Anti-Scam: Vice Industry Token (VIT )

Hello Steemians, I am teacher Zorro.

My primary job is to expose the scam projects in the blockchain world. This is my first anti-scam article about Vice Industry Token, which has raised over 24k ETH during the crowdsale so far!

Wow! That’s a lot of money! Vice Industry Token is claimed to “pay you to watch porn”. A lot of people find this project promising after viewing the profiles of the team members. But let me tell you why it is definitely a scam project.

C+ Developer?

Let’s first go through its website:

The CEO’s funny face and his old-fashioned picture attract my attention. His bio says that …

Emmm… A typo?

Former C+ developer?

Even my worst grade in my entire undergraduate study is A-. I am confident to say that I am a former A- developer, 4 levels higher than this C+ developer.

Yes or No?

There is some inconsistency I found on the website:

However, an opposite answer is found in the whitepaper:

So… yes or no???

Alright, let’s forget about the typos and inconsistencies and dig a little bit deeper into this project itself.

No KYC Required

I notice that KYC (Know Your Customer) is not required to participate the crowdsale:

There numerous articles online talking about the importance of KYC/AML policy of an ICO project. YOU ARE NOT BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN MONEY IF PARTICIPATING ANY ICOs WITHOUT KYC POLICY. Since different countries have different regulatory environment for ICOs, any crowdsale without KYC will expose the project itself to a high risk of being violating federal securities laws. (actually any ICOs is illegal if the token is defined as securities in the U.S.)

100,000 TPS?

The whitepaper claims that the VIT protocol is capable of recording more than 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). As a blockchain researcher, I have never seen any consensus protocol can process 100,000 TPS and I don’t think that could be achieved in a decentralized network by using any existing DPOS consensus protocols. (EOS is claimed to reach millions of transactions per second in the future, but it is not the case, at least for now, on the EOS Testnet.)

The VIT consensus protocol is the same as that of Steem, which means that the highest TPS the VIT consensus protocol could achieve is the same as that of the Steem (3000 TPS). You can learn more about the TPS of Steem blockchain performance in this article (https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@sargan26/has-the-block-chain-a-good-performance).

In a word, the 100,000 TPS stated in the whitepaper is absolutely incorrect. If the VIT protocol could reach such a TPS, it would be a groundbreaking news for the blockchain world.

Launch the Mainnet on March 21???

I don’t buy that at all. The whitepaper is lack of technical details and even the economic model is incomplete. What is the inflation rate of the VIT token? What is the distribution of the new issued tokens? How much does a viewer earn after watching a video?

The answer is...

Coming soon.

Well, that answer is unacceptable especially in the case that the mainnet is about to launch in a week.

Actually, the whitepaper is only 5-page long (except for the team member bios and FAQ). It is way too concise for a project with 24k ETH funding.

A Good News

A good news for the VIT investors: your investment is refundable!

You are entitled to have your invested ETH back by Jun 28. I checked the code of the smart contract and the team did not lie on that.

So, VIT investors, take your money back and stay away from scams!!!