Porn.com and the Sacramento Kings are into Bitcoin
Two Bitcoin related stories over the last day, the first from The Next Web, “Porn.com’s marketing director: ‘I definitely believe that porn will be Bitcoin’s killer app”
From the article:
In December, porn.com started accepting Bitcoin for its premium services, and the virtual currency quickly came to account for 10 percent of sales. At the start of January, a post on Reddit’s Bitcoin subforum boosted the figure to 50 percent, before settling down to about 25 percent.
The tremendous interest has led David Kay, the marketing director at porn.com’s parent company Sagan, to talk very positively about the virtual currency: “I definitely believe that porn will be Bitcoin’s killer app,” he told The Guardian. “Fast, private and confidential payments.”
The article also mentions that Porn.com is for sale at a price tag of $50 million.
The second Bitcoin story is that the Sacramento Kings of the NBA are going to accept Bitcoin, Bloomberg reported:
The Sacramento Kings are the first professional sports team to accept Bitcoins, the virtual currency that’s grabbed the attention of technophiles and investors.
The basketball franchise partnered with payments-processor BitPay to accept the digital money in the Kings Team Store, which sells jerseys, T-shirts and paraphernalia. Fans will also be able to use Bitcoins to buy game tickets and merchandise online by March, BitPay said.
Payments are not “private and confidential.” Bitcoin works because there is an open and shared ledger of all Bitcoin transactions. One of the main “inventions” of Bitcoin is a shared ledger that is achieved through a decentralized consensus mechanism by “voting” using computer power of the Bitcoin miners. Transactions can be confidential if you do not link your identity to your Bitcoin addresses and those coins cannot be traced back to you via the ledger. Since Bitcoin addresses are free most veteran users use a different address for each and every transaction. there is also a thing called “change” where most transactions are split into 2 because all inputs and outputs must total zero. It is a bit too complicated to fully explain here but Bitcoin is not automatically confidential nor is it automatically traceable.
If you want to make all your transactions fully visible, such as some kind of fundraising drive, that is very easy. Simply reuse the same Bitcoin address and search it at a web site like blockchain.info and you can see the balance and all transactions in and out and which addresses funds were sent. If you want to “mix” these coins to achieve confidentiality then you can run up against Anti Money Laundering Laws.