What is Quahl?
Quahl previously known as Initiative Q is payment network system.
Quahl is building the payment system of the future. The Quahl payment network will integrate the best technological improvements that have been made in the payment industry over the last few decades to create a flexible, easy-to-use and inexpensive payment network.
These technologies have been available for years, but have not been adopted due to a classic chicken and egg barrier: No buyer wants to join a new network with no sellers, and no seller will offer a payment option that no buyer uses.
Quahl solves the adoption problem by associating the payment network with a new global currency, and distributing this currency to early adopters for free. Quahl is not the new Bitcoin, but here’s why the idea has value.
Could free units of a new digital currency end up being worth thousands of dollars?
Initiative Q, which is aggressively marketing itself on social media, wants you to think so. It urges you to sign up now, and get your friends to do so as well, to maximize the value of your free “Q” currency. This has invited comparisons to pyramid schemes and suspicions about its legitimacy.
It’s not a scam. It also won’t make you fabulously wealthy. It is, nonetheless, an interesting idea.
Quahl’s marketing explicitly draws comparisons with the best-known cryptocurrency: “Think of it as Bitcoin seven years ago.” The implication is this is the next Big Thing in internet money.
You might think of it as Bitcoin, but know it is not like Bitcoin in most important respects. Yet Initiative Q also states it is not developing a cryptocurrency.
The basic definition of a cryptocurrency is simply any form of digital money consisting of entries in a cryptographically secure virtual ledger, rather than physical coins and notes. In this sense “Q” can be thought of as a cryptocurrency. However, cryptocurrency is increasingly defined further as using a decentralized system to manage and secure the virtual ledger that records transactions.
Bitcoin, for instance, uses blockchain technology to “distribute” the virtual ledger across a network and “decentralize” the process of coming to agreement on how to update it. Blockchain protects a cryptocurrency from manipulation by hackers or governments, but it comes with costs.
**What makes Q different?
Quahl is not like Bitcoin in most technical respects.**
It will not use blockchain but control the “true” ledger centrally. This makes blockchain enthusiasts uncomfortable, because it cuts against the cryptoanarchist aversion to any one group holding power over a system. But it will avoid some costs of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies.
One is the feared environmental cost of energy-intensive “proof of work” algorithms that prove to the whole network a blockchain is compiled correctly.
“Q” will avoid that by the company deciding what is the “true” ledger. That also allows the company to counter fraud and resolve disputes by “reversing” transactions, where blockchains can typically only do this with an intensely difficult “hard fork”.
By design the Q won’t fluctuate wildly in value, either. The goal is a stable private currency for payments processing rather than a vehicle for speculation. It is clearly designed with the current “stablecoin” trend in mind.
Lawrence White, who helped design “Q”, is known for advocating systems where money does not fluctuate wildly in value. He has clearly built Initiative Q around monetarist theory, which says the money supply should be controlled to keep prices stable. So the value of “Q” will not fluctuate wildly like many cryptocurrencies. All of this makes Initiative Q unlike Bitcoin, although it creates a private digital currency.
These systems can be privatized. Any private citizen with a laptop can write a protocol that administers large-scale institutional systems like money, which historically only the centralized state could enforce.
For example, Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, is said to have belted out the source code for the cryptocurrency on a laptop at home during spare time. Now millions of people around the world use the system to interact every day.
What’s exciting is that this allows people to invent all sorts of different institutional systems to see which ones work best – feeding a process my colleagues have called “institutional discovery”.
From this perspective, what is interesting about Quahl is that it creates a novel blend of institutions oriented around streamlined payments processing. It is supposed to take all the good things about PayPal and improve on them.
Not the new Bitcoin, but still interesting
One can understand why Initiative Q’s marketing strategy has caused it to be dismissed as a “pyramid scheme”. But like any payments system, it faces “network externalizes”. It needs lots of people to use it. The more people do, the more value it has.
If it does succeed, though, it won’t make you fabulously wealthy. You’ll get something more like a gift card. The value of “Q” is designed to be stable, so you shouldn’t be expecting to become a crypt-billionaire.
There is no money to invest in Initiative Q right now. There isn’t anything tangible, which means it will be a while before the project is operational. According to Quahl’s timeline, the payment network isn’t scheduled to start development until mid-2019. Once any payments are required, that changes the game. Now money is on the line.
Like most cryptocurrencies, you’ll probably only have white papers and credibility of the founders to go off of in determining to invest or not. As mentioned above, Saar Wilf is a serial entrepreneur. Fraud Services was a success with its acquisition by PayPal. That certainly lends some credibility.
Hitting milestones will be positive developments for the company. Mid-2019 starts network development followed by the ‘accumulation of initial monetary reserves’ and ‘distribution of payment app’ starting in late 2020. Another important milestone occurs in 2020 to 2021 with ‘Seller integration’. 25% of registered sellers is the target. In late 2021, the network launches.
Should any of these milestones get pushed out or seller targets fall far short, it will be concerning and increase overall risk. How the company responds to any of those potential events will be telling.
Quahl Invite Link -
https://quahl.com/invite/xcY@XslVf