NSFW: After The Corporate Hype, Porn Gets Into Blockchain

Porn star Brenna Sparks is not the only one warming up to blockchain tech. Startups such as Spankchain as well as Vice Industries are attempting to fuse intimate desires with software undergirding cryptocurrencies such as ether. Maybe the long search for a real-world, ready-now blockchain technology use case is finally over. Then again, both user and performer could simply download wallets and exchange peer-to-peer electronic money, say bitcoin cash, without any startup companies between them.

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Blockchain Tech Goes Porno

Favorite ecosystem pornographer, Brenna Sparks, recently tweeted “I’m going to be shoving a dildo in my vagina on the Blockchain tomorrow. If that’s not the coolest thing ever, idk what is!”

For sure, the Laotian triple x-rated social media influencer has more or less cornered the crypto market. Her adventurism extends from between the sheets and on camera into the financial world, where she is known to give digital asset education videos topless. And she’s not half bad … in terms of her decentralized money knowledge.

“I’m going to trademark all of my crypto camshow games,” Ms. Sparks cheekily tweeted on the eve of stuffing herself with plastic, “I’m going to trademark-troll anyone who tries to profit off my genius. I’m going to be a Pablo Escobar of camshows, taking cuts off of other camshows. This is my town!”

Ms. Sparks is also something mildly deeper. She’s helping to fire up discussion, debate about blockchain usage. Corporate hype, the drug in fashion, is attaching any project to “blockchain.” Name it, and the two have been associated: blockchain and ice tea, blockchain and medical records, blockchain and ending refugee crises around the world, blockchain and religion. It’s endless. There’s just one problem. None of these dreamy projects have gotten off the ground and proven themselves to be anything more than slick marketing to venture capitalists who appear ever-more credulous.

Pornography could be a real-life, honest-to-goodness use case. Sort of. Ms. Sparks is also a savvy businesswoman, and she’s teamed up with the smile-inducing project titled, Spankchain. The idea is to perhaps end embarrassing credit card charges for late night indulgences while an in-the-flesh partner is unavailable, for example. Spankchain is essentially a micropayment processor for the masturbatory universe, client and talent.

Digital Equivalent of Anonymous Tipping

Last year, the company was thought highly enough to have gobbled up close to twenty thousand ether, over five million dollars, after trading its proprietary payment token, spankcoin, during an initial coin offering. That money reportedly has gone to develop the streaming system Ms. Sparks would eventually use to fulfill the promise of her tweets.

Vice Industry Token Inc. is yet another variation on the blockchain porn entertainment idea, and it too raised a boatload of cash, something like $20mil worth of ether in about a day. It’s Vice Industry Token (VIT) “can be used to create a resilient global utility token economy in which goods and services can be earned and traded internationally without any barriers whatsoever,” its quite lavish website boasts.

“People will be free to earn VIT, to buy VIT and consume with VIT as a cryptocurrency,” they continue. “VIT enables people to get paid to watch and consume content. VIT is an important disrupter of status quo systems and networks and is a vital link for interconnected global human prosperity.”

What it all basically comes down to is an ability for a performer to be paid well, timely, transparently without the usual minders. For users, confidence in quality talent attracted by the arrangement, plus a kind of financial anonymity, makes for a smoother experience. And so these types of platforms are developing tipping mechanisms with dancers much in the same way dollars would be slid behind garters of yore during a semi-private dance back in the day. That can happen again digitally thanks to on-chain solutions. Still, there’s also nothing stopping these same performers from operating their own cam and accepting bitcoin cash, for example, directly peer-to-peer, from an admirers’ electronic wallet to theirs, without participating in a blockchain startup. Go figure.

Is this a use case for blockchain? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images via Pixabay, Twitter, Brenna Sparks.

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