Initiative Q - Money from nowhere?
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@onyx said in Money from nowhere?:
Hello, my name is Realname 'Onestguvn'a.
I will neither confirm nor deny that I might have an account somewhere with a real name vaguely resembling Noneofyo Urbusiness.
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@anonymous234 said in Money from nowhere?:
Heck, you could embed a passive RFID chip in your phone,
WTF Bank provides a chip you can glue in the back of your phone. It isn't as silly as it sounds.
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@initiativeq said in Money from nowhere?:
Why carry anything other than my smartphone?
Because the law here says I need to carry my ID card. And my drivers license if I'm driving anything. That starts to sound like half a wallet.
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@luhmann said in Money from nowhere?:
@initiativeq said in Money from nowhere?:
Why carry anything other than my smartphone?
Because the law here says I need to carry my ID card. And my drivers license if I'm driving anything. That starts to sound like half a wallet.
Will you kickstart my app that replaces a driver's licence?
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@onyx said in Money from nowhere?:
@luhmann said in Money from nowhere?:
@initiativeq said in Money from nowhere?:
Why carry anything other than my smartphone?
Because the law here says I need to carry my ID card. And my drivers license if I'm driving anything. That starts to sound like half a wallet.
Will you kickstart my app that replaces a driver's licence?
Being less facetious here, but that's actually something I see in all the cyberpunk stuff I read/watch/whatnot that I think SHOULD happen. Not an app, necessarily, but having a single digital ID device that things like licenses, accounts, and everything get linked to so the only thing you need to have is the ID device.
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@dcon said in Money from nowhere?:
After all, TDWTF is now involved!
Of course, TRWTF was involved from the very beginning.
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@onyx Basically. How am I gonna make runs against the megacorps if I can't even have a proper fake SIN?
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@initiativeq said in Money from nowhere?:
face recognition, voice recognition, PIN code.
Banks could do face and voice recognition with the existing system. I don't think it's a good idea.
My bank's anti fraud AI works really well too. I had my card number stolen and it blocked everything, flawlessly, until I cancelled it.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Money from nowhere?:
@initiativeq how will Q ensure scarcity? Whats would stop them from issuing infinite Qs?
Members vote for an independent (i.e., they aren't technically part of the company) board that decides on new issues of Q.
Source: read way too much of the stuff on their site.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Money from nowhere?:
@onyx Basically. How am I gonna make runs against the megacorps if I can't even have a proper fake SIN?
But, the runners are SINless anyway...
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@onyx Not all of them. The last Technomancer I created had a full citizen SIN.
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@onyx said in Money from nowhere?:
Will you kickstart my app that replaces a driver's licence?
I would but my phone's battery is dead so now I can't pay you ... hold on I think I still have a few euro cents in my big boy pants
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@hardwaregeek And I'm apparently at the bottom. No one has used my link for a free funny money account.
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@onyx said in Money from nowhere?:
@sockpuppet7 said in Money from nowhere?:
@initiativeq how will Q ensure scarcity? Whats would stop them from issuing infinite Qs?
We all know there's only one real Q
There are at least two other Q. And both are far more pleasant to look at, IMO.
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@onyx said in Money from nowhere?:
@luhmann said in Money from nowhere?:
@initiativeq said in Money from nowhere?:
Why carry anything other than my smartphone?
Because the law here says I need to carry my ID card. And my drivers license if I'm driving anything. That starts to sound like half a wallet.
Will you kickstart my app that replaces a driver's licence?
The government of shitholistan gave us an app for that. It can be used instead of your paper driver's license.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Money from nowhere?:
@onyx Not all of them. The last Technomancer I created had a full citizen SIN.
That must've been fun.
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@onyx said in Money from nowhere?:
@e4tmyl33t said in Money from nowhere?:
@onyx Not all of them. The last Technomancer I created had a full citizen SIN.
That must've been fun.
Sort of. She was an NPC I made up to justify running a no-deckers game (to simplify it a bit for first-timers) that never ended up happening. She was a 16-year old Techno who had just manifested a month or two previously. Her parents freaked and called one of the black-heli corp groups to come cart her off for "research purposes". The crew was supposed to find her and break her out during an unrelated run at the holding/research facility.
Unfortunately that game never got off the ground.
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@onyx said in Money from nowhere?:
What? I'm from Nigeria, that's a common name there!
Good luck, Jonathan.
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@initiativeq said in Money from nowhere?:
VISA don't need us to tell them about it. They already know how to do it, but they can't, because it requires building a new network from scratch, and they don't know how to get everyone to move to the new payment network.
