Initiative Q – professors making fools of themselves

It's been well over six months since my review on Initiative Q so it's about time to have a look at what's going on with the scheme.

Below is the roadmap published on Initiative Q's website. According to the roadmap the recruitment campaign of the scheme is about to end. The next phase, starting in the mid 2019, should be development of payment network.


The roadmap of Initiative Q. (click to enlarge)

Initiative Q has been awkwardly silent ever since traffic to the website started to plummet after peaking in the late 2018. The latest post on the official Facebook page has been published in March 2019.

Google Trends show that there hasn't been much interest towards Initiative Q for about six months.






Professors making fools of themselves


On Initiative Q's webpage there are four people introduced as being the economists behind Initiative Q. They all seem to be real people.


The economists behind Initiative Q: 
Lawrence H. White, Professor of economics at George Mason University
Marc Rysman, Professor of economic at Boston University
William J. Luther, Assistant professor of economics at Florida Atlantic University
James Caton, Assistant professor of economics at North Dakota State University 

Being the economists behind this ridiculousness I'd sure like to hear them explaining how Initiative Q is supposed to work. After all, they are the ones giving their names and faces to this "self-fulfilling prophecy" that no-one should miss.

Let's go through some known facts that I find worth mentioning.

We don't know exactly how many people have joined the scheme by now. However, in November 2018 Initiative Q announced reaching 5 million users. At the time Initiative Q was giving away its future currency claiming that each position was going to have an estimated future value of over 19.000 dollars.

In January 2019 the website announced that over 6 million people had joined Initiative Q. At the time the scheme was gifting the people joining with positions of estimated future value of over 17.000 euros. An article published in early June let's us know that Initiative Q has 7 million registered users. Currently Initiative Q is gifting new members with positions worth about 16.500 imaginary dollars.

If I understood the system correctly each user gets 10 % of the currency reserved for a position just by joining. The rest must be earned by recruiting more people to join (and finishing possible other tasks).

This means that even with the minimum amount of the currency given to each member Initiative Q has given away its currency for a total amount of way more than 12 billion dollars – based on the imaginary value of the currency.

Whether there would be 7 million or even 100 million people as members is meaningless in my opinion. There would still be nothing backing up the value the project has self-proclaimed.

Although stupidity is an endless resource I find it hard to believe that anyone would take this scheme seriously enough to start investing real money in to this... Unless they would develop it into OneCoin like ponzi-pyramid scheme. Still, it would only be yet another scam.


Initiative Q celebrating reaching 5 million users in November 2018.


Screencap from the website in January 2019.


Now, I would really like to ask these professors of foolishness that how is this nonsense supposed to become a reality?



Meanwhile Saar Wilf goes Bzigo


The man behind the idea of Initiative Q, Saar Wilf, has been silent about the project as well. It seems that he has been lately more interested in the future of killing insects.

At first I thought this was a lousy and somewhat disturbing parody ad but it now seems that it is a genuine thing that Saar Wilf has put his heart and mind into:




The device is called "Bzigo". However, it does not kill insects but only locates them in a room and points them out with a lazer beam.

Well, I don't think that a device that is only designed to locate mosquitos is going to be a success, but then again I might be dead wrong and this might only be another self-fulfilling prophecy about to happen.

Comments

  1. Initiative Q has had the same problem since the introduction. I wrote it in Finnish back then, but here's a rough translation:

    Let's take imaginary John Doe who signed up to Initiative Q and got $25,000 (Q-money) for that. Now keep in mind he got all that for free. Assuming the Q-money can be transferred between users, John Doe sells his Q-money to Jane Doe, who in turn pays $12,500 (USD) to John Doe. John is happy about this because it's all profit.

    Now let's assume the Q-money has actually been adopted by merchants (which it won't be as we will soon see).
    Jane goes to a web store and buys a car worth $25,000 (USD) and pays the car using the $25,000 (Q-money) that John sold to her.
    Jane sells the car to someone in real life for the $25,000 (USD) the car is worth.
    Now:
    - John has netted $12,500 (USD) from Jane when he sold the Q-money he got for free.
    - Jane has netted $12,500 (USD) from selling the car.
    - Someone has gotten a $25,000 (USD) car and paid $25,000 (USD) for it, making net profit/loss of 0 USD.

    Whereas the merchant who sold the car now has $25,000 (Q-money) and needs to buy more cars for sale.
    How does he do that?!?

    Basically the Initiative Q should provide a means for the merchant to cash out their Q-moneywhenever they wish, but there isn't any USD in the "Initiative Q" system. Every single cent of real-world money has been moved outside the system so far. Therefore nobody in the system can credit the Q-money to the merchant.

    Also:
    John sold the Q-money for $0.50 (USD) apiece. The coins were supposed to be worth $1.00 (USD) apiece but since he got them for free he STILL netted $12,500 (USD) for all this.
    People who signed up to the system back then can sell their Q-money for any price and still make profit. Why would the Q-money be valued at $1.00 USD?

    This is the key problem with Q-money. It was given out for free and will therefore always have a potential for an immediate price collapse.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The fundamental problem of these get-rich-schemes is always the same:
      In order for some fool to get rich there has to be more fools willing to pay for that dream to come true. And those fools won't get rich without even greater number of fools willing to bail them out from their misery.

      Initiative was DOA because it was an attempt by an ex PayPal guy to create wealth out of thin air by backing the value of Q with gullibility of people.

      Delete
  2. "Currently Initiative Q is gifting new members with positions worth about 16.500 imaginary dollars."

    16,389 as of today.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It truly seems that the figure isn't really based on anything.

      Initiative Q's roadmap shows that their recruitment campaign was supposed to end in mid 2019.

      The aim was to reach tens of millions of people joining:
      "Member recruitment campaign
      Target: Rapid user growth, indicating high likelihood of reaching tens of millions."

      Delete

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