Pornhub and the Value of Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Pornhub and the Value of Bitcoin

papers.ssrn.com

29 pointsprostoalex8 comments

"In general, I find that deplatforming Pornhub increased the value of cryptocurrency accepted on the site by 21.0 percent on average. Deplatforming Pornhub increased the value of bitcoin by 45.7 percent, while the the value of the other thirteen cryptocurrencies accepted on the site increased by 19.1 percent on average."

I can't really follow all the paper's logic to its conclusion but it seems to me that the conclusion was due to an over generalization of the data so it's not valid. Can someone weigh in with their thoughts?

Which over generalization is that? Is it an error in assumptions or an error in methodology?

Methodology, I think it starts out with the assumption that Pornhub is the reason for the move. Which invalidates the conclusion to me.

That's fair. That the treatment was the cause of the effect is an assumption made by differences in differences. Is this because you see it as a lack of evidence that Pornhub was the causative event, or was there another event that took place that you had in mind?

>Which over generalization is that?

"deplatforming Pornhub increased the value of bitcoin"

Because correlation does not equal causation, complicated-seeming math and control groups notwithstanding.

I'm having a hard time finding the use of correlation in the paper. The author uses differences in differences analysis which also does not use correlations. Was there a correlation analysis performed that you found?

It's amazing how porn really affects everything in subtle ways. If you don't really watch it, discuss it, or even know what the trends are, it's really confusing, because it seems like every technology is largely driven by porn.

In the past it seemed like the tech that came from it was great, the rest of us got higher resolutions to watch regular movies.

But now that there's way more non-porn drivers of consumer tech, it doesn't seem like anything interesting is coming from it.

I suspect the privacy at all costs culture we have(As opposed to the previous way of thinking where the internet was pretty much a public place, and fingerprinting wasn't really considered serious) is partly because of porn.

Which actively holds back adoption of new tech like IoT and new browser features, because nobody wants even a vague chance they might leak history or get hacked to listen in a bedroom, they'd rather not have the tech at all.

And of course, cryptocurrency.

Plus VR, which I'm not entirely sure will ever be as big as normal gaming and so far is pretty disappointing(The normal kind, I've never seen the porn kind) AR is a lot more interesting.

The FOSS scene is so negative on the idea of connecting everything and making tech more powerful. Porn seems to have gone from pro tech to anti tech.

This is the first time ever seeing a paper here from where I used to study - Florida Atlantic University.

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