WHY AFRICANS SHOULD RE-THINK ON INCENTIVIZED BLOCKCHAINS
By: Josh Erhiga., Quantum
Tags: Waves Platform Wallet, Dash Protocol, Qnode Blockchain, Blockchain Startup

Blockchain is the technology of the century and its here to stay.

As of today, the Bitcoin (BTC) network is as powerful as 9.1 million horses (horsepower) of energy or 14,000 Corvette Z06s engines.

Understanding Blockchain Is Same As Understanding Bitcoin

The Bitcoin network was the first project or protocol to device the blockchain technology. So by lay definition, A blockchain network is a collection of computers (also referred to as nodes, running along with clouded back-end), with encrypted hard coded software and as a store of data in an inter-chains of blocks. A blockchain can therefore be described as a collection of blocks.

In each block is a collection of transactions or data. All these computers running the blockchain have the same list of block data, transactions and anyone can transparently see these new blocks, being filled with the generation of new coins transactions (in this case bitcoins). No one can cheat, halt, alter the system. A blockchain is always immutable by this design.

Anyone, whether running a bitcoin “node” or not, can always see these transactions occurring live on block explorers. In order to achieve a nefarious act, a bad actor would need to operate 51% of the computing power that makes up bitcoin network to impose an attack (this is practically impossible). Bitcoin has around 47,000 nodes as of May 2020 and this number is growing. Making such an attack is quite unlikely.

Africans have underestimated the power of technology or they always catch on late with the event of things. I remember the event of ATM coming to Africa countries, it was a tug of war to make Africans register for a debit card. But today, there are limitations on the society and the way forward is a cashless society where the debit/credit cards play vital roles. I still believe in the few more years, debit cards might become too heavy to use. The same way the resistance of the automated teller machines posed setbacks initially, it same today with blockchain and crypto-currencies in particular.

BLOCKCHAIN MEANS FREEDOM AND DISTRIBUTED WEALTH?

I intend to be very plain in this write up. On a general note, Blockchain is a technology of freedom and wealth creation. I believe that the technology is for every-man on the street. But humans are always stereotype, particularly Africans. We (Africans) are always slow to new age technology and also lack the zeal to make contributions. I have not been surprised the way governments (world over) have look at the topic of blockchain. At first, we believed and looked at bitcoin as a scam or we say “its too imaginary to be a true store of value or its a crazy man idea. Irrespective of what we believe, this technology is the current gateway to a decentralized community, freedom to financial well-being, and a distributed wealth generation tool, if properly harnessed.

WHY SHOULD AFRICANS RETHINK BLOCKCHAIN?

Usually, Africans are always behind. And if we must solve poverty in our ecosystem and continent, we must think and rethink incentivized blockchains. We must build and rebuild strong projects. We can invent or re-invent, deploy or restructure existing or new projects or protocols with the goal of freedom for every African. Africans can build their own niche. This thought drove me crazy a few years ago when I missed a piece of information that engenders wealth creation. Someone has told me to buy 500 or 1000 DASH currency around 2014 or so when it was just $0.60, but I ignored it. It would have only cost me just 190,000 NGN for 1000 supplies of it. The Naira was neighboring 183 - 190 NGN/$. And in 2015, Dash Protocol introduce the masternodes concept. Today, you need 1000 DASH to deploy a masternode and 1000 DASH neighbors around 36 million NGN as at the writing of this article. DASH therefore became the first INCENTIVIZED BLOCKCHAIN PROTOCOL outside of the bitcoins forks with the masternodes model and democratic governance.

HOW CAN WE RETHINK BLOCKCHAIN?

On this sub-caption, I will share my brief journey on blockchain development and show you how I did this. And if its a worthy cause, then I call on all my African brothers (Nigerians, Kenyans, Ugandans, Ghanians, Zimbabweans etc) to rethink blockchain. I ventured into blockchain fully in 2016.

I was just asking one question. If the person or team behind bitcoin protocol could produce a piece as this digital money (Bitcoin) that has changed the course of world economies, then who did this? Where Africans part of the initiative? If my answer is no, then where was Africa? Is it too late for Africans to awake and create their native economies? Not as competitive with existing protocols by as additional touch of growth and main stream adoption! Is it possible? Can the government of today encourage this technology for transformation?

These questions filled my mind until I summon the courage to begin. It has taken 2 years of research, failure & persuasions. And today, my team and I built a stand alone blockchain with a fork of an existing protocol (Dash Protocol) with unique specifications and without fund raising. We achieved this by making use of available tools from both open and closed sources to deliver a piece of the QNODE BLOCKCHAIN. Qnode Blockchain is an incentivized version of Dash protocol with modified parameters. I developed this for Africans, and Asians as well. QnodeCoin was developed with the goal of vendors usage.

MY CONCEPT OF BLOCKCHAIN IS THAT IT SHOULD BE FREE

Actually, blockchain is free and there are lot of open sources supporting several initiatives. If anyone can afford mining rigs or GPUs, they can create wealth by mining bitcoin, Dash, QnodeCoin and the likes of it. Its only costly at the point of acquiring the hardware's, or requirements for consensus participation or developmental knowledge to build a private rig or node.

INCENTIVIZED BLOCKCHAIN WERE MY INTEREST

I will mention some blockchain that proves to be incentivized base protocols, who did what was different from the SHA256 POW protocol. DASH PROTOCOL was the first incentivized protocol on X11-Proof of Work, that caught my interest and their unique governance model with Masternodes. PIVX also made an upgrade of the DASH Protocol and nabed it Quark-Proof of Stake with masternodes. Followed by it, was the WAVESPLATFORM; that developed the first Lease Proof of Stake algorithm. Lastly, the recent launch of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) on etheruem smart contracts. These protocols can be leveraged upon. So, I did leveraged on them. This gave rise to the Qnode Blockchain of today. We had initial challenges, but we over came them.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal, what matters is the courage to continue - Winston Churchill

QNODE BLOCKCHAIN WILL EVOLVE WITH THE FEATURES FOUND IN THE INCENTIVIZED BLOCKCHAINS MENTIONED ABOVE & DEFI.

I believe we are just one of the few incentivized protocols in Nigeria and Africa. We built Qnode Blockchain from a fork of the Dash Protocol. With our developments, we have every feature the dash protocol have as at version 0.14 (prior to the new dash v0.15 upgrade in june, 2020). We have also integrated interoperability for DEXs (Decentralized Exchange) on Wavesplatform. We are currently building a DeFi layer for governance token with an underlying x11 algorithmic protocol via a smart contract on ethereum. To learn and participate on Qnode Blockchain, you may visit https://qngnodes.medium.com, https://qngnode.cc and https://defi.qngnode.cc

LET BUILD FOR AFRICA, LET BUILD TO LAST

I have said much, therefore let Africans arise to make timestamp developments for community use, Let rethink blockchain. Blockchain is not an easy bite venture, yet there has been evolving platform blockchains that make tokenization easy for non-techy people. Therefore, let build for Africa and let build to last. I believe we can refocus our energy in Africa and support most indigenous project as well as foreign protocols. To this end, I want to thank the team behind DASH Protocol, Wavesplatform etc. LET RETHINK AND BUILD FOR AFRICA…