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Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.
A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)
Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.
EDIT: This may be the rationale for the change.
This is the kind of problem that crypto currencies were meant to solve.
To elaborate:
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to have sympathy for these websites/users, because the failure of traditional payment processors to handle this sort of thing was recognized and predicted before cryptocurrencies existed. When bitcoin/cryptocurrency was first released/invented it wasn't a bunch of people saying "oh look at this cool toy, we have no idea what its for, but it seems neat!" No, they were specifically saying "yay! we have solved this hard problem of digital payments that has been plaguing us for the last decade on the internet! These are the cool things we will now be able to do: [same list as above plus other things]."
For any kind of business that once needed cash to function: switch to crypto or die a slow death as payment processors leave you.
I think the bigger problem for shady companies switching to crypto is that they are going to have expenses they cannot pay in crypto, necessitating entities that will swap their crypto for fiat. These entities are almost certainly, if they do business in the US, required to abide by KYC and AML laws. Maybe randos looking at the blockchain don't know address X is Pornhub, or whatever, but whoever is changing Pornhub's crypto into dollars has a legal obligation to know. So the angle of attack can easily shift from payment processors to whoever is doing their currency exchange. Crypto is censorship proof as long as you only ever have to use crypto but that's not a sustainable state of affairs for most people or businesses.
It seems quite easy to interpose a cut-out for crypto-to-fiat conversion, so that your only real exposure is to tax authorities. The only challenge is ensure there are enough socially acceptable crypto use cases that you don't draw too much attention.
I am not sure what you mean by a "cut-out." Like, a third party that works with the crypto exchange doing the conversion instead of Pornhub? Unless that third party is also paying all of Pornhub's cash bills it seems like that would be the same as working with the exchange. I guess the idea is the exchange might object to Pornhub but not the third party?
Yes, something along those lines:
When big money's at stake, plausible deniability is usually all that's needed to keep things moving.
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