Paypal’s Abandonment of Major Cyberlockers May Become Bitcoin’s Big Win

Paypal is now well known for a sort of sanctimonious attitude towards sites that they feel will damage their ability to make money and now that cyberlockers are under fire from copyright conglomerates such as the RIAA, MPAA, and BRIEN. This comes during the long-burn of Megaupload by the U.S. government at the behest of these copyright cartels and now Paypal pulling out means that many of them will lose a primary source of funding and accessibility to the general public.

According to TorrentFreak, Paypal has stopped working with cyberlockers such as MediaFire, Putlocker, DepositFiles, and many others citing concerns of piracy.

Even the newest folk hero of cyberlockers, somewhat infamous Kim Dotcom, has come out asking the community on Twitter about better payment systems than PayPal and U.S. credit companies to upkeep this advancement of Internet innovation. As we all know, the MPAA and RIAA have gone to credit transaction companies and gotten them to withdraw their support from sites that may be capable of supporting piracy (which means any and every cyberlocker out there.)

An obvious answer comes to mind from the growing population and functional use of a digital cryptocurrency we already know: Bitcoin.

The e-currency is still in its rough-start stage when it comes to technology and much of that has been because it’s been treated as a fanatic commodity by a small but extremely loyal group who keep it afloat. It also fluctuates in value too often for most people to want to store their money with it; but we have seen it used effectively for an intermediate currency and a number of services do take bitcoins as compensation—such as Bitmit.net auctions and several VPN providers who also take the currency.

Point-of-sale for service with Bitcoin could be used via a vendor taking bitcoins, instantly trading them on a platform like MtGox for their local currency, and providing access to the cyberlocker to the customer.

Paypal’s withdrawal from cyberlockers, which have proven to be extremely useful to a multitude of people, see the popularity of Megaupload before the U.S. burned it to the ground and the layout of customers who used it for legitimate means, even U.S. military servicefolk.

A growing use case that everyday people can interact with will provide stability

If Bitcoin were to become the alternative to PayPal and U.S.-based credit cards for getting cyberlocker services it would mean that there would be money flowing into outfits that exchanged and traded in bitcoins. This means that they’d have a reason to make their systems more stable, the currency itself would find a happy medium with a larger critical mass of trading going on, and we’d see innovation taking advantage of the presence of money flow.

It’s worth to note that the market for bitcoins is already extant, it functions, and it’s survived several major upheavals (including losses of bitcoins, hacking, and even market crashes) and we’ve seen it used in the real world for trading and for selling products.

If Kim Dotcom uses his celebrity to bring attention to the use of Bitcoins for cyberlocker access, welding the two together will most likely bring both out with a much bigger market than before and make both of them much more resilient to economic siege by the copyright industry.