If you found a candy store that accepted other forms of cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, I’d be surprised if they wouldn’t accept Lust. It’s just money. I suppose if there’s ever a Federal regulatory agency that checks the intended purpose of cryptocurrency (and maybe there is?), then a candy store might be wary of accepting that particular currency. But otherwise I’m not sure I understand why the distinction has meaning. It seems completely arbitrary, as I said, like an envelope marked, “for this use only”.
Honest question, because I don’t know enough about cryptocurrency to answer it myself – is it protected by some kind of DRM or the equivalent? Like those coffee machines that won’t accept non-brand pods? Because otherwise I’m not seeing how this can’t be used as straight-up money.
Like, if I owed you $10,000, couldn’t I just buy $10,000 in Lust and give you the key to it?
It isn’t though. It really isn’t. Cryptocurrencies in general can’t really be described as “just money” and this is like a company scrip - it’s a closed system specifically designed for illegal trade.
You could do that, but I sure as hell wouldn’t accept it in lieu of cash (or check or even other cryptocurrency or the equivalent value of bulk toilet paper). I’d fear that simply possessing it could open me up to legal liability, the value would likely decline in an attempt to sell it off, and I’d be limited to finding a buyer wanting to, by definition, engage in criminal activity. Treating this as currency is like treating bongs as currency. That might work if you’re in the “head shop” trade, but otherwise not so much…
I guess I don’t understand how the system is supposed to work, then, if you can’t cash it out.
I mean, let’s say I’m a prostitute who agrees to take Lust as a form of currency. What am I supposed to do with it then? Spend it on my own prostitute who also takes Lust? Does Lust offer a SkyMall-type catalog where I can use Lust points that I’ve earned on real goods?
I’m sorry if I’m coming across as exceptionally dense, but I don’t understand how you can use actual money to purchase Lust points, but then can’t cash out your Lust points for actual money…
Edited to add: Or is that why this is a newsworthy story? It’s a scam intended to fleece people interested in prostitution but not interested in finding out that it doesn’t work that way… ??? I kind of don’t get it.
The sex worker would be selling the cryptocurrency to the johns - either directly, through the marketplace, or indirectly, by selling to the marketplace which sells it on to johns. (The marketplace thus being a virtual pimp that takes a cut of transactions, but unlike traditional pimps, only offering any protections to the customer, not the worker.) The “currency” is specifically for sex work where it’s illegal, so no one else is going to be interested; it’s like the tokens that arcades sell you to run their machines - there’s nothing in theory stopping it from being used as some sort of unofficial currency outside of that context, but in reality it’s too specific, as there’s no other market for them outside of people who want to play at that arcade.
Either a dystopia or some kind of hedonistic society where sex just doesn’t have the same implications as for us. A good author can take the most absurd premise and make it seem perfectly natural.
Also note that just because currencies were based on gold very few actually used the opportunity to trade a dollar bill for gold. They bought clothes and food and paid their rent while the gold was a theoretical guarantee that the money would be worth something, and when the gold standard was dropped people didn’t really notice.
The main reason to come up with a new “currency” that is basically a version of something already existing like Ethereum is so you can “pre-mine” some money in that currency for yourself when it is still easy and before other people are allowed to have a go (this worked pretty well for Bitcoin, where a few of the earliest adopters are sitting on nice piles of coin that they got when everything was new). So in the wishful-thinking world of the inventors of “Lust”, this may just be a scheme that lets them have sex with hookers for virtually free.
Sex with others is only a scarcity based economy because of the social construct that treats women as if something has been taken from them when they have sex. It’s not treated as a service, to the extent that it’s ILLEGAL to treat it as a service. If you inherently find a woman who has never had sex to be a more valuable person, and a woman who has sex frequently to be a less valuable person, then you’re treating sex as a limited resource. That creates an incentive for women to preserve their perceived virtue by withholding sex, and men to preferentially seek out women who don’t have sex to have their sex with. This creates a paradox: Women who will fuck you are sluts but men who fuck women are alphas.
Women are not oil wells, that can be pumped dry and rendered valueless. In reality, the more sex you participate in, the better you get at it, and the more your services should be valued, as soon as society can wrap its head around the fact that this should have no more stigma attached to it than a visit to the hairdresser.
I think you’re absolutely right. Presumably though they plan to spend those early-mined coins in some tragic excess of debauchery, once the mining difficulty goes up and the planned deflation begins. The difficulty is that if you schedule your orgy too soon, you risk being the laughingstock of the cryptocurrency world, like the poor guy who bought a pizza with a couple hundred bitcoin in the early days. If he’d just starved himself for a few more years, he could have bought millions of pizzas.
I’m sorry, but that makes no sense at all. What about anything I’ve said excludes gay sex? The same social stigma is imposed on gay guys who have lots of sex, or who sell sex, and many times I’ve heard people say ‘I love the sinner, but hate the sin, so I’m OK with the gays, as long as they aren’t actually fucking’. As for men not being able to perform as often, that’s both irrelevant, and if we somehow shoehorn it into the argument, it STRENGTHENS my argument. If men can’t perform sexually as often as women can, then women have MORE sex to go around, not less, and treating their sexual activity as a limited resource makes LESS sense, not more.
After thinking about your answers for a while, I think I’m back to my original question: “So, how will this really be used?” For example, prostitution is legal in Nevada, and so, one of your comments:
is not valid in Las Vegas or Reno. Which means that, you don’t have to carry hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, and risk getting mugged or robbed or pick-pocketed, you can carry it around in Lust. I think that means it’s also easier to stay anonymous. How would you want to carry $1 million in mob money? A duffel bag? Or a flash-drive?
Another comment:
is actually very illuminating to me, because I live in southern Oregon, which is rapidly becoming the Napa Valley of marijuana. Recreational marijuana just became legal in Nevada (July 1, 2017), which means that a black market grower could take several thousand dollars worth of weed from Klamath Falls to Winnemucca, pretty much avoiding notice, and exchange it for cryptocurrency.
I have friends who grow recreational marijuana legally (they’re licensed with the state, everything is above board – I can’t even get a freebie, yeesh!), but the worst part of their business is that it’s all still cash, sometimes getting a lot of cash in remote areas. I could see Lust being a far more reasonable form of exchange for them.
