Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

> It's incredibly easy and cheap to send USDC or DAI to OnlyFans if they accept tokens on a sidechain (like Polygon or Fantom).

And then you quickly realize how useless USDC/DAI is when you want to pay your rent, for milk, etc.

> OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.

They can't because then KYC kicks in. This is exactly the problem with crypto at scale...you can't convert large scale amounts of crypto to fiat without someone noticing. Silkroad "worked" because there was no central authority taking money, just lots of a smaller drug dealers. Pablo Escobar wouldn't have been able to run his whole operation on crypto without getting seen.

View on HN

>> OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.

> They can't because then KYC kicks in. This is exactly the problem with crypto at scale.

Isn't KYC only a problem for people trying to hide their income? Onlyfans (and other legit businesses) would not have this problem as they would not be trying to hide their earnings.

KYC/AML isn't just for hiding income, it's about understanding the threshold for which someone wants to do business with an individual or company. For the same reason CC companies don't want to take on potentially illegal activity, no crypto exchange is going to take on the risk of business conducting $B's of dollars worth of crypto as its means to doing business.

This is essentially how Coinbase is allowed to operate - it doesn't have whales on its platform, just millions of KYC'd minnows who are individually low risk.

It is more chargeback and fradulent transactions processors are concerned with it. Those cost immediate money to them . Blockchain and altcoins solve that (for payment processing consumer, protection is lesser of course)

Illegal activities are only a problem if law enforcement makes it their problem, I don't think there is a case where law enforcement went after the payment provider for facilitating transactions for illegal activities, it is website/marketplace responsibility usually

> Blockchain and altcoins solve that (for payment processing consumer, protection is lesser of course)

> Illegal activities are only a problem if law enforcement makes it their problem

And now this is where AML kicks in. Now you're dealing with banks and not credit card processors as the source of the issue. No US bank is going to work with a company who is converting money from crypto to fiat at the level of billions of dollars.

Ren of billions if not lot more has already moved from USD into crypto coins. Banks have had very little say in it, and also no control how money is being used once USD is converted to crypto.

Exchanges are doing pretty well to convert USD to say BitCount, despite Bitcoin's unsavory reputation for illicit/ illegal transaction like ransomware payments that actually happen on the coin. Even single transactions in the millions barely register these days.

I am not sure porn as an industry earns in billions and even if it did the market is today large enough that it won't be sticking out all that much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com