Coindesk just ran a series of articles about the relationship between cryptocurrency and sins. The sins vary from money laundering to crime and porn and, in an interesting variant, the financial system has only ever progressed thanks to crime and sex, something I’ve written about a lot before.
Here are a few key paragraphs from Coindesk’s discussions:
Though crypto is certainly no cure-all, many in the cannabis industry have found it to be a useful tool … take, for example, Crypto Cannabis Club, “a social club for cannabis consumers that basically uses NFTs as the membership card,” CEO Ryan Hunter said
Can Crypto Save the Cannabis Industry?
“A lot of people in the firearms market, when they hear bitcoin or crypto, they automatically assume that it's untraceable and private. But they don't realize that blockchain is a ledger. Everything is there.”
As the Gun Market Moves to Crypto, Deeply Private Owners Reveal More Than They May Know
“We’ve had so many difficulties with MasterCard, Visa, Stripe, PayPal,” he said. “None of them want to work with us … we’re not doing anything bad other than bringing people together to teach them about sex … “we’re really looking at the future of this company, the future of this community, and saying: ‘Well, what can we do with crypto? What can we do with a [decentralized autonomous organization]? Can we give full autonomy to the organizations and make decisions? Can we have our own currency and work with them?’”
In 2021, $14 billion in cryptocurrency value was tied to illicit activities. We aren’t really sure how much money is spent on doing illegal stuff, for obvious reasons, but it is probably a significant percentage (like, 22%) of the world’s $80 trillion of gross domestic product. Compared with $17 trillion, $14 billion is hardly a drop in the bucket.
Criminal Crypto Use Is Growing, but That’s Just Half the Story
OnlyFans has repeatedly changed its guidelines regarding sexually explicit content and previously caught flak for blaming creators for customer chargebacks … and that’s why crypto – a permissionless, decentralized, censorship-resilient payment system – seems to make sense.
How to Pay for Porn With Crypto
It turns out that people like free money. With their initial model of casino games, [ICE Poker, the casino-that’s-not-a-casino], saw around 200 daily active users. When they flipped to a model of play-to-earn, the daily users exploded to 12,000. ICE Poker is now the most highly-visited site in Decentraland, accounting for 60% of the metaverse’s total traffic.
The Metaverse Casino That Wasn’t
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...
