Matti Robinson
7 Nov 2018 11:04
Recently a phenomenon called Initiative Q has been making rounds in the social media. The website – all that it is for now – promises a new revolutionary payment system, but what is it really?
Initiative Q is spreading via invites on social media. Currently the company is trying to raise awareness and increase subscriber base by offering free money.
Well, actually it's free Q money. The currency they are hoping to establish is called Q, and you'll get some amount of it for both joining and inviting others.
The sooner you join, the more you get. According to the website the earliest adopters might get Q worth of $100,000, although that would require a Q economy worth trillions.
Sounds like a pyramid scheme, doesn't it? Fortunately you don't have to invest in this venture, so as far as losing money goes you should be safe.
As a digital currency, is it the next Bitcoin? Again, no. There's really not much in common, although there isn't much detail about how it all works at this point.
What is certain, though, is that Q is not a decentralized and it's not based in a blockchain technology. According to the founder of Initiative Q this is because Q aims to be mainstream.
The founder is Saar Wilf, an Israeli entrepreneur who previously worked on fraud protection technology in a company that was sold to PayPal. Also one of the more acclaimed proponents is Cato Institute's Lawrence H. White, who teaches monetary theory at George Mason University.
As a currency, there is nothing concrete Q bases its value on, which has invited people to try and discredit it straight away. Currencies, however, do not necessarily need to be based on anything to work.
All they require is an acknowledgement from the users about its value as a trade item.
That doesn't mean Q is without issued by any stretch of the imagination. Actually, currently it's really hard to say where the problems lie because there is so little information about the system.
The website says that security could be implemented with multi-factor authentication (MFA) and fraud protection could use AI. But, again, these are still just examples in a vision, yet to be realized.
All in all, seems like probabilities for Initiative Q to take the world by storm and revolutionize monetary transactions are fairly slim.
Then again, that's what they said to current Bitcoin millionaires.