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Some people just can't seem to get their heads around bitcoin. But last week, the digital, untraceable, autonomously minted, and decentralized currency hit a new plateau. After a rollercoaster ride of its market price, bitcoin has breached the public view. Last week, within ten minutes of each other, a couple of baby boomer friends told me they'd seen the New York Times' story about the Winklevoss twins, exclaiming their thrill in watching the convergence of our disparate cultural worlds.
After last week's exciting collapse, doubtful vibes have swarmed the crypto-currency like never before. I'm hearing twice as many people make twice as many loose remarks; interrogating its real-world practicality, its economic buoyancy, and interviewing a few monopolists that could single-handedly cause a massive bitcoin-collapse or digi-depression. Despite ongoing scrutiny, some have stepped across that jagged line of uncertainty, embracing the shifty step-cousin of a currency.
OkCupid, the best way to meet singles online (in my experience), and MetArt, the aspirational, high-fashion label of porn, have both adopted bitcoin for premium subscription services. Venture Beat is hurting its head over the development, rejecting the idea as nonsensical. "Bitcoin users are probably the last people who would be into online dating — but don’t tell that to OkCupid," a VB blogger seemed to grab out of thin air. Now listen, I do consider myself an outsider, a dweller in the margins of society, and I have explained the concept of bitcoin to an unbeknownst internet date or two. Yet I disagree with the idea that the ordinary bitcoin player would have no interest in online dating. I personally know a handful that are interested and have online dating profiles.
OkCupid daters might largely be unknowledgeable of bitcoin, or how to use it, but I can only see the sites' provision of the new payment method as an integral milestone in the currency's mainstream proliferation.
If you didn't know, the fastest-growing dating site which is mostly free, has a premium monthly service it calls 'A-List.' The perks of the monthly $10 subscription allows users to send messages to others with full mailboxes, to remain hidden while scanning profiles, and a few other features. I've been an A-List member of OkCupid for over a year now. And as humiliating as it is to admit that, I feel it's my duty in making some sense of the issue at hand. While I probably won't be changing my auto-payment method of gaining A-List status to bitcoin anytime soon, it warms my little heart to watch the development.
In the meantime, when I'm not getting any tail on OkCupid, I want to watch some cutting-edge, high-art pornography (something that is likely available at more affordable via bitcoin from a deep web site). Now that option is on the table, too. MetArt [NSFW] will accept $15 worth of bitcoin for 30 days of access to its award-winning erotic content.
What does all of this mean? An embrace of the crypto-currency that was described early on as facilitating money-laundering, child porn consumption, wildlife trading, illicit drug trafficking, and every other imaginable tawdry trapping on the virtual black market. Like Bitcoin Central, that first place to accept deposits that are insured by the French regulatory equivalent to the US' FDIC. While I had my disagreements with such a bank, due to the ethos of bitcoin being a decentralized, unregulated currency, I understand the arguments that appeared shortly after I published a critique of bitcoin's first accredited bank. That bitcoin had yet to see a large scale proliferation and adoption by mainstream consumers, I'll take stance alongside such an argument.
"Is bitcoin is here to stay?" Some still ask the question. If recent massive fluctuations of capital through the currency isn't evidence enough, it still fuels the argument: If bitcoin doesn't work, something very much like it probably will. There's always Litecoin, a similar system to bitcoin, and Mintchip, Canada's fiat-backed digital currency—and with sites like OkCupid and MetArt signing on to bitcoin, mass digital currency acceptance doesn't seem so far away. It's time to claim some firsts for the digital currency outside of the deep web, and they're right on top of it.