You may not have heard of Ted Nelson but there’s a near certainty you’ve been impacted by his vision. Decades before the dawn of the web, Nelson, then a student at Harvard, conceived of a “digital repository scheme for world-wide electronic publishing.” Within a few years, the idea had rattled around in Nelson’s brain long enough that he imagined a way to navigate that repository by having special functionality attached to certain words or phrases on a computer screen. Interacting with those words would instantly surface other information.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Nelson was describing hypertext, or what we eventually came to know as “hyperlinks” and now just typically shortened to links. While his project never made the impact of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, it most certainly played an influential role. (The h in http, of course, stands for hypertext).

But Nelson’s vision wasn’t merely around linking information. He foresaw the need to pay content creators for their work. Nelson coined the term “micropayments” to describe small amounts of money, easily transmitted, to allow those that read/listen/view content to compensate those that wrote/recorded/filmed it.

In Xanadu, did Ted Nelson, a payment scheme declare to be

Nelson saw micropayments as core to his Xanadu, the grand name for his grand project for a “digital repository… for publishing”. But while the web delivered much of his vision, micropayments have remained something of a Gordian knot online: There must be a way to solve the problem, but thus far we only have the wreckage of those who have tried and failed.

Which brings us back to Tube8 and the VIT. It’s not the first time cryptocurrency has been associated with pornography nor even the first we have heard of Pornhub getting interested in tokens. Back in April, the site announced it would begin accepting payments via the anonymous cryptocurrency Verge (VXG). The use case there was to pay for premium subscriptions using a method that wouldn’t leave a trace. You can actually use Verge today to sign up (the link is safe for work).

The process remains convoluted, of course, as with much around crypto. Verge recommends buying bitcoin or Ethereum at Coinbase and then using that crypto to acquire VXG through Binance. At that point you can download your Verge wallet, load the VXG into it, and spend it — at least at Pornhub. It’s exhausting just to think about.

The new VIT/Tube8 deal works in reverse. Instead of taking all sorts of steps to buy a product you can already buy with a credit card, the idea here is to seed VIT into the word by giving it to people who would do something anyway, i.e. watch free porn.

Of course if it works, there could be millions of VIT users. And from there the vice token could also be used as a payment mechanism, perhaps even encouraging holders of it to acquire more in exchange for other cryptos they already have or can easily get.

In the future, the VIT given away by Tube8 could allow purchasing content across the Pornub family. But more interestingly, it could go much farther than that.

A brief history of porn, technology catalyst of the digital age (and even the analog one!)

If you hadn’t heard of Ted Nelson, there’s a good chance that Harrison Marks is also an unfamiliar name. His rather colorful history dates back to 1950s London where, in his photo studio in Soho, Marks began taking “glamour” photographs of women. The euphemism referred to mid-century erotica and after publishing some of that work in a magazine he and partner Pamela Green called Kamera, Marks sets his sights on the technological revolution of his day.

The advent of 8 millimeter film made it possible to shoot movies without rather large, typically expensive professional equipment. Using 8mm equipment, Marks made “glamour home movies” with topless women. They were often filmed in his and Green’s kitchen (she was also one of the women on film) and were sold using the most high-tech methods of the day, including retail stores and mail order. Without Facebook ads and a website to promote them, Marks and Green often used the pages of their own Kamera magazine to do so.

But while their work would eventually make the move to 35mm, their pioneering use of 8mm helped boost that format and ushered in an era where porn would often lead the way in making “the next big thing” happen.

Video killed the … oh never mind

By the 1970s, adult firlms had made their way to movie theaters in what were often the least desirable neighborhoods of America’s cities. But then a revolution would happen that would forever move adult entertainment into people’s homes. The VCR was born and while it often cost more than one thousand 1970s dollars (almost $5,000 today) access to recent Hollywood movies, the ability to record TV and watch it later, and access to porn made it a smash hit.

By the decade’s end half of the videos sold were adult content and the porn industry’s selection of the VHS format for distribution helped kill Sony’s technologically superior Betamax.

By the time the internet had begun to go mainstream in the mid 1990s, porn was already one of the most popular forms of content online. “Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway: A Survey of 917,410 Images, Description, Short Stories and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2000 Cities in Forty Countries, Provinces and Territories” was published in the Georgetown Law Journal. That same year, Gary Kremen, an entreprenuer behind the dating side match.com registered the domain name sex.com. Back then it was common for people to search for something by typing in a basic keyword, and people were clearly going to search for sex.

A gentleman named Stephen Cohen figured the same thing and fraudulently got Network Solutions to transfer the domain from Kremen to him and allegedly made between $50,000 and $500,000 per month just directing clicks from the sex.com homepage out to other porn sites. Kremen sued and in 2001 was awarded $67 million for lost income associated with that site.

At that point, there were an estimated 21,000 websites devoted to porn. Today, it’s estimated there are 4.2 million. While much of the revenue for online porn comes from advertisements run along with the adult content, there’s a huge business in charging people money to view it as well. And for that, we can thank the third obscure historical figure in our story: Richard J. Gordon. When Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee taped themselves engaged in sexual relations back in 1995, they had no idea that Gordon would later be the man who would figure out how to charge people to watch them.

But that he did, and Gordon’s Electronic Card System led the way: “He was the house for Internet porn in the early days,” said an early employee. “At that time, if you had anything to do with Internet porn, you called Electronic Card Systems.”

Credit card companies don’t love dealing with porn sites, however, which meant businesses like Gordon’s had to act as middleman, charging hefty fees to deal with fraud losses, chargebacks, and the like. Today, one of the successors to Electronic Card Systems, ccBill, charges as low as 10.8% to work with “high risk” merchants like porn sites.