Sure Verge might have palmed a few hands to make it happen but we all know nothing in life comes for free. Something you might have to do thing others find deplorable in other to make shit happen. Especially when the long lasting effect of such act is exceedingly positive. I personally see this as a win for crypto, especially for privacy related coin. If their is a bump in mindgeek's figure , i bet other privacy coin will be heavily courted by other adult content providers. In all, it aids in encouraging adoption.
I'm a big fan of verge but there are a few problems with everything.
1. The Partnership isn't bad for crypto and exposure for Verge. The issue is how profitable will it be? everyone keeps saying its genius due to the amount of traffic, but how much of that traffic looks for anything other than porn, ads are annoying to them. Also who pays for porn these days? a very small amount and then out of that small amount who needs to keep it private. One of the marketing phrases was 'now you don't have to hide your porn usage from mum'. I mean cmon.
2. The partnership may have pigeon holed them from potentially bigger things. Other companies have boards and shareholders and they are most likely not wanting to partner with someone asociated with the porn industry. could be putting all your eggs in the one basket.
3. Before the announcment, over the weekend they transfered the coins received in donation from the community to an online wallet on Binance. Now that was a major red flag they were looking to sell some before the announcment, sure enough 15mins before the announcement and the mother of all dumps happen. That is a slap in the face of the community, remmember that was the 'communities' coins they did that with.
4. They had a hard fork after the hacking last week and refused to aknowledge it. That caused all types of issues with mining pools and a lot of coins were lost from miners that were mid way through.
5. Having an announcment for an announcment is inside trading. They knew that would push the price up before the day (buy the rumours sell the news) for Point 4 to occur.
All that has really left a sour taste in my mouth, its shady practice and its throwing a lot in the face of the Verge community yet people in the community dont seem to care....
Trust, I get it man. Of late there has been a lot of issues with verge that i find annoying but my praise is strictly restricted to the proclaimed partnership. Sure an immediate profit might not be noticed, but the long term effect will be overwhelming positive. Don't underestimate the power of porn. Like you mentioned, this sites do log some serious traffic globally. You will have individuals that were unaware about anything but Bitcoin soon talking about verge.
Also most companies that would have an issue with adult content will likely go the ripple route before considering verge. This companies you mentioned are not interested in promoting privacy, cos privacy in away negates capitalism to a sense. In the perfect world, promoting our privacy will be ideal to this companies but in the fucked up world we currently live in, privacy is a niche subject to this huge establishments and the few that encourage it is the adult content provider.
Again, don't understatement the power of porn in pushing tech products forward, we all have heard about the vhs/betamax saga. The adult industry can be credited for investing heavily on virtual reality project and last but not least, the adult industry popularized electronic online payment
And to the guy above, yes i know verge is not truly a privacy coin but it's been promoted as such thus the reason i use the word. We all know golf isn't technically a sport but more of an advanced leisure activity but that doesn't stop sport center from broadcasting golf. Am not celebrating verge as a privacy coin, rather am celebrating the partnership which is a win for crypto in general. The whole plan is to push the adoption rate, and this is a small step forward towards that goal.