Lust Coin ICO - Decentralized Sex Marketplace

Decentralized sex marketplace which helps find their perfect sexual partner anonymously

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Lust Coin

Period: August 18th to October 19th, 2017

Website: https://lust.agency/

Whitepaper: Yes

Team: Adrian Schmeling and co.

Scam or Scum?

ICOtracker.net gives Lust coin a Scum Alert rather than a Scam Alert.
Lust coin is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain and an intend to make use of Ethereum smart contract between participating parties.

I came across Lust Coin while researching Scams identified on ICOTracker.net and there a more sex-industry tokens in the works, such as: Sex service

Blockchain-based Friendly Sex Dating Service

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Lust Coin

Your Lust – Our Deal

From Lust Agency's website:

A decentralized sex marketplace with a goal to enable all human beings on earth to find their perfect sexual partner anonymously. We want to build a free community where members can experience the innate pleasure of the world without worrying about censorship by religious or governmental authorities or third party involvements. With absolute anonymity and user satisfaction as our primary beliefs, we aim to eradicate the undesirable effects for all parties involved in the sex industry. Cause everybody needs sex, we create this vital tool to provide unstoppable reasonable services to anyone and anywhere in the world.

The aim of the service is to provide a worldwide ‘decentralized’ sex market to satisfy all customers and to ‘eradicate the undesirable effects’ inherent in the sex industry.

The Whitepaper sheds more light on the ‘undesirable effects’ the token hopes to eliminate through the use of their product.
There certainly exists a dark side to the global sex industry, issues of **human trafficking, sex slavery, sexual exploitation, sexual blackmail, and dangerous working conditions for sex workers immediately come to mind.

How does a sex token aim to eradicate the dark side of the sex industry?

We'll explore the Whitepaper and see if this gargantuan task is achievable or just a cover for a profit making platform.

Claims that a token has the ability to wipe away some of the most nefarious aspects of the industry is a lofty and admirable aim but perhaps it is equally unrealistic and naive.

Before we look at the Whitepaper, let’s have a look at the Team. The project is lead by an individual named Adrian Schmeling, the CEO of Lust.

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Lust Team

Adrian Schmeling – Founder (CEO)

Simone Schwartz –Marketing and PR

Alex Holt – Community -manager

Mihail Rudenco – Blockchain developer

Evgeniy Karnishin – Smart-contract developer

Duncan Lemp – Distributed high-loaded systems developer

Vitaly Rubanov

Finding information about the members of the Lust Team is easier said than done. Some information of the development team exists on Github but the profiles betray a fair amount of inactivity and very few followers.

Likewise, the founder of Lust, Adrian Schmeling, proves to be quite elusive. There's an Instagram account with the name Adrian_Schmeling but it's set to private. Aside from this Instagram account, Adrian only shows returns in relations to the very few reviews of Lust coin on several crypto sites.

When the history of the team is difficult to find, it's generally a bad sign.

Another warning is the inclusion of (sorry for the pun) a 'token' Vitaly. After viewing dozens of ICOs, I've noticed that multiple ICO teams have a member named Vitaly. Most likely this is in an attempt to dupe those who know little about cryptocurrencies but have heard of Ethereum's creator Vitalik Buterin.

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(comment thread from - https://tokentops.com/ico/lust/)

Whitepaper

Link to Whitepaper

Lust’s Whitepaper is 14 pages in length and the developers include a roadmap of projected progress over the next several years.
The roadmap for Lust is 'conquering' Europe first in 2018 and expanding into Thailand and Japan in 2019 to corner a significant part of the sex trade industry throughout Asia.

The vision of Lust is wholly dependent on the power of escrow smart contracts.

From the Whitepaper -

Since sex is necessary for everyone and it's embarrassing to keep silent about it,
we have created a vital tool for the reasonable provision of these services. This might sound complex, but as a user, it’s extremely convenient to find exactly what you’re looking for on our portal.

With accurate filters ranging from eye colour to desired body figures, you get a
large variety of workers to choose from according to your needs.

We have maintained complete transparency to ensure customer as well as seller
satisfaction with updated ratings, turnaround time and detailed parameters. Also, both seller and buyer are given a choice of whether they want to disclose any personal details to each other or not till the completion of the transaction. This makes it extremely easy for both the parties to join and cultivate funds from our portal securely.

In simpler words, if a client is interested in a worker on our portal, he will send her a request with the preferred time. If the request is accepted, a client will be able to access private information of that worker, like more photos, name or something worker decides, and vise versa. After double confirmation, this money will be held by smart contract and his wallet would generate an access key.

This key has to be scanned later if they make an agreement and meet otherwise
the contract gets automatically closed in 48 hours, and the client gets his Etherium tokens back in the wallet. The client can start with another try if she disagrees. Also, once the service is completed, both parties have 24 hours to leave a feedback to each other and gain reputation. Completely anonymous, transparent, secure and impossible to shut down, this decentralised marketplace is the new revolution of the sex industry.

Does this really make sex workers safer?

I have serious doubts about this claim.

While the escrow smart contracts and a sort of peer to peer interface between seller and buyer (to use Lust Coin’s terms) could be beneficial in cutting out the middle man (pimps, escort services companies, brothel owners, etc.) it could actually make sex workers more vulnerable. As much as I despise pimps, at least there’s the chance that if a sex worker gets in to some trouble they may have some level of protection.

Furthermore, it’s possible that sex workers (girls) may have their accounts controlled by a third party (sex trafficker) much like how a trafficker may control a girl’s passport and force immigrants into prostitution.

Another scenario could be that sex workers are threatened by the John during/after their encounter. The John may be abusive but demand that the girl gives the John a high rating or worse forces under threat to return his payment by terminating the contract/agreement as unfulfilled.

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I’m not alone on this point as there are many others who are skeptical of Lust Coin’s plan and some even believe that it has the potential to increase violence towards sex workers.
Here are some comments from -

tokentops.com

bitcointalk.org

Potential issues

• Anonymity facilitating child prostitution
• Playground for sex offenders
• Crimes could be more difficult to trace

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The ICO Pre-Sale is still ongoing.

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Conclusion

The question posed earlier was - Scam or Scum?

It's hard to ignore that Lust has a polished website that is appealing on different levels. There's a team, with titles, a 14 page Whitepaper, a product that has a giant market (42 million sex workers) worldwide and that sex and dating sites are very profitable.

Back to the question at hand. I'm no expert but I'm gonna go with BOTH. It's both scammy and scummy.

The Team itself appears to be a complete fabrication as information is hard to come by. Also, it seems unlikely that the product can deliver on it's promise to 'eradicate' unsavory elements in the sex trade simply by introducing a token with smart contracts.

A question that is also useful to ask is -

Is the token necessary?

Imho, I don't think it is. Individuals could simply use pre-existing cryptos to transfer payments, use existing SMS/dating sites to find one another and I don't see how a smart contract can improve the safety of sex workers on the whole.

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Disclaimer: I'm be no means a cryptocurrency expert and this is not financial advice. I'm expressing my opinion based on the little information I could find relating to this ICO.

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