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>Should we be telling all the sex workers and adult entertainers that we should be better at "building trust" Given that the reason there was controversy aroun

>Should we be telling all the sex workers and adult entertainers that we should be better at "building trust" Given that the reason there was controversy around OnlyFans was because of scandals about child sex trafficking, I'd say yes. The rest of society should be able to trust that OnlyFans is not providing a platform for trafficking children; crypto payments do nothing to solve that problem, they may even make it worse. They're really good at increasing fees for middlemen though, and it's very frustrating to hear them pitched as a solution to something when the original problem seems to so often get lost in translation.

rglullis 5y ago
> controversy around OnlyFans. I'm not going to argue about the specifics of OnlyFans because I'm honestly not aware of the details. In any case, you are missing the point. I could talk about any "legit" adult site and all the extra fees they have to pay because of the risk and credit card fraud associated with the industry, or I could even just use a more "innocent" example such as Gumroad or Steam, who sell only digital content, and would benefit from crypto-payment systems: no chargebacks, no fees for micropayments, no currency conversion fees, etc. > they're really good at increasing fees for middlemen though. I can make transfers now of any amount of ETH/DAI for exactly $0.19. [0] This is already competitive with credit card transfers for less than $5. Raiden [1] released today a new version of their client, so you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free (fractions of a cent if the transfer needs to be mediated by other nodes, but basically free otherwise). [0]: https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/ [1]: https://raiden.network https://raiden.network
- shatteredgate 5y ago
  I can't see how that is the point, I honestly don't understand what cryptocurrency provides there at all. I've seen nothing about it that suggests it has some kind of novel solution to fraud prevention; no chargebacks just means the customer now has no recourse from a fraudulent vendor, so you've pushed the cost of fraud all onto them. It's also possible to get no fees for micropayments and no currency conversion fees with a more traditional virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on top of that. >Raiden released today a new version of their client, so you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free I've read some of their blog series: https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-explained-489b429fcd90 https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-explained-... It seems like an interesting way to do peer-to-peer lending, that is not specific to cryptocurrency. I would be interested to see the same algorithm deployed on a credit card network to see if the fees can be reduced even farther.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    > no chargebacks just means the customer now has no recourse from a fraudulent vendor. This is the realm of the social layer, not the technology. You can add an escrow system or even use a reputation-based approach as a way to manage fraud, but the idea is that it is optional. If all you want is to buy some cheap and fast content online, you can't do that with credit card but you can with crypto. > It's also possible to get no fees for micropayments Please point me to one micropayment solution that does not involve middlemen and/or extraordinarily high fees (in proportion to the value of the transaction). > and no currency conversion fees with a more traditional virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on top of that. Problem statement: you are a software company in the UK and you want to contract a developer based in Argentina. She wants to receive (in Pesos) the equivalent to 500GBP. Find me some non-crypto alternative where she can get that amount with minimal loss. We can compare notes later if you want, but I can tell you a crypto alternative where the cost is less than 0.3%.
    - shatteredgate 5y ago
      >You can add an escrow system or even use a reputation-based approach as a way to manage fraud, but the idea is that it is optional. If all you want is to buy some cheap and fast content online, you can't do that with credit card but you can with crypto. I don't understand how this follows at all, the only thing you've added here is that you can't get your money back if the "cheap and fast content" turns out to be a scam. I can't understand why anyone would want this to be optional. >Please point me to one micropayment solution that does not involve middlemen and/or extraordinarily high fees (in proportion to the value of the transaction). This would be any virtual currency where you buy it to spend directly with the market operator, the kind you see on prepaid cards in retail stores. That's in the context of a vendor like OnlyFans that runs a marketplace of sorts; if you consider that to be a middleman and you only want some completely peer-to-peer solution then that's a different question with different risks from what we were originally discussing, and most cryptocurrency doesn't fit that definition anyway. >Find me some non-crypto alternative where she can get that amount with minimal loss. We can compare notes later if you want, but I can tell you a crypto alternative where the cost is less than 0.3%. I'm not really interested to search around for every exchange I can find and make a comparison, but I would be very skeptical of any crypto-based solution claiming they can lower fees here. The costs of doing bank transfers are the same regardless of whether you use crypto as the medium to move the money. There's probably something else they're doing. This is getting towards my main problem with these crypto conversations, we're moving away from what the technology actually brings and instead we're getting into only comparing fees without considering any of the other details of what we're actually doing. I find this to be a pointless angle to take; there isn't going to be a period where we use cryptocurrency and we can totally avoid fees, because an explicit goal of every cryptocurrency I've seen is actually to make it so participants can't avoid paying fees. And when you get into smart contracts, every participant can now start acting as a middleman and charging more of their own fees in addition to the transaction and gas costs you pay to the network.

