This:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1vlbgt/strip_club_in_portland_accepts_bitcoin/And
http://cointelegraph.com/news/112825/its-raining-bitcoins-on-strippers-in-tampa
Kasmir Hill on her week living on Bitcoin went to a strip club (
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/05/11/living-on-bitcoin-a-year-later-all-grown-up-and-a-little-naughty/ ):
So here I am in front of the Deja Vu Centerfolds, rolling deep with my two friends from abroad and two civil liberty lawyer friends we’ve picked up along the way. The outside of the bricked building is pretty tame compared to the flashing signs and fleshy photos we passed up the street; there’s a dim sign and posters with women’s faces. Motorcycle Man meets us out front and ushers us in. I realize later that had we not been with a VIP, I would have had to pay a cover charge, and I would not have been able to do so in Bitcoin. I’ve never been to a strip club before but I’ve seen so many in the backgrounds of shows involving police officers or detectives that it feels oddly familiar. There are many fully clothed men and many skimpily clad women. One on the stage is fully nude and doing a sexier version of ‘The Worm.’ There are two poles; she’s not currently using them. Because it is a fully nude club — rather than just a topless one — there is no alcohol allowed. This seems like an odd rule, but we roll with it, ordering cokes and Sprite-flavored soda waters in a glass walled VIP room that looks over the main half circle in front of the stage. I am oddly comfortable. The ladies are paid to be here, dancing and nude. I’m paid to be here and write about it.
Motorcycle Man introduces me to Rocky, a tall brunette from Hawaii who spends a month at a time at strip clubs in Texas, California, and Las Vegas, places where an exotic dancer can make the most money, she says. She’s wearing black underwear and very little of a white cotton t-shirt, and has incredible pec muscles that make her artificially enlarged breasts dance. She carries around a tiny pink sparkly treasure chest with a handle, that looks like something a little girl would keep lunch in, but hers is full of cash and her iPhone. Rocky is joined by a woman who I think is named Candy. They give me a lesson in this strip club’s economics: the woman pay the club for their time on stage, as well as for the use of the private rooms where they give lap dances. They keep the cash they get. But the club also has something called “Vu Bucks.” Patrons can use their credit cards to buy them, but they pay a 10% fee, so they get $100 for $110. “It’s like Monopoly money,” says Candy. When the women cash the Vu Bucks in at the end of the night, they pay a 10% fee, so $100 becomes $90.
When the payment mechanism is in the control of the strip club, a lot of what the women get paid gets skimmed off. Rocky and Candy want to talk about Bitcoin and about why it would be a good idea to take it. I ask them if they ever get paid in non-U.S. currencies. “Japanese and once, Pakistani,” says Rocky. “It was annoying, because I had to go to the hassle of taking it to an exchange, and it turned out all the Pakistani money was worth like nothing.”
So if they had international clientele — who actually had Bitcoin — it would be better, I say, because it is a universal currency and they would know what it was worth. Or if they and their clients don’t want to be walking around with a bunch of cash. They ask me to explain what Bitcoin is exactly, and when I do — that it’s a virtual money created five years ago which runs on a network of computers around the world, that it can be sent digitally and cashed in for local currency through exchanges — they say it sounds like Vu Bucks. Except there’s not someone taking 20% out of the transaction.
Rocky says she wants to dance for me and be paid in Bitcoin. She pulls up a QR code, but then explains it’s not her QR code but Motorcycle Man’s and that he is going to give her cash. I turn to Motorcycle Man, and complain that he has misled me as this club’s early adoption. “I’m trying to get the club to start accepting it, but I’m starting from the bottom up, with the women. But the first hurdle is they all have iPhones,” he says. Apple does not allow apps in its store that involve the transmission of Bitcoin, due to the convoluted regulatory environment for the stateless currency around the country and the world.
I tell her she should open her own wallet, so she creates one on Blockchain.info, slowly typing in her email address and password thanks to long, obstructing green fingernails. I’m re-impressed at the ease of opening an account. It takes literally 30 seconds for a stripper who only recently learned about Bitcoin to create an address on the block chain and be set to get paid in the currency. It’s pretty easy to use the phone’s Safari browser on Blockchain.info’s website to receive Bitcoin, as it only involves pull up a QR code for her wallet, but trying to use the website to scan someone else’s QR code to send Bitcoin is clunky.
I think I’m the first person to pay a stripper with Bitcoin, but I’m corrected on Twitter. In the summer of 2011, a then 25-year-old electrical engineer went on a road trip from Connecticut to Los Angeles, using only Bitcoin the whole way. He mainly did this by meeting up with people from the Bitcoin community along the way to whom he paid BTC to buy things for him in U.S. dollars. He got over 500 BTC in donations from supporters; that was worth $1,750 then, but is valued at $225,000 today. He tells me by email that he spent some of them in a strip club in New Orleans.
“I met up with a Bitcoiner from the forums, EvanR, and we spent the evening drinking, dancing and telling everyone about Bitcoins. A gentleman guarding the strip club door extolled the charms of his establishment and we decided to check it out,” he says. “I should note that we did NOT tip ‘real Bitcoins’ here! This was before smartphone wallets and it was impractical.”
They had Bitcoin scratch off cards that contained the code needed to unlock a value of 1 BTC — worth about $3.50 at the time — on the block chain. “One of the dancers was remarkably interested in Bitcoin and diligently listened to our explanations and projections,” he says. “I explained that during my road trip I was honor bound to not use cash but would she like some Bitcoin tips? She would, yes; so we spent maybe an hour drinking and talking to her. We tipped somewhere between 6 and 8 of these 1BTC cards.”
That’s an excellent way to give out a digital currency while still managing to cop a feel. I leave way less Bitcoin but far more US dollar equivalent than they did at the strip club. Rocky, like most Bitcoin-accepting merchants, converts it almost immediately to cash, selling hers to Motorcycle Man at the end of the night.
I decide that if I were to start my own striptography club, I could call it Tittycoin. Dancers could wear QR codes on their wrists. I’d advise against tattooed versions of their payment address as it’s a terrible privacy practice to use the same address for every transaction, leaving a very obvious trail in the public ledger that is the Bitcoin blockchain. For tipping a performer on stage, the dancer’s QR code would be projected on a large screen. On another screen would be a data visualization that would show the volume of Bitcoin tips flowing into his or her account. “Making it rain” would make this screen look a lot like a scene from the Matrix. Dancers would not need to sweep up dollars from the stage at the end of their act. And who knows, maybe this model would make more given our tendency to part more easily with digital dollars?
If anyone wants to fund this titillating Bitcoin start-up, you know where to find me.