That seems improbable. ISTM that if a payment processor with the reputation and clout of VISA told their merchants, "We're setting up a new network that's more secure and with lower fees," there would be a stampede to the new network. Customers would be forced to move, because eventually the old one would stop working.
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Interesting.
Either I'm witnessing the new 1% being "born" or I've just happened to come across potential future victims of a rob-your-kidney scam.
I guess I value my kidneys more.
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@blakeyrat said in Money from nowhere?:
I'm sorry so how does the "belief" get converted into hard currency exactly? Gonna need you to connect the dots here.
I don't see how having 40,000 people "believe" they have $50,000 gets me any closer to my $50,000.That's actually basic economic theory. Money, by definition, is whatever people believe money is. If I had a bunch of sand and I could convince everyone that it was a valid store of value and medium of exchange, then it would become one because we'd start using it as one.
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@masonwheeler Well ok and I get that dealing in cryptos, but the problem is: $50,000?
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@masonwheeler said in Money from nowhere?:
@blakeyrat said in Money from nowhere?:
I'm sorry so how does the "belief" get converted into hard currency exactly? Gonna need you to connect the dots here.
I don't see how having 40,000 people "believe" they have $50,000 gets me any closer to my $50,000.That's actually basic economic theory. Money, by definition, is whatever people believe money is. If I had a bunch of sand and I could convince everyone that it was a valid store of value and medium of exchange, then it would become one because we'd start using it as one.
Well, yeah, but his real question is, why would people really believe in this particular $50K equivalent?
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@blakeyrat said in Money from nowhere?:
@masonwheeler Well ok and I get that dealing in cryptos, but the problem is: $50,000?
Well, to be fair...
I'd go sign up an account at the shittiest bank in the universe right now if they told me they'd give me $50,000 for free. This is probably working on that principle.
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OK, here's mine:
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@masonwheeler said in Money from nowhere?:
@blakeyrat said in Money from nowhere?:
I'm sorry so how does the "belief" get converted into hard currency exactly? Gonna need you to connect the dots here.
I don't see how having 40,000 people "believe" they have $50,000 gets me any closer to my $50,000.That's actually basic economic theory. Money, by definition, is whatever people believe money is. If I had a bunch of sand and I could convince everyone that it was a valid store of value and medium of exchange, then it would become one because we'd start using it as one.
I accepted their 50k thing. It doesn't mean I believe it has value. Maybe it works as an incentive for us to convince other people it's money. I doubt this strategy would have any chance of succeeding.
If they accepted it as payment for something useful, that would help. If a government accepted it for paying taxes, and used it to pay government workers, then it could work.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Money from nowhere?:
If they accepted it as payment for something useful, that would help. If a government accepted it for paying taxes, and used it to pay government workers, then it could work.
I was actually thinking "Why would a government approve of and use a currency that they aren't in direct control of", but then again, the Euro exists, so...
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@e4tmyl33t Looks pretty much like a Ponzi scheme. But with bits.
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@wft Indeed. At least with this one, if it IS a scam, the most they have on me is my email address.
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@initiativeq said in Money from nowhere?:
Hi Everyone,
Ben from Initiative Q here.
We haven't officially launched the project. We just sent invites to a few close friends and it somehow circulated all the way to you...
See responses below. Let me know if you have more questions.
Thanks
BenClearly, we have our finger on the pulse of the industry. We have spies everywhere.
Let me begin by acknowledging that you are in an unfair position as you are representing a company and thus must exercise measured restraint in your responses while I am free to be a candid asshole in mine. I yearn for the day when PR people can insult back when they have the moral high ground, but I don't think that's going to happen in our lifetimes.
You are basically agreeing with us: To innovate in payments you must overcome the enormous advantage old technologies have due to network effects.
Glad we agree! I concede that you've perhaps been caught unaware, but it might be a good idea to start innovating. At a job interview over a decade ago, an interviewer noticed that I had been working on some personal projects, and he asked me, "What does your product have that no other product on the market has?" I didn't have a good answer. But for the next big project I started working on after that, I made sure I could have a good answer. It's been almost eight years since and I'm still both meticulous and secretive about the details as I want to be taken seriously when the public sees it for the first time.
The problem is not competition, but how silly it is that we identify our accounts with a large piece of plastic.
