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.”
Kay believes porn.com’s increase in sales thanks to Bitcoin is the result of more than just hype. Sure, Bitcoin fans are rushing out to support a site that takes their preferred form of payment, but he also argues privacy and confidentiality are “paramount” for the majority of users joining an adult service.
Most porn is available for free, but premium services require forking over some dough, almost always accompanied by personal information like your full name and address. Bitcoin circumvents all that, although it doesn’t support recurring payments, which makes it impractical for renewable subscriptions.
Despite all this positivity, porn.com’s owners apparently aren’t interested in waiting around too long to see how everything plays out. The site’s owners are offering the domain for sale: $50 million, payable only in Bitcoin.
In 2007, porn.com became one of the most expensive domain names ever sold, when Detroit-based MXN paid $9.5 million to buy it. The only other domain to sell for more at the time was sex.com, which went for $12 million in 2005. Since then, a few more domains have beaten those records, but porn.com is still unquestionably popular, with or without Bitcoin.
See also – Bitcoin passes $1,000 mark for the first time, up over 62% in a week and 15 of the most expensive domains of all time
Top Image Credit: zcopley/Flickr
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