This is a common analysis by technical-oriented people whom are not thinking of the business implications.

No one would spend $5.000.000? How much do Ashley Madison billboards cost? Anyone that thinks you're going to spend $200K and have a viable business is not correct. Why not use your logic on Uber! They already have the software built. Maintaining it with 50 people for half a million each is only $25M a year. Servers will not cost more than that. Hence: Why is their burn rate higher than $50M?

At PinkDate consider: If we were to offer $500 sign-up incentives to escorts to join and promise to check PinkDate once a day for 2 months and we signed up 500, that's $250K right there. Look at our whitepaper. Escort and client incentives make up the bulk of our costs. At the beginning we must spend heavy to grow fast and spend to keep clients and providers happy, even if they are in the wrong. This is not cheap.

Do note that we reduced our ICO to $20 MM because we do not at this time need $50 MM. $20 MM is enough to handle a large drop in crypto and other setbacks yet still allow big growth.

With jurisdiction I explained it before but again:

0. Most sex-legal countries have regulations we would not meet. The very premise is void. Proof: The big sex and dating companies would already be doing exactly what PinkDate is suggesting...the idea is not novel...but yet they do not. Why?

To continue... assume there is a country that does not care about our business. That we are the first to have this idea.

1. US ignores law. Look at The Pirate Bay or Mega-Upload. Violation of local law and rights is not an obstacle.
2. US can make up things, accuse us of human trafficking, for example. They could take FBI tactics and plant people to claim trafficking and attempt extradition or legal attack with that cover. They have clever people working for them that will do what they can to bend us into non-compliance.
3. US can choose their time and place. They can charge us, get extradition requests, wait until one day we step foot into a US-friendly jurisdiction...
4. Privacy is damaged. We will have to respect search requests by the local authority, and that authority will allow foreign countries to get search requests. See Protonmail legal incident list for more info.
5. The laws may change. Sex work is in a fluid state legally-speaking. It would not be surprising to see a country change legislation in a way that might impact us.
6. It adds a lot to operating costs because at some point we will end up fighting it in court. Even if we win this is distracting for business.
7. Legal playing-field unfairly benefits well-funded competition.

The smartest thing is a layered defense: Utilize those jurisdictions that help us, but utilize Tor and privacy tech as well! For instance: We have some servers in friendly countries.

500 shares, which is $500 today, but will be $1250 in Series B.

As of this morning, 1.1 mn: https://seriesa.pinkapp.io

Series A is directly connected to the investment system. Main site is pure static HTML to reduce attack surface as much as possible and gets updated less frequently. I would suggest talking to us on Slack if you're undecided: https://join.slack.com/t/pinkapp/shared_invite/enQtMjQ0NjI2MDM0ODY1LWJhMGQ5ZTY4ZjRmODFlMTRlYWU3NDUwYWMzMDA1MGVlZGE1NThlN2ZjMWE2NGYxODRmNmY2NTg1YWI2MWM0YTk

The SEC opinion on ICOs is what made us 100% certain this was the right path. We can choose to be legal and deliver no value to investors (ICOs taking donations, trying to pretend its a utility - shit like this). But no, we choose to do right by investors.

Our company is an extrajurisdictional company. EJCs do not register with central authorities like the SEC or U.S. Government in general.

I do not see how we are not doing an IPO, even by your definition. We will trade on distributed exchanges at a minimum. You cannot have it both ways: On one hand it is a security so it needs to be prosecuted, but on the other it is not real so it cannot be an IPO. And since the SEC views it as a security, we do to. And selling our shares to the public on an exchange, even if distributed, is what it means to go public.

1. There are no tokens involved. Pink is only selling shares, not coin/tokens.

2. Nobody will be forced to send or receive tokens, coins, BTC/ETH/etc. We take cash.

We do not believe so. But we recommend signing-up for a free email account and using Tor and Monero to send transactions, just in case.

No relation.

Pink
Brad Anderson

I do not understand the rest of your comment. If you mean large institutional investors, then you are right. We will not meet their requirements like FINRA. Such investors would need to make personal investments or pass on Pink. If you mean someone else please explain in detail because I am not understanding.