That seems like mostly a philosophical objection. I think it's silly that men put on helmets and spandex and give each other brain injuries while moving a pointed, egg-shaped piece of leather down a grassy stretch of land, and that members of the public express extreme anguish over any injuries said men in helmets and spandex might suffer. But as much as it's irrational to me, it exists.
Again, you are agreeing with us: Credit cards are suboptimal, causing sellers to resort to technology that is thousands of years old (cash).
Right now they are the optimal solution as nothing better has yet emerged to displace them.
Just an example. The point is that if you were free to design a payment system from scratch, without worrying about critical mass, you would come up with much smaller and more secure ways to identify an account.
But as a developer, I'm intimately interested in the critical mass situation, especially if it's my job to deliver a functional system. Handwaving does not produce stable, high-availability, secure systems that can handle the kind of traffic you guys are aiming to attract.
I have also seen many young developers (and been one myself) who were too keen to throw away something old and covered in warts, replacing something functional with something that has a ton of bugs (as all new software does), and then made many of the same mistakes their predecessors made (and then fixed) in that old, ugly code.
Actually, there is very little use of advanced fraud prevention algorithms in today's payment networks. Interestingly, many of the innovations in the field were made by Initiative Q's founder, Saar Wilf (founded Fraud Sciences, acquired by PayPal).
How do you know this? Have you examined the algorithms in use by many of the big players today? Would they so readily share their secret sauce with you?
True for some, but not for all. Do you really think that if we were free to reinvent payments, people will be walking around with round pieces of metal in their pockets?
Yes, because there are these things called laundromats, parking meters, vending machines, and arcade machines (to name a few) which still haven't migrated to more modern payment options and probably won't for some time yet.
One of my hobbies is 1/4 mile drag racing. It's rare you will even find a functional ATM at a dragstrip. They are effectively all cash for admissions and concessions. What's your answer to that?
Don't follow your point. Do you disagree that a hypothetical superior network with wide adoption would process trillions of dollars a year?
We can debate that when such a network exists.
How do we get there?
- Get a critical mass of users, who join only for the free Qs.
- Then you can build a superior payment network without worrying about adoption.
- Everyone prefer to use it because it's cheaper, faster, safer.
- Qs have value ("the equation of exchange")
I think steps 2 and 3 are going to be much harder to implement than you think, and it concerns me that you're handwaving away the details. Now, if you guys do have a detailed plan for that and don't want to disclose it for obvious reasons, that's great. More power to you. But I would think if you had solved the hard problems already, you'd be taking a different approach than hypotheticals.
Note that all users in Initiative Q must be invited and verified by an existing user. In the future, all users will undergo additional verification, and people who approved fake users will lose their rewards. This reduces the ability to claim multiple incentives - not to zero, but close to it.
I have a feeling that most of the regulars on this forum could easily defeat whatever countermeasures are in place. VPNs are a thing. Email addresses are easy to get. Throwaway SMS numbers are easy to get. The good news is that if you manage to pull it off, Google and Facebook would probably be banging down your door for your technology as even they can't prevent fake accounts.
- When you design a payment system correctly, you can reduce transaction costs to a fraction of what they are today.
- Definitely possible that we will have competitors. We'll just have to try to be the best.
Well, you've got your work cut out for you. Failing that, you'll still have a nice database from which you could sell user analytics.
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@groaner said in Money from nowhere?:
Failing that, you'll still have a nice database from which you could sell user analytics.
Joke's on you, I'm an EU citizen, I have G-DERP on my side!
Oh, wait, I haven't signed up either way... Damn it law, why aren't you ever helping me?
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@initiativeq once you have your millions of people signed up, how are you planning on getting them to spend their Qs? Say I'm an early adopter convinced this currency is eventually going to be worth a similar amount to US dollars, why would I spend it when it's worth a fraction of that? If it's all about velocity of money you need people to want to get rid of it rather than hoarding or speculating
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@weng said in Money from nowhere?:
My wallet contains 6 payment cards.
2
3
3
7Is your wallet like two inches thick holy crap!
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@mott555 said in Money from nowhere?:
So in this thread everyone accuses Q of being a scam, but joins in just in case it isn't? Do I have that right?
It's free, why not?
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@mott555 said in Money from nowhere?:
@onyx said in Money from nowhere?:
@sockpuppet7 said in Money from nowhere?:
@initiativeq how will Q ensure scarcity? Whats would stop them from issuing infinite Qs?
We all know there's only one real Q
There are at least two other Q. And both are far more pleasant to look at, IMO.
