What Pornhub's capitulation to credit card companies says about cryptocurrency in late-2020

Pornhub just removed around 80% of its hosted content in order to get back into the good graces of the established payment channels of the world. For a content delivery platform, deleting 4/5ths of its product from view is a drastic move.

Background

On December 4th, The New York Times published a piece by Nicholas Kristof with very serious claims of PornHub profiting from illegal content including child exploitation. He waded a little further into murky anti-porn moral territory (misogyny is not illegal) but that's another discussion. Clearly there is a problem with the illegal stuff. Based on what he found, Kristof called upon Pornhub's payment processors to cease doing business with them, and less than a week later they did.

Impact

Pornhub clearly needed to work harder at removing illegal content, because even making a penny from serving ads on something like that is unacceptable. It's hard to blame those making decisions for Visa and Mastercard for accepting the call to demonetize them.

Clearly the owners of Pornhub are feeling it. And other porn platforms similar to them are surely taking note (and I would guess doubling their moderating teams). However there are more people impacted by the removal of PH's revenue stream than just its stakeholders. Samantha Cole writing for Vice makes the case that credit processors pulling out of porn puts sex workers in danger.

Crypto alternatives?

Pornhub has dabbled in cryptocurrencies for several years now. Up until recently these have been low-adoption or scam tokens. Perhaps with some insight into what was coming, they got a little more mainstream and added Bitcoin and Litecoin payments in September. Seemingly in response to the present situation, they have just added support for Monero too.

It's good to see another company that has become a household name, porn-related as it may be, take cryptocurrency this seriously. However, is it enough?

No alternative, yet

Pornhub's removal of most of their own content in order to appease their credit gods is akin to a religious sacrifice. The dollar is their Lord, and there is none beside it. Despite opening the door to cryptocurrencies, even some of the most popular ones, they still have to give in to extreme self-destruction to have a chance at being able to deal in the Almighty Dollar again.

State of crypto in 2020

Over 10 years since Bitcoin's launch, there is still much ground to gain towards cryptocurrency adoption and commercial use beyond speculation. Pornhub's current situation is almost a dream for pushing adoption and use of alternatives to fiat money, but their religious fealty to the dollar makes it clear: Crypto is still far from where it needs to be for generating real revenue.