Patreon taking a cut and not allowing adult content.
Payment processing and facilitating has tangible expenses (cost) and payment processors do not want to get involved with any companies involved with sordid industries (higher fraud).
Patreon adopting crypto cuts out the middleman processor and solves both problems.
But crypto ia too user-unfriendly at the moment, so usage would be very limited.
> Patreon taking a cut and not allowing adult content.
That's an issue with the payment manager, not the currency used for payment.
> Payment processing and facilitating has tangible expenses (cost) and payment processors do not want to get involved with any companies involved with sordid industries (higher fraud).
I agree completely.
> Patreon adopting crypto cuts out the middleman processor and solves both problems.
I disagree here. Presumably, the assessment that adult content is higher risk is valid, and Patreon would just assume that risk themselves if they didn't involve a third party payment processor, regardless of the currency used for payment.
Is your claim that fraud would be reduced because there's no real way to reverse a crypto transaction at the moment? If so, my stance is that accepting crypto would just open them up to other issues associated with fraud, and wouldn't be worth the effort.
> But crypto ia too user-unfriendly at the moment, so usage would be very limited.
I agree with this as well, which is another reason crypto isn't the solution here.
From my experience with setting up payment processing for white, grey, and very grey (legal) projects, processing fees are a given. They're actually very reasonable for anything white, and downright -- pun intended -- criminal if you want anything more discrete.
You will have fees no matter the payment processor, but crypto has the lowest if you don't need speed. Cutting out the processor achieves this first aim, even though fees are still necessary to run Patreon. Whether or not they're too high after this is another matter.
Adult content is primarily high risk because of credit card charge backs -- it's very rampant. Being illegal operations is another matter that concerns wire fraud and may cause uneccesary burden on the payment processor were it invovled in a criminal investigation.
The chargebacks, higher risk, and threat of investigation are all priced into more "lax" payment processor's fees. Crypto doesn't need to price this in because: it's practically non-reversible and there is no centralized body fronting the risk, i.e decentralized operations.
The blockchain network fronts the risk for wire fraud, so that no other entity, f.e Patreon or PayPal, need to.
I have no stance or argument, these are just some musings I wrote from my observations in the "industry."
Crypto is the preferred payment processor of high risk businesses. Everything else that caters to it is downright garbage in comparison.
> but crypto has the lowest if you don't need speed
Fees are a moot discussion when the underlying crypto is unstable. I'd much rather have higher fees than an unpredictable "currency" like bitcoin that could be worth 50% less one month than when it was collected.
A more approachable solution (for the general public, at least) would be a payment processing service that takes the risk of working with adult content creators. But that seems like a tall ask, especially for a problem that's pretty niche. Porn makes a lot of money, but not for the people who're just handling the payments. Or, rather, it might make them a good amount but it's probably the same as the profit from other industries, except with added risk.
The problem is that when Patreon allows high risk activities, those activities poison the well, and all "legit" processors must stop offering their services. Thereby, Patreon is now left with using more high-risk-tolerant processors, but paying the same high fees for all activities regardless of its actual risk.