You forgot the kid Q
and the old Q, can't seem to find him though
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@tsaukpaetra There was also Civil War General Q who had speaking lines (and presumably all the extras were also Q but they didn't speak).
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@tsaukpaetra said in Money from nowhere?:
@mott555 said in Money from nowhere?:
So in this thread everyone accuses Q of being a scam, but joins in just in case it isn't? Do I have that right?
It's free, why not?
"If the product is free you are not the customer, you are the product"
I hope all the jokers who joined used a false name, burner email address and most of all a unique password or I will have no pity for you fools.
Filed under: Either way it's an interesting social experiment
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@blakeyrat said in Money from nowhere?:
@masonwheeler Well ok and I get that dealing in cryptos, but the problem is: $50,000?
That's pretty straightforward: they give you 50,000 Q, and then convince everyone that 1 Q has a value of $1, and at that point it becomes true as per the definition of money.
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@jbert said in Money from nowhere?:
I hope all the jokers who joined used a false name, burner email address and most of all a unique password or I will have no pity for you fools.
Tsaukpaetra is my name. Well, on the Internet.
Email address... not so much, but eh, whatever.
Used Insecure2014 password.
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@jbert said in Money from nowhere?:
@tsaukpaetra said in Money from nowhere?:
@mott555 said in Money from nowhere?:
So in this thread everyone accuses Q of being a scam, but joins in just in case it isn't? Do I have that right?
It's free, why not?
"If the product is free you are not the customer, you are the product"
I hope all the jokers who joined used a false name, burner email address and most of all a unique password or I will have no pity for you fools.
Filed under: Either way it's an interesting social experiment
Real name and email (so @masonwheeler presumably now knows who I am) but a unique keepass generated password.
If anyone wants to get in at the bottom of the pyramid,
Initiative Q is building a new payment network. To get people to adopt it, they’re giving away significant sums of their future currency to early users. They require only name, email, and an invite from an existing user. Here’s my invite link: https://initiativeq.com/invite/SZC8FgP-Q
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@groaner said in Money from nowhere?:
Yes, because there are these things called laundromats, parking meters, vending machines, and arcade machines (to name a few) which still haven't migrated to more modern payment options and probably won't for some time yet.
I've seen multiple arcades in multiple different states over the last 2-3 years that take preloaded RFID cards instead of quarters.
At my last job, in the break room, there were vending machines that take cards or cash.
I've seen parking meters that accept cards. They're not common yet, but they do exist.
Laundromats...
. Haven't used one of those since college, so I have no idea what the current state of them is. But it wouldn't surprise me if they're modernizing too. Everything else seems to be...
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@jaloopa said in Money from nowhere?:
Real name and email (so @masonwheeler presumably now knows who I am) but a unique keepass generated password.
Yes, it gave me the name and email for verification purposes, but not the password. (They verifiably got that much right! :P )
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@masonwheeler said in Money from nowhere?:
Laundromats... . Haven't used one of those since college
I remember some that had special cards you had to load (or something like that). Course, we're talkin back in the mid-80s, so <memory fault>
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@e4tmyl33t said in Money from nowhere?:
@wft Indeed. At least with this one, if it IS a scam, the most they have on me is
mya disposable email address.FTFY, I hope.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Money from nowhere?:
@wft Indeed. At least with this one, if it IS a scam, the most they have on me is my email address.
I was gonna say that it's not a pyramid scheme, it's a dimaryp, but unfortunately, that's a different Last Week Tonight video on an industry that exists purely to scam people.
For those interested in some accent-based authority:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6MwGeOm8iI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg
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@masonwheeler said in Money from nowhere?:
I've seen multiple arcades in multiple different states over the last 2-3 years that take preloaded RFID cards instead of quarters.
The big ones like Round1 and Dave & Buster's all use cards, but a lot of the smaller venues still use quarters or tokens.
At my last job, in the break room, there were vending machines that take cards or cash.
And there are still plenty all over the country that do not.
I've seen parking meters that accept cards. They're not common yet, but they do exist.
I've seen them as well. Problem is, what about all the meters in Backwaterstan?
Laundromats...
. Haven't used one of those since college, so I have no idea what the current state of them is. But it wouldn't surprise me if they're modernizing too. Everything else seems to be...Ah, sounds like you haven't lived in an apartment complex that had to shut down the laundry room for a week due to maintenance. I had to stop by a laundromat at least once in the last couple years and it was very much still quarters.
Oh, and the apartment laundry room was also quarters only until a couple years ago as well. One of many things I don't miss about that place.
Quahl