I guess that is the misunderstanding. We're creating a company, not a platform. It is an EJC (extrajurisdictional company) and thus not listed in the US or Canada. You might as well say Bitcoin BTC isn't a currency because there's no country issuing it.

We will publish more details soon. Providers will choose a screening level that works for them. When a client tries to make contact they will need to meet the screening requirements before the provider is even notified. The provider will see what info they have provided: Employment Verified, ID verified, phone verified, Social Media linked (Example: Facebook (207 friends)). In some cases, the client can elect to keep this on file for providers that want to do their own screening. Then with one click the provider is receiving the original info the client submitted.

Providers will also see general notes by other providers that have seen that client in addition to the clients rating. The notes may be things about hygiene, peculiarities, punctuality or attitude while on date.

There are no big established escort agencies operating in the US or Canada due to legality issues. There are a bunch of smaller ones with 10, 20 workers that get by because they maintain a low profile.

$200,000 is how much some individual escorts make annually. If we charged 10% and they used Pink exclusively, that's just 10 escorts. So I do not understand how you are arriving that the company is worth $200K. And you should realize that everyone disagrees with you. The only people that agree are the ones that view our system as fundamentally flawed and worth $0.

Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are trying to convey.

The moment we ever move from that safe spot, the US would grab us. The US might play dirty tricks, accuse of us other things ... whatever they can. The best approach is a layered one. There are benefits to customers too: No subpoenas or warrants possible.

RAM drives mean we have an constantly-streaming encrypted backup system, yes. And it does mean if something fails, we end up needing to manually enter the key to restore. I believe this tradeoff is worth protecting everyone's data.

Eventually we will launch most major cities. For now, we are focusing on CA/IE/UK/US. We should have between over 10 cities online (conservative) by the end of 2018.

We do take advantage of jurisdictional friction to aid us. But we cannot count on these countries protecting us. We will be operating worldwide, and local laws such as NL has won't apply overseas. The US is known to play dirty. So while we could take advantage of our citizenships, only hire people with certain citizenship, live there and never travel ... it is playing a dangerous game. At best we would end up in a long legal fight. Even if we win, that is a waste of money and time.

It is cheap enough to get 32 GB of RAM. This is enough to run our apps or a database for now. It is not common because it is difficult to operate and most companies do not need the security.

Newsweek's International Business Times did an interview with our VP: http://www.ibtimes.com/beyond-bitcoin-blockchain-tokens-sex-industry-2601252 - so there's 3rd party confirmation of someone other than me being involved.

I don't control those accounts. But for arguments sake, let's say I did. Let's say that I bought a bunch of accounts and the entire thread is me talking to myself. That sounds like a sad attempt at promotion and has zero bearing on our service being legit. If true, it is weak, but I do not see how it jumps to being a scam. After all, we only started the ANN thread on this forum well after we were working on the platform.

I'll make you the offer I've made others. We'll pay for a dinner date with an escort in your area (assuming English city) if you will post on social media afterwards. Just discuss Pink, SSIO and others. Ask direct questions about them preferring tokens vs cash, for instance. Email me and we'll set it up. Go to Twitter and find escorts in your area, someone public that we can both agree is real and unbiased.

Edit: Also, are you an investor in SSIO? Just in the name of full disclosure...?

Approximately 10 people working on the project. We won't go into personnel details, sorry.

Hi there, and thank you for your work on this.

First off, we are nothing like SSIO, Eros.Vision, and others. We have a real business model. Or VP of Product is an active sex worker. Those other projects have zero future, scam or not, because they don't even have a real idea that'd possibly work. The same thing for Eros.Vision. I personally know how bad it feels to get ripped off. But Eros.Vision wasn't ever going to be a viable product. It was a Craigslist 2.0, with more scam potential.

1. Anonymous team. The core team must be anonymous or we'll be shut down. Launch city is Toronto, but we are going to expand into the US next year. But even with Toronto, the business of sex work is not legal in Canada. Selling sex is legal, but that's it. You cannot assist someone in selling sex. Even tangentially! For instance, we wanted to use Tarsnap as our backup provider. I emailed Mr. Percival, and his legal team said they could not provide us service, because they'd be living off the proceeds of prostitution. Not having an anonymous core team puts the entire project at risk.

