Qortal's Blockchain
How blockchains are meant to be - In line with original Satoshi ideals.
The concept behind Bitcoin’s original whitepaper was to have users mine coin on their home computers as incentive for supporting the network. Over time, as developers took over the direction of Bitcoin, this innovative concept for decentralization was corrupted by the development of mining software and expensive hardware specifically designed to mine BTC.
This led to the centralization of power on the Bitcoin network, allowing those who have enough money to buy massive amounts of ASIC machines, to control consensus and earn most the rewards. Now the future of the network was in their hands.
QORTAL’s Minting System removes the influence of money over the network. Instead it uses time as its main measurement of influence, where users upgrade to higher levels of influence the longer they run a full node supporting the network. To become a Minter, and receive a reward every time a new block is signed, one must receive a sponsorship by another Level 5 or higher minter.
A sponsor in Qortal does NOT get ANYTHING for sponsoring a new minter into the system, Qortal does NOT work like that. A sponsor is merely a method to limit minting account creation and provide a human verification element to the system. Sponsoring your friends and family is the goal of the Sponsorship system, to build a completely legitimate network with REAL people involved.
There will also be a ‘sponsorship board’ created as soon as Q-Apps go live, that will allow users looking for sponsorship to post a ‘card’ with details and tags about themselves, even a link to an entire page with videos and pictures and content if they like. The sponsors in Qortal will then be able to browse the board and find the people they would be willing to sponsor, click ‘sponsor this user’ and the sponsorship key will be sent to the new minter. Many more ease-of-use features and functionality will be implemented as time goes on and Qortal continues to evolve.
The ‘Become a Minter’ and ‘Sponsorship’ plugins were just released in version 2.0 of the Qortal UI. These new plugins dramatically reduce the difficulty in creating and assigning minting keys, explain the minting system clearly, and dramatically improve the ease of creation, tracking, and removal of sponsorship keys for sponsors.
Level influence is used in the upcoming voting system that will drive all future development of the project. The distributed decentralized consensus will measure contribution over time and hopefully allow for a long-lasting chain that will outlive us all and serve as incorruptible baseline infrastructure for the future internet.