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   26170 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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As a little bit of a palate cleanser for the Annunciation shooting and Scotland All Female Braveheart Remake children-with-knives fracas, I thought we could talk about the financial state of internet whoredom:

Matthew Ball Xwitter Thread on OnlyFans Financials

(Mod question: If linking to a Xwitter thread, are there any standard operating procedures considering some people don't have it?)

Big 3 Takeaways:

  • Subscription revenue is down, but transactional revenue is up 95%. This means that OF "creators" are making their money, now, on actually bartering pseduo-social-sexual relationships with buyers. You can't just blast out nudes and collect rent, you have to engage with the audience. This, to me, seems like an actually defensible moat vis-a-vis AI OF alternatives.
  • Gross creator revenue surpasses the total league payroll of ALL SPORTS LEAGUES EXCEPT THE NFL. Culture War angle: The market value of female sexuality is greater than everything except the most intensively financialized male performance sport.
  • One creator (read: one single internet girl) has certified gross earnings in 2024 of $82 million. This puts her at the same level as the highest paid pro athletes, the managers of the largest hedge funds, banks, and private equity firms. The only people out earning her are founder-shareholders of giant public behemoths (Zuckerburg etc.) and this is through wealth appreciation rather than "straight cash homie!" income.

What actually got me to take the time to write this up was seeing this article on sports betting.

Sports betting, OnlyFans (etc.), and addiction level of marijuana use are, to me, the three horsemen of tolerated social degeneration. That these all disproportionately impact (there, I said it!) young males is all the more revealing -- society is still okay with disposing the disposables and is now more than happy to turn it into a multi-billion dollar industry.

This just made me think about how easy it must be to launder money through OnlyFans kind of services.

They take a 20% cut, and don't accept cash or crypto. That makes it a pretty unappealing option for money launderers. If the money is coming from stolen credit cards, platforms are quick to track down which creators have an abnormal chargeback rate and ban them.

Fundamentally OnlyFans is no different than Patreon, Gumroad, the Kindle store, etc. There are plenty of storefronts online where an individual can charge money for access to content. They all tend to follow pretty similar best practices for preventing fraud and money laundering.

20% still isn't that bad. Opening a hair dressing shop in order to launder money is a lot more work.

The biggest issue with OF money laundering is that there is no cash payment.

20% still isn't that bad. Opening a hair dressing shop in order to launder money is a lot more work.

Yeah but a lot of that is frontloaded and once you've got it ticking over you've got a very viable platform for turning dirty cash into bankable money. Also in a lot of Western countries you can potentially double dip by getting 'skilled employee' visas by curating your business to fit into whatever the overlords are saying is undersupplied, which opens up plentiful revenue streams on that side.

Auction houses for modern art don't usually take cash and take similar cuts, and that field is rife with questionable financial activity.

That is less money laundering than it is questionable payoffs for corruption and other acts though. The money being used has already been laundered, if necessary.

Hey, there was a Genshin Impact event about this last week!

Yeah once you're in the electronic payment loop it's fairly hard to engage in anything too discrete. The hard part is getting the cash and/or crypto into that loop, not channeling it once it's already in there.

My guess is the NFT craze (same as art market) was fueled by washing crypto. It died down though, and one can see what wallet paid for what, so I don't know how to wash bitcoin.

Coin tumblers is how they can be laundered. The coins are deposited into a big common pot, you get a code to get your coins out, and can cash them out from a new (clean) address. As long as you don't do something stupid like match the exact amount going into the pot when you withdraw, or withdraw immediately after depositing, then the coins on the outgoing side can't be traced to their origin.

But those coins are of course traceable to a tumbler you still need to find a way to spend them that won't block you for having used a tumbler.

See also WP: Tornado Cash for one implementation.

I think the main practical problem with that is that the IRS will still be curious about any big purchases you are making with crypto. A tumbler/mix can avoid getting linked to any specific criminal act, but you still are left to explain why you find yourself in possession of a fortune in crypto.

By contrast, NFTs/shitcoins offer a convenient explanation. Spend 10k$ of legitimate earnings on some worthless shite, then use your illegal funds to drive up the price and sell for 100k$. As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, you just got really lucky trading NFTs.

Of course, if someone were to look very carefully, they might notice that most of the buyers paid with coins which had recently gone through a tumbler.

Also, I could think of two ways tumblers could work. One would use N addresses for N customers, and it would not be obvious that someone used a tumbler at all. However, it might also look like you had just received money which was used to pay for CSAM or ransoms, which is probably not something you would like if you were a honest drug dealer.

The other alternative would be to use one address for all customers. Then it is obvious that you used a tumbler (because the pattern of "multiple addresses pay the same amount, then others withdraw the same amount" is very distinct even if none of the coins are known dirty), but all the receiving addresses would have plausible deniability.

you still are left to explain why you find yourself in possession of a fortune in crypto

That's where the OF laundry comes in, no?

So when the IRS calls you tell them what, that you manage exactly 1 successful onlyfans model who happens to give you a very generous portion of her income? Whole thing sounds like a lot of work unless the cash you want to launder is essentially already from pimping.

How exactly?

The 'money laundering' thing for crypto is just as much about people with vast amounts of money essentially stuck on the blockchain whether it be due to difficulties of offshoring or just already having bought a 10/10 lifestyle in their developing economy of choice and not really having any further utility from money. Who then get bored and yeet it on random shit since it's just numbers at that point.

Onlyfans doesn't really let you ingest money outside of the electronic banking system practically and even if you did it's taxed as regular income.

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