We have all seen the endless posts on social media promulgating the virtues of initiative Q, as friends, relatives and god knows who else invite us to sign up for access to the currency. But what is it? How does it work? And will it transform the world of payments/ make me a millionaire overnight? Matt Ehret provides answers to all these questions and more with his insightful analysis into the initiative.

Initiative Q is a new payment system that includes a digital currency, Q; this is not a cryptocurrency, just kind of like one.

It’s founded by Saar Wilf, renowned for selling his fraud protection service to PayPal in 2008. As an experienced and prestigious individual in the payment system world, his claims and promises about what Initiative Q hopes to achieve and how they plan on doing it has attracted The Futurist’s inquiry.

Saar Wilf claims the payment systems we use are outdated and that he offers a modern, innovative alternative. Already millions of people have signed up to Initiative Q and reserved their currency, despite each Q being currently worth exactly $0. Wilf and his team are dreaming big though. The business has the seemingly impossible aspiration of becoming a world leading payment network, where each Q is worth $1 and the accumulated total value of the currency to be between half a trillion to 10 trillion dollars. All of this just a few years down the line.

The aim is to create a payment network that solves the issues of both traditional mediums of exchange, fiat money and credit, and cryptocurrencies. According to their website, Q will be a global digital currency with an array of benefits: easy to use payments only one click away; fraud prevention technology superior to credit cards; the promotion of proper business practises; payment reversibility and dispute arbitration; reduced transaction costs; a bank-free system facilitating global use. Their website assures of far more as well, but without boring you, let's just say according to themselves Initiative Q is a flawless idea that everyone should adopt.

To translate Initiative Q’s vision into reality they are financially incentivizing the use of Qs for all types of transactions, from minor purchases to salaries, and investments. However, the functioning of Q is conditional on a large number of people using it for payments. It has set out an aggressive, pyramid scheme-esque, marketing strategy to accumulate what it hopes is a critical mass of users. They are rewarding new users with reserved Q and additional currency for referrals. The Qs rewarded today are from a supply of 2 trillion and will be fully available for use when the total Q is worth 2 trillion dollars.

What differentiates this from being branded a cryptocurrency is its centralized economic model. A monetary committee will be created to maintain the purchasing power of Q and preserve the currency’s stability. This will ensure the supply of Q available for use, matchesthe growth in economic activity on the network. Independent of Initiative Q itself, the committee will act much like a central bank would for a country. They will be in chargeof releasing Q, creating activity incentives and open market operations (the buying or selling of Q in return for other currencies). This, theoretically, offers better control over the currency and is even claimed to be an improvement upon today’s central banks.

However, there are criticisms. The valuations it uses are extremely speculative and there are no assurances it will ever reach the velocity or volume it says it will. The assumption that soon everyone in the world will be using Q to pay for anything from their coffee to their rent is pure speculation (and will probably never happen). The monetary committee are portrayed as an all knowing, can do no wrong, setof individuals, above self interest or corruption. But: How are these people chosen? What is the criteria? How do they vote on monetary issues? The questions for this alone are endless. Initiative Q’s worrying lack of acknowledgment of the international scale of resistance it will get or issues it will create is simply naive. This is not a trait an aspiring global payment system should have. Overall, the ethics and consequences of monopolizing payments are yet to be considered, or more precisely, vocalized to the public.

Some believe this is probably for sound reason. Initiative Q offers free digital currency in exchange for your name and email, and when considering the world of data collection we live in today, your name and email can be quite valuable. It is an alluring, get rich quick scheme, which makes grandiose promises about its overall success and how you can profit if you join now. It is suspect and should be treated as such. Happily, both the website and the founders repeatedly insist user data will never be used in this way and if it fails the database will be destroyed. However, I wouldn’t be able to write this article without issuing caution about disclosing any further information that could be requested, or the future proposition of payments to gain further access.

Ultimately, if you sign up to Initiative Q you’re probably not going to become a millionaire. To sign up now and refer a handful of friends would reserve you around twenty thousand Q. Its difficult to say whether this will at some point down the road become $20000, as the project is in such an early stage of development. Personally I think - why not.If it manages to take the payment world by storm you’ll be happy you jumped on the bandwagon, if not, you’ll have spent a couple of hours convincing your mates to use your referral code. What can be said is ideas like Initiative Q’s are becoming increasingly frequent. Steps are being made to reform the way we make payments, only time will tell what that reform will be.