Initiative Q — a non-crypto private currency, marketed by pyramid scheme

You may have seen this text pasted repeatedly on your Facebook or Instagram:

Initiative Q is building a new payment network and giving away significant sums of their future currency to early adopters. It’s by invite only and I have a limited number of invites. My personal invite link:
https://initiativeq.com/invite/Hli-OqII7

Initiative Q is a proposal for a new payment network using a private currency, which they aim to leverage into the “one global currency”.

It’s not a cryptocurrency — but a few people asked me about it, because it has the same smells to it, and they keep comparing themselves to cryptocurrencies. It also shares a lot of bad ideas with cryptos.

There’s no such thing as a get-rich-quick scheme that works — particularly one that badgers you to get in early. And the marketing is entirely pyramid-shaped.

But as far as I can tell, they’re completely sincere! It’s just their ideas that are bad — or don’t actually exist yet.

The people
Initiative Q was founded by Saar Wilf, who has past experience in the payments world — amongst other companies, he founded Fraud Sciences, which he sold to PayPal when it was part of eBay.

The other key participant is Lawrence H. White — an economist at George Mason University, who is heavily into Austrian economics, though he’s not a complete gold bug. White worked out the economics of the Q private currency.

The Q token
The Q token is a centralised private currency issued by Initiative Q. It’s presently worthless, and not exchangeable even on Initiative Q’s own servers — but they aspire to it being used in their nonexistent future payment network. At that point, they intend it to be freely exchangeable with dollars.

Get your pyramids early!
Initiative Q needs many committed users to ensure a meaningful network of buyers and sellers. If a critical mass is not reached, the project may not go forward. Because the rewards are only valuable once the system is functional, it is in everyone’s interest to get others to join.

The marketing is a straight-up pyramid scheme — you need an invitation to join, and then you and the person inviting you get some Q tokens, and you get five invitations in turn.

You are required to complete (unspecified) tasks to get your full Q token reward. They also stress the importance of getting in early — “joining at the very early stages requires real vision and foresight.”

So far it’s just signing up to get their made-up Q tokens — they haven’t asked for actual money, or anything else that’s exchangeable.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/06/24/initiative-q-a-non-crypto-private-currency-marketed-by-pyramid-scheme/