Qs vs Crypto

How is this different from Bitcoin and cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency is a brilliant solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

Cryptocurrency is digital money that is hard to counterfeit. While the mathematical foundation is ingenious, an “immutable money ledger” is far from being a major need today. Our money is already digital, in the form of bank computer records, and no one is worried that these records will suddenly disappear. This is due to a robust system of trust and governance that protects individuals from such risks.

While many dislike this complex system, it works reasonably well and there is still no better alternative. In fact, the anti-counterfeiting measures that cryptocurrencies offer create an array of much worse problems:

1. Transferring security risk to the currency owners: Removing banks from the system also removes the protection that banks provide in security, fraud prevention, and dispute resolution, leaving individuals vulnerable to theft, scams, and human errors.

   To protect themselves, cryptocurrency users are expected to undertake complicated security procedures such as generating cryptographic keys using dice, entering them into an unused laptop that is later destroyed, storing the keys using special hardware from multiple manufacturers, and keeping paper backups in bank safes.

   Comparing that to payment cards, which allow consumers to make payments using just a few unencrypted numbers while being fully protected from losses, underlines how far cryptocurrencies are from becoming the currency of the future.

2. Unstable value: A basic requirement for a currency is stability and predictability in purchasing power. This requires a carefully managed monetary policy that matches the money supply to current economic activity. Cryptocurrencies have either no monetary policy or an overly simplistic one. As a result their value fluctuates rapidly, rendering them unhelpful for purchases and trade, with all activity driven instead by speculation.
3. Legal controls: Whether we like it or not, governments still hold ultimate power and they insist on regulating currency transfers, financial transactions, investments, and their underlying mechanisms. Any currency that attempts to circumvent such regulations, including most cryptocurrencies, will face an uphill battle to wide scale adoption.
4. Reversibility: No matter how good a system is, if humans are involved there will be mistakes and misunderstandings. Allowing transactions to be reversed benefits both buyers and sellers in the long-term, as customers can engage in the market more confidently. Of course, reversing a transaction should be allowed only for certain reasons — something that can only be determined by human beings following procedures. This goes against the decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies, making wide-scale adoption difficult.
5. Waste: Bitcoin’s energy consumption is equivalent to that of 6,000,000 households and emits 90,000,000 kg of CO2 (200,000,000 lb) every day. Worse, all that energy is spent to support about 3 transactions per second—a far cry from the thousands of transactions per second on the credit card network.

Initiative Q’s main goal is to achieve global adoption, and Initiative Q therefore prioritizes ease of use, stability, security, efficiency, and legality, over abstract goals like decentralization. This is a real world solution for real world problems. It is based on a network of Q agents, who employ thousands of people, conform to local regulations, and ensure that members receive quality customer service and are fully protected from thefts and scams, without requiring them to become security experts.

However, some of the concepts behind cryptocurrency are valuable, and may be deployed in Initiative Q’s backend, for settlement between Q agents — where these disadvantages become negligible.

Read our full payment vision here.