Help Me Brainstorm About Bitcoins

[rawTOP]

I've been thinking a bit about bitcoins. If you've never heard of them they're a digital currency that you buy/sell with real money but all transactions with bitcoins completely private and outside the prying eyes of Visa, etc. Basically it's the digital equivalent of cash - untraceable. Anyway, they're finally starting to mature and the tools to use them are starting to get to the point of being usable - so it seems like a decent time to sit down and think about how I might use them.

For starters they can be used along side credit cards - so I can try to get my friend to support them on rawTOP.tv and when I finally get around to selling physical products like t-shirts and lube they can be used along side credit cards there too.

What they're ideal for is selling things that are legal, but not OK with Visa. Visa can be really difficult with stuff like piss, scat, simulated rape, "race play", etc. Thing is, given Visa's rules, there's not much content like that out there. But it could be safely added to something like rawTOP.tv and only available to members who pay by bitcoin. But again, the issue is where do you get the content? People just haven't been producing it because it hasn't been salable.

Bitcoin is also perfect for things related to sites like this one. This site would NEVER pass review by Visa because it has user-generated content. That's completely legal, but not something Visa would touch. So some sort of premium membership would be possible here - but what would that entail? I'm a little hard-pressed to think of things that people would want to buy. I could change the label under your name ("virgin", "curious", etc.) to something of your choosing. I could offer ads-free browsing - but would anyone pay for that?

So help me brainstorm - what would you guys pay for that I don't currently offer? And remember the entry point into bitcoins is a little high right now - you have to do things like confirm a bank account. But once you do that everything is anonymous. But that could be a real barrier to entry - so the things to pay for need to be worth all that trouble.

[BC_Bottom]

Nothing is ever truly anonymous.

I am highly suspicious of just how anonymous bitcoins really are. The records exist to connect your bank account to your bitcoin account, and transaction records must exist as well. If the data exists, someone WILL figure out how to access it.

Read up on how silkroad got shutdown. Now imagine that instead of a shutdown, they took it over, and logged all the transactions for a few months, then started busting people.

Tell me it couldn't happen.

[bottombottoy]

Glad a saw this as im a computer guy and just getting into bit coins myself. Bitcoins if obtained properly can and are totally anonymous. However the more proper you try to obtain them the harder it gets.

Silk road was shut down do to many idots being complacent with what they were doing on the deep web (buying/selling hitman services, drugs, counterfeit merchandise and currency, escort services, pedophilia content, ect.) . not because of tracked bitcoins and the buyers were not arrested the service owner was arrested for hosting.

As far as accepting bitcoins, I think all it will be ,is just another form of payment for the site. The problem youll run into is not enough people use it yet to be a revenue generator. But I know some people here might like it.

just my two cents

[Blueyedsoul]

I am with Bottombottoy. I have been looking into this as well. I know just about the same as him. I do know that the concept is really gaining steam and catching on. Please let us know what your decision is. Either way, I am intrigued for many reasons and may check it out myself as I see my dollar be constantly depreciated; thank you very much Federal Reserve.

[PhoenixGeoff]

I've looked at bitcoins a bit (ugh...) and think they're interesting, but there are some problems.

The main one is the learning curve associated with them and the related question of the complexity of buying and selling them. This has improved a great deal over the past few years, but it's still a lot more complicated than buying something with a credit card.

Then there's the question of jyust how much privacy and anonymity they actually afford.

The two questions are related. I guarantee that if Bitcoins actually take off as a widely used medium of exchange, part of the "deal with the devil" that will allow the financial system to buy into it in a big way (and more importantly regulators to allow it) will be the loss of the privacy and anonymity that makes them attractive to your clientele in the first place.

Then there's the question of what your site will offer. If you want to produce porn that Visa won't touch, then you have to deal exclusively with Bitcoins. But then you're into a chicken-and-egg problem with your clientele (which is also the larger problem with Bitcoin itself). My guess is that the segment you're looking to go after (people in extremely hardcore gay fetish porn, who also have the ability and inclination to set up an account in Bitcoins to access what you're selling) is a pretty narrow one, but I could be wrong about that. 20 years ago, I'd have said the same thing about Treasure Island Media (though of course AFAIK, they've always taken Visa).

[skinster]

I don't know much about Bitcoin. You can tell me I don't know enough to talk about it.

But professional experience suggests that nowadays nothing electronic ever is truly anonymous/untraceable. Nothing. It only depends on time/resources available to the researching party and maturity of forensic/hacker tools used. Any web transactions, just like credit cards past the early days, over time become exposed if someone or some government gets really interested in it, or you come across a really negligent unsecured middle entity. It is somewhere in the server logs, online registers, behind an IP address, or a logon name in some 3rd party database.

There are already cases of law enforcement cracking down on dealers accepting Bitcoins for drugs and money laundering inside and out of US. Google 'Liberty Reserve Costa Rica' and 'Silk Road black market', you'd get a whiff of it. My suggestion is - treat it like credit cards, bank drafts, DRM, torr_ents, Paypal, et al. and play it safe. It is not a heavenly savior. Just a financial transaction tool. When it gets too popular, there will be some controlling entity with oversight to it. Service qualification criteria is different by any provider, some websites use 3rd party processors for their things - CCbill, etc. May be it is worth it, I don't know the economics of it. If things happen, they may just as well politically or procedurally price you out of their system like Visa.

Edited November 3, 2013 by skinster

[rawTOP]

I did some more reading... The issue is that as soon as you connect a bank account or credit card to a bitcoin account you're no longer anonymous. So I could set up something that only received bitcoins and I could be anonymous, but the people giving me bitcoins wouldn't be anonymous unless they were giving from unconnected accounts.

So it seems bitcoins aren't so much about anonymity. What they are useful for is things that are legal, but not Visa-approved - e.g. membership upgrades for this site, and borderline "obscene" porn.

My goal is to run sites that are fully-functional in a free mode, so if a die-hard fan really wanted the upgraded membership then they probably would jump through a few hoops. But I have to devise something compelling for them. Thoughts on that?

[bottombottoy]

Like i stated earlier, You can have anonymous bitcoins but the more anonymity you get with them the harder it becomes to obtain them. Also If you are paying in bitcions on the normal web, no matter how anonymous you acquired them they WILL NOT be anonymous.

On a side not you could launder them in a deep web bitcoin market. Also there is no log of what you buy with them only that you used them or transferred ownership.

[mike_thieriot]

Putting aside issues of anonymity and ease of implementation, bitcoin is poorly suited as a transaction medium simply because it is so volatile. What happens if you accept $50 worth of bitcoins as payment today, and by tomorrow they're now only worth $40?

[bottombottoy]

That is not entirely true. For the most part BitCoin has been trending positively. In the month of October it rose almost 100$ per BTC at a high of 220 BTC per USD, as per MTGOX. How ever its is a little volatile due to speculation. for instance in April of this year it drop 90$ but as you can see now it is well above what it was in April before it fell.