GO-3.0/tools/qortino-knowledge/docs/philosophy/playing-qortal-book.md

Playing Qortal: Guide to the Revolution of Values (v3.0.0)

The complete book by Simon James, included in this knowledge pack by the author. Qortino may quote and reference it freely.

You are holding an invitation. This book is about a way out. Out of a world where Your time is sold for money, and into one where Your time is simply Yours. It is about a real tool, called Qortal, that already exists and already works. And it is about a change of heart, which I call the Revolution of Values: the slow, quiet realization that the most valuable things in life were never for sale. You do not need money to begin. You do not need anyone’s permission to start exploring. You only need a little curiosity, and the willingness to imagine that the world could be far kinder than the one we were handed. Here is the whole idea in a single breath. Your time is priceless. Qortal lets You record Your time as a value called QORT, simply by keeping a computer connected to a shared network. The moment enough of us decide never to sell that time for money, money quietly loses its power, and what remains is the oldest currency of all: kindness. A Thank You. A helping hand. The things our grandparents once gave freely. I call this real currency of Qortal, the #QQQ. This book has two halves, and You are welcome to read them in any order. The first half is a practical guide. It explains, step by step, how Qortal works and how You can join, mint, and take part. If You are here for the how, start there. The second half is more personal: my own view of why any of this matters, about money, society, health, family, and the deeper questions of who we are. It is honest,

and it is mine. Take what resonates with You, and gently leave the rest. Nothing here asks You to believe anything. It only asks You to look, and to decide for Yourself. A few words You will meet along the way: QORT - the value You mint by keeping a Qortal node connected; a record of Your contributed time. Minting - the act of earning QORT, simply by staying synchronized with the network. Level - how long You have been minting, from 0 to 10; the longer connected, the higher Your level. Node - Qortal running on Your own computer. There is no central server, only thousands of us, together. Nomination - how You earn the right to mint: an experienced member vouches for You, and the community approves. #QQQ - the real currency of New Earth: the kind words and kind acts we share freely. Tribe - a community on New Earth, sovereign and selfsufficient, yet connected to all the others. ICF - the Integral Collective Federation: a vision for how those Tribes can share an economy without money. New Earth - not another planet, but this one, seen and lived differently. My name is Simon James. I am not a guru, and I am not selling You anything. This guide is, and always will be a gift. I am simply someone who found a door, and wanted to leave it open for You.

1.0 The Golden Rules

"If You cannot transform it from the outside, join it, and transform it from the inside out." ~ Simon James Do You have a computer and a connection to the internet? If You do, then You already have everything You need to begin. This guide is Your personal instruction, explaining how to join the Qortal Community, a place where every person is their own bank: independent, decentralized, answering to no one. You do not ask a government for permission. You do not ask anyone for an account. You run a small piece of software, helping hold the network up, and over time the network gives something back. Not a fortune dropped in Your lap, something far rarer. Your time, returned to You, to spend however You choose. Qortal is, in a way, the most interactive game ever built, except the board is reality itself, and so is what You win. It is free. It does not require You to pay, buy, or sell anything, and it never will. Everything here is voluntary. That one word — voluntary — is the whole revolution. Because that is what this is. Not a revolution of weapons or governments, but a Revolution of Values. Qortal is one of the first practical steps into the next era of the internet, a Third‑Generation Internet that no company owns and no government can switch off. It will not bend reality. But it

may help You see Your own more clearly: how much of Your one life has quietly been sold, and how much of it You can still take back, for Yourself, and for the generations after You.

Allow me to explain…

1.1 It is all my fault

"You always get what You want." ~ Alan Watts Have You ever wondered why a few people may "legally" print money, while anyone else doing the very same thing is imprisoned for it? The official reason sounds responsible. If just anyone could print money, there would soon be far too much of it, and the savings of hard‑working people would lose their value. The whole system would come apart. But look closely. Isn't that exactly what is happening anyway? Money printed by the banks is no less absurd than money printed in someone's basement. We invented the greatest game ever played with numbers, and now we are all trying not to drown in this swamp. I say my fault on purpose. Not to sink into guilt, but because what we made together, we can also unmake. We were born into a system built on a single belief: that money has value. The money we use is called fiat money. In Latin, fiat means "let it be done on faith", worth summoned by decree, the way a ruler's word once made a thing so. It has value only for as long as we agree it does. The instant that faith wavers, the money wavers with it. Every crisis, small or large, is simply that faith flickering.

And with each flicker, the value quietly saved by ordinary people is drained away. So how is the money actually made? Most of us picture a bank as a vault, it gathers the savings of people and lends them to others. That is not what happens. When a bank grants You a loan, it moves no one else's money to You. It simply writes a number into Your account. That number did not exist a moment before. It was created, out of nothing, by typing it in. You need not take my word for this: the Bank of England described it plainly in 2014: every time a bank makes a loan, it creates brand‑new money in the very same act. The catch is the interest. The bank creates the sum You borrowed, the principal. It does not create the interest You owe on top of it. So across the whole world, more is always owed than was ever made. The only way for You to find the difference is to take it from someone else, someone who borrowed before You, or who will borrow after. Everyone can never repay at once. It was never built to be possible. Money is debt. This is how the largest pyramid in the world is raised, not in stone, but in numbers, with all of us living inside it. For the accounts to balance, someone, somewhere, must always fall: into bankruptcy, into foreclosure, sometimes into a despair they do not come back from. That is not a flaw in the system. It is the design. A chair is taken away each round, and the music keeps playing. You already know this game. We call it musical chairs.

