For those of you who have been following us from the beginning, I wanted to address some of the changes we’ve made to our Whitepaper along the way. Some things just disappeared. There are also some features that appeared, then disappeared again. So for the sake of transparency, and also wanting to get all our fans on the same page as far as what where we’re headed, here are some of the changes made, with an explanation of why.

Lottery Blocks

There are two big recent changes to how lottery blocks are awarded. Those are:

1. Stakers Only Now - They are now only awarded to staking wallets. NOT to Masternodes. The reason is that technically, masternode coin allocation is not staking, making it very difficult technically to put both masternodes and stakers into the same pool in a decentralized system. We could have done it with a lot of work, but this also made sense because we reduced the staker rewards from 45% to 38% when we added a new fund for exchanges and platform building. So this helps bring things back into balance.

2. Higher Stake Means Better Chance to Win - This has also been changed. It used to be that no matter how much you staked, you had the same chance to win. The idea was to give the little guys a better chance. But, we decided this would just get abused. People would set up a lot of useless wallet multiples and game the system. It also improves "coin velocity" by making people want to hold their coins rather than putting them onto exchanges.

3. Lottery amount and time is no longer randomized - Originally we had wanted to run this like a Powerball lottery, where every minute the pot would grow larger until someone won, and you could win at any moment. This turned out to require a lot of resources to accomplish. The way it is now will work well too. People will get excited each week to learn if they won, and so the anticipation builds in a different way.

Marketplace

Some people may remember that in the original whitepaper, we had plans to build an in-app marketplace for people to buy and sell goods with DIVI. We were seeking to give people something to spend it on. I was particularly excited about this because I have a lot of retail experience (I used to own a chain of 30 stores in malls throughout the east coast of the U.S.)

We took this out because it’s a massive undertaking and we didn’t raise enough funds during the ICO to do it. Without huge effort and a lot of nannies policing it, an app like that could become “Silk Road 2.0.” Instead, we decided to focus on building resources for other people to use Divi, such as plugins and interactive buttons. This is what we refer to as “Marketplace Integrations.”

Also, Divi will be a payment platform for others to develop upon. Someone else can build this, and it makes more sense to do it within specific niches so experts can focus on what they’re good at, rather than trying to be Amazon.

Masternodes (Desktop)

There were a couple of desktop masternode technologies we hoped to have because they’re very user-friendly. We wanted for users to be able to set up a masternode at home, using a single computer, on a dynamic IP address with a single click. It turned out that this was basically the opposite of “low hanging fruit.” It’s more like a small fruit at the very top of a really tall, thorny tree. With enough effort, anything can be done, but in this case, it means re-working the way masternodes communicate and secure the network. With MOCCI working so well, this became a very low priority. So you won’t see it on our roadmap anytime soon, if ever. You can still set up a masternode at home the normal, hard way using CLI.

See-saw Algorithm

This was an invention of PIVX and was touted to be a big deal that helped create a balance of rewards between masternodes and stakers, to ensure that the network had enough of each. I never really saw the point of it, because it seemed like the stakers and masternodes would sort themselves out anyway to capture the best rewards they can. Many PIVX-clone masternodes adopted it and there were a lot of problems for many. The see-saw caused some difficulties and ultimately PIVX themselves removed it. So we saw no upside to keeping it.

Looking Forward

So although we’ve lost a few things, we’ve also added features too. Our plan is far more solid than ever before and fits well with the arc of crypto adoption, which will be fast, but slower than I think many people anticipated back when we started. Mainly this is due to politics, or more specifically central bank interference/manipulation that’s slowing progress.