Yeah, I mean. What is this if not academic clickbait??
But Will is clever with this, having made much of a career from writing about bitcoin academically and professionally as an economist; find instances of where an economist's quantitative tools are fit for purpose to bitcoin; run the regressions; publish the paper.
Anyway, in "Pornhub and the Value of Bitcoin," Will uses a before-and-after device common in economics called "difference-in-difference."
Analytically, it's not that impressive and basically always hinges on whether or not we believe that the two things were/should/would have continued to move similarly if not for the intervention (we don't; these are groups of shitcoins; given the widely believed Bitcoiner conviction that they all trend to zero, this type of grouping would automatically show a delta between the bitcoin group and the non-bitcoin group). A standard objection to this method is "I don't believe your common trends assumption."
Now, having said that, Will identifies the Pornhub ban of payment processors in December 2020. Not sure you guys remember, but it was all the news rage/debanking rage for like a half-dozen news cycles. After social pressures, Pornhub were shut out from Visa and MC, and started taking crypto payments.
Will thinks of this as a marketing ploy or use case illustration that accrue permanent value to bitcoin. If you're not allowed to pay or receive payment, if your payments are blocked, or you fiat asset seized, you call still use this mechanism for moving online value.
I consider the extent to which deplatforming Pornhub increased the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies accepted on the site ... I find that deplatforming Pornhub increased the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies accepted on the site by 21.0 percent. ... I find that deplatforming Pornhub increased the market capitalization of bitcoin by 45.7 percent.
The mechanism/story here is exactly that: by showcasing its uncensorableness, the Pornhub episode revealed permanently to much more people how/why/whatfor bitcoin is so good.
Thus:
Prior to December 2020, few people realized an online retailer might be cut off from the traditional payments system without a government requiring it. The decision of Visa, MasterCard, and Discover to deplatform Pornhub made it clear this was possible. To the extent that deplatforming Pornhub was unexpected, one might treat this event as a natural experiment and estimate its effect on the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies accepted on the site.
Obviously, we could run similar type of exercises for a few other such events: Canadian truckers or seizing Russia's reserves. Those were all alarm bells marketing the virtues of bitcoin to larger audiences.
Maybe those papers are already in the pipeline on some aspirational PhD student's computer.