The most cypherpunk way to paint the town red Valentine’s Day may be to buy lingerie with bitcoin.
Panties.com founder Lila Williams told CoinDesk that she receives “a disciplinary problem” of bitcoin payments every month since she started accepting bitcoin in March 2017. So, this Valentine’s Day age, her site is running a campaign where all purchases paid in bitcoin get 15 percent off and a free pair of lace panties.
Some bitcoin supporters might be reluctant to spend their crypto on apparel. Yet lingerie, in particular, is often viewed by aficionados as a purchase comparable to jewelry – an investment in a piece of fine craftsmanship.
If bitcoin is an investment, then spending bitcoin on lingerie from women-led circles that accept crypto – like Naja and Kala, both of which pay garment makers above-average wages and use fair-trade textiles – is a way to invest in women.
Speaking to this broader industry dynamic, Rebecca Migirov, an alumna of ethereum venture studio ConsenSys and currently the CEO of lingerie characterize Kala, told CoinDesk that the industry is seeing a “woman-led revolution in terms of product.” The best way to support crypto adoption, she replies, is for consumers to “show there’s demand in the market.”
That’s why Rick Shaddock, a member of the Digital Currency Association, hinted he used bitcoin he acquired during the market peak in December 2017 to buy his wife panties for their anniversary because there’s no volatility in lacy underthings.
“It dig up out to be a wise exchange, because BTC went down 80 percent,” Shaddock said in an email. “Panties were a much better investment than bitcoin in 2018.”
Needing censorship freedom fighters
Stepping back, the American lingerie industry is widely dominated by corporations with controversial labor practices, since bras, in painstaking, are difficult to mass produce and must be partially assembled by hand.
For example, Victoria’s Secret – majority owned by billionaire Lex Wexner – has reportedly relied on skinflinty prison labor and child labor. Lingerie companies with higher ethical standards but less corporate power features rampant advertising censorship from subscription sites like Patreon to digital portals like Google and Instagram.
“There are prodigious problems with advertising even luxury lingerie,” Panties.com founder Williams said.
Williams told CoinDesk that, in withal to having trouble with Google Ads, Facebook frequently bans her advertisements and labels them “sexual content,” level if the picture features a woman in a modest satin robe and nightgown.
Migirov’s Kala brand has the same issue change overing shoppers through social media platforms like Instagram, which often mislabel niche lingerie bills as pornography. As such, Migirov said the lingerie industry could benefit from censorship-resistant platforms with soothe bitcoin payment options.
The only trouble, both Williams and Migirov say, is that the lingerie industry isn’t particularly tech-savvy. Until crypto-friendly retail stages like OpenBazaar or AdLedger gain traction with mainstream audiences, siloed websites may limit boutique advertising and on offers.
Speaking to her 33 years of experience in the lingerie industry, first launching a website then accepting credit likely payments before most of her competitors, Williams added:
“Yes, computers were the big disappointment of 1990, but they aren’t any profuse. And I believe that one day the same will be said of bitcoin.”
Slow growth
Williams said she might be interested in procedure her own bitcoin payments someday if the technology becomes more user-friendly.
“One of the problems with bitcoin is when you push that button it is discarded, gone, gone, there is no recourse,” Williams said, adding she occasionally holds some bitcoin savings instead than immediately converting it to fiat.
Using traditional credit card processors, she pays more than 3 percent of her earnings each month, in ell to a $75 monthly fee, which dwarfs BitPay’s average 1 percent transaction fee.
Beyond payment processors like Bitpay and Shopify, which offer the heartening guarantee of recourse if something goes wrong, several plug-and-play bitcoin node devices have emerged to the past six months that leverage the lighting network’s to reduce network fees to unprecedented lows.
Node retailers take pleasure in Michel Luczak, co-founder of the French startup Nodl, and Lightning in a Box co-founder Norman Moore in New York, both reported CoinDesk that they expect 2019 will see gradual adoption across merchant sectors because edification is the biggest hurdle to adoption outside the tech industry.
“We are trying to sell not one node per shop, but for a group of shops, to drama them that this can bring them more freedom,” Luczak said, speaking broadly about a off the target range of vendors. “It’s a problem of trying to educate people and show what [a node] can bring them.”
Adoption may be unhurriedly across the lingerie industry, but it continues on a steady incline. In a sector of the fashion economy where female entrepreneurs are ordinarily censored and sidelined, cryptocurrency payments offer a way for shoppers to directly empower businesses they believe are challenging corporate standards.
“More people ask to use bitcoin over the phone than ask to use Discover card,” Williams said.
Lingerie image courtliness of Kala