Does this mean our project is high risk? In absolute terms, YES! Compared to other ICOs? Well, like I pointed out about Eros, SSIO, or even Frantic, they have such bad business ideas that even if they aren't scammers (I think SSIO is sincere) they aren't going to make money. Filecoin is literally a real-life version of HBO's Silicon Valley's Pied Piper, without the amazing compression. Scam? No, but if you lose money because it's a terrible idea, you still lose money. So when you consider the high-risk ICO market, Pink is one of the more solid investments. But please only put in your disposable "gambling" money, just like you should do with any other ICO.

2. We're working on a "whitepaper" or pitch deck. I will say that whitepapers make NO SENSE for businesses. Pink is not a tech company. The core app is damn straightforward. We are not inventing new tech, besides our advanced privacy and security setup: https://medium.com/@PinkApp/pink-app-trading-latency-for-anonymity-and-other-techniques-815ee21c6da4 So these whitepapers are mostly just an invention of ICOs wanting to pretend they are inventing something new, and to distract from the lack of real business model. But we're capitulating and will have a real pitch deck and some calculators soon. We'll even call it a whitepaper.

3. Yes, investment is anonymous to protect both our operations and investors.

4. Most ICOs are heavily dominated by whales. We had investors lined up from before we even bought the domain name so it is not surprising to have early investment. We had a slump when BTC dropped, and the recent spike was due to our update (https://pinkworldwide.com/update2). I am not sure how it is our benefit to show low-investment periods. We'd definitely have more investment if we hadn't had a slump in the middle of the fundraiser! Also note that in the update, the plan is not to reach the cap or minimum right now. We're closing Series A end of month, using the money to build a beta, then will sell remaining Series A shares in a B round, then use that to do a big launch. We issued extra shares to pre-Oct 18 investors and gave them $1 call options expiring in December to compensate, and that was responsible for about half of the jump we recently saw. The rest was some mid-sized investors finally getting in, after weeks of back-and-forth.

5. I'm not sure how this has anything to do with the company. If you want to see real people, go to our Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/pinkapp = We have real escorts talking about their thoughts on Pink. From the videos, you can see these are not paid actresses (they identify themselves and you can check them out on Twitter) or scripted. We did provide a small ($200) compensation for their time, we asked for their honest thoughts and opinions. We asked several people and published every video response we got.

6. Our initial site used the "Primes" template we got off Themeforest. The new design used an NY-based design agency, Vivid Motion (http://vividmotion.co/). I HIGHLY recommend them. As proof, here is an early concept they delivered, hosted on their client-work site: http://vividmotion.design/pinkapp-final/index.html  - They were fast, iterated quickly, listened to us go back and forth and all around on what we wanted, visually. Email me and I'll give you our contact's email if you want to ask about how they worked for us.

We have more than just a few screenshots. Our homepage links to a couple of videos, and more are on the way. But no testnet/beta yet, you are right.

7. Eros.com takes their business seriously. They run a fine line legally. Eros.Vision was outright illegal. It's understandable that Eros.com wants to distance itself from Eros.Vision and shut them down. And remember that trademark law strongly encourages companies to defend their trademark. If Eros.com was aware of Eros.Vision and did nothing, that'd be bad for them. And in no way will the Eros.com re-use their name to launch an illegal business (or scam!). We mention Eros.com because they are competition in a sense. We also mention Backpage, Slixa, ECCIE, TER, and other such sites.

Anyways, in summary: We may be high IQ scammers spending a ton of time to pretend to be building an app, while refusing to play the traditional ICO game (tokens, whitepapers, all that nonsense). I cannot prove a negative. As Sarah mentioned, go into our Slack room and chat with us and get a feel. There are other investors there you can talk to.

One thing was health checks. As an outsider, it seems like a good idea. It sounds straightforward. Health checks actually received a very negative response from sex workers. If we advertise that everyone is certified healthy, then clients are more likely to pressure providers into doing unsafe acts.

Roughly 10