rglullis 5y ago

> controversy around OnlyFans. I'm not going to argue about the specifics of OnlyFans because I'm honestly not aware of the details. In any case, you are missing the point. I could talk about any "legit" adult site and all the extra fees they have to pay because of the risk and credit card fraud associated with the industry, or I could even just use a more "innocent" example such as Gumroad or Steam, who sell only digital content, and would benefit from crypto-payment systems: no chargebacks, no fees for micropayments, no currency conversion fees, etc. > they're really good at increasing fees for middlemen though. I can make transfers now of any amount of ETH/DAI for exactly $0.19. [0] This is already competitive with credit card transfers for less than $5. Raiden [1] released today a new version of their client, so you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free (fractions of a cent if the transfer needs to be mediated by other nodes, but basically free otherwise). [0]: https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/ [1]: https://raiden.network https://raiden.network

shatteredgate 5y ago
I can't see how that is the point, I honestly don't understand what cryptocurrency provides there at all. I've seen nothing about it that suggests it has some kind of novel solution to fraud prevention; no chargebacks just means the customer now has no recourse from a fraudulent vendor, so you've pushed the cost of fraud all onto them. It's also possible to get no fees for micropayments and no currency conversion fees with a more traditional virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on top of that. >Raiden released today a new version of their client, so you can have decentralized transfers for virtually free I've read some of their blog series: https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-explained-489b429fcd90 https://medium.com/raiden-network/raiden-protocol-explained-... It seems like an interesting way to do peer-to-peer lending, that is not specific to cryptocurrency. I would be interested to see the same algorithm deployed on a credit card network to see if the fees can be reduced even farther.
- rglullis 5y ago
  > no chargebacks just means the customer now has no recourse from a fraudulent vendor. This is the realm of the social layer, not the technology. You can add an escrow system or even use a reputation-based approach as a way to manage fraud, but the idea is that it is optional. If all you want is to buy some cheap and fast content online, you can't do that with credit card but you can with crypto. > It's also possible to get no fees for micropayments Please point me to one micropayment solution that does not involve middlemen and/or extraordinarily high fees (in proportion to the value of the transaction). > and no currency conversion fees with a more traditional virtual currency, crypto only adds costs on top of that. Problem statement: you are a software company in the UK and you want to contract a developer based in Argentina. She wants to receive (in Pesos) the equivalent to 500GBP. Find me some non-crypto alternative where she can get that amount with minimal loss. We can compare notes later if you want, but I can tell you a crypto alternative where the cost is less than 0.3%.
  - shatteredgate 5y ago
    >You can add an escrow system or even use a reputation-based approach as a way to manage fraud, but the idea is that it is optional. If all you want is to buy some cheap and fast content online, you can't do that with credit card but you can with crypto. I don't understand how this follows at all, the only thing you've added here is that you can't get your money back if the "cheap and fast content" turns out to be a scam. I can't understand why anyone would want this to be optional. >Please point me to one micropayment solution that does not involve middlemen and/or extraordinarily high fees (in proportion to the value of the transaction). This would be any virtual currency where you buy it to spend directly with the market operator, the kind you see on prepaid cards in retail stores. That's in the context of a vendor like OnlyFans that runs a marketplace of sorts; if you consider that to be a middleman and you only want some completely peer-to-peer solution then that's a different question with different risks from what we were originally discussing, and most cryptocurrency doesn't fit that definition anyway. >Find me some non-crypto alternative where she can get that amount with minimal loss. We can compare notes later if you want, but I can tell you a crypto alternative where the cost is less than 0.3%. I'm not really interested to search around for every exchange I can find and make a comparison, but I would be very skeptical of any crypto-based solution claiming they can lower fees here. The costs of doing bank transfers are the same regardless of whether you use crypto as the medium to move the money. There's probably something else they're doing. This is getting towards my main problem with these crypto conversations, we're moving away from what the technology actually brings and instead we're getting into only comparing fees without considering any of the other details of what we're actually doing. I find this to be a pointless angle to take; there isn't going to be a period where we use cryptocurrency and we can totally avoid fees, because an explicit goal of every cryptocurrency I've seen is actually to make it so participants can't avoid paying fees. And when you get into smart contracts, every participant can now start acting as a middleman and charging more of their own fees in addition to the transaction and gas costs you pay to the network.