The Game of Musical Chairs Ten children circle nine chairs while the music plays. When it stops, they scramble for a seat. First come, first served, and because there are ten of them and only nine chairs, one child is always left standing. Not because that child was too slow, or careless, or unworthy. Because the game was built with one chair too few. Someone has to lose. That was decided before the music ever started. This is how almost all money is made. Nearly every coin begins as a loan. The lender creates the money it lends, but it never creates the interest. So from the very first day, more is owed than was ever made. The chairs are the money. The children are all of us. And the missing chair is the interest: a debt the system demands but never prints. Then the next round begins, and a chair is taken away. The circle tightens. The music stops. Another child is out. Then another, and another, a chair vanishing each time, when someone is falling. And these are not really children, and this is not really a game. The one left standing loses a home, a business, a family farm held for three generations. Sometimes the debt was never even theirs, quietly inherited from a relative they barely knew. The judge does not care that they never agreed to play. Behind every empty chair is a real life. Some are pushed to despair, and not all of them come back. On it goes, chair after chair, round after round, until one sits alone among empty seats and is named the winner, while nine stand in the dark and are named losers.

That is where the numbers come from, and they are worth seeing clearly, because the official version is gentler than the truth. The richest 1% own close to half of all the world's wealth, and, in almost every country on Earth, they now own more than the poorest 90% put together.

WHO OWNS THE WORLD how all the world s wealth is shared among its people · 2025 The richest 1% own more than the poorest 90% combined. 1% 9%

90% of people

PEOPLE

WEALTH

40%

35%

25%

The richest 1% The next 9% The poorest 90% The richest 10% own about three-quarters (75%) of all the world s personal wealth. Half of humanity

roughly 4 billion people

Just 60 000 people

the top 0.001%

own just about 2%.

own three times more than the poorest half.

Sources: World Inequality Report 2026 (shares of personal wealth, 2025) · UBS Global Wealth Report 2025. Wealth means everything a person owns savings, investments and property minus their debts.

The game was built with one chair too few.

Line up a hundred people at random: the single richest of them holds more than the ninety poorest of them combined.

At some point the figures stop behaving like figures. The average person in that top 1% holds around two and a half million dollars. The average person in the poorest half of humanity holds about three hundred. That is not a misprint. One group owns roughly eight thousand times what the other does, and the gap widens every year. Every crisis, large or small, widens it: the poor stay pinned beneath the line, the rich climb. How is it that on the same planet, in the same hour, we run side‑by‑side epidemics of obesity and of starvation?

Bravo! Please, applaud the winners, the champions of the monetary game. Let us set a diamond crown on each of their heads. How is it that twelve men now own more wealth than the poorest half of humanity, four billion people? How is it that nearly half of humanity lives on less than about seven dollars a day? How is it that around thirteen thousand children under five die every day, roughly nine every minute, overwhelmingly from causes we already know how to prevent? This is the democracy we are sold. This is the free market. In the monetary system, You are exactly as free as Your purchasing power, and no freer. If You want to know the level of freedom You actually have, try going somewhere without the money. Left to run, this game has only one ending: the 1% owning 99%, and then a single person owning everything, while the rest of us are issued QR passes on our "smart" devices, permitted to move, permitted to buy, permitted to live. Smart indeed. I hope You can feel the problem now: that we are not swimming but drowning, too far under to even call for help. Dollars, euros, yuan, every currency ever issued, were an experiment, and the experiment has taught us one thing clearly: the way we arrange life on Earth has to change. We

have to grow up and update our values, because our values have been eclipsed by the greed. The old arrangement: money, trade, loans, endless consumption, has reached its tipping point, for the simplest reason of all: endless growth on a finite planet was never possible. And it does not matter what name we give it. Capitalism, socialism, communism, plutocracy, or some coming technocracy run by an AI held in the hands of the few, every one of them grows from a single root, and so carries a single disease. They are all built on money and trade, and money and trade bend, in the end, toward corruption. Corruption is only greed wearing an official face: greed for money, for power, for control. If we truly want to remove the problem, we have to remove its root cause, the belief that money has any value. So the next time the news hands You a problem, stop and ask the question almost no one asks: what is its source? A strike for higher wages. A central bank lifting interest rates. A desperate person who stole. Look closely and nearly all of it traces back to the same place, too little money, or the fear of losing it. The media only name the symptoms and serve them to You with a side of fear. They will not step outside the box to ask the question sitting beneath all the others: why is a human life arranged around money at all?

Exercise:

(A tip: do every exercise in this guide as if Your life depended on it. In a sense, it does.) Questioning the integrity of the whole system is not in the media's interest. The media is paid by attention, and nothing holds attention like a problem. The more problems they can show You, the more You watch, and the more they earn. There is an older reason this works. The human brain evolved to fix on whatever might kill us, far more readily than on good news, a single rustle in the grass mattered more than a beautiful sky. That instinct kept our ancestors alive. Today the media feed on it, pressing that ancient

button again and again, and being rewarded every time they do. So it is simply not in their interest, whether the screen is a television or a phone, to point at the source of the trouble, the place where it could actually be solved. The big outlets will not examine the structure of the system itself. They describe its symptoms, one after another, forever. And here is the part worth sitting with: they are not outside the sickness, reporting on it. They are one of its symptoms. Does art create reality, or does reality create art? Either way, the news has become an art form of its own, the art of keeping a low, constant ache of lack, division, and fear alive in the mind. The nightly program called "The News" is, in effect, a script: sequenced, tested, tuned for how it makes You feel. Its real purpose is not to inform You. It is to keep everything exactly as it is, while handing You the comforting illusion of choice. Fortunately, one button was left under Your control.

In money‑based systems, we lost something we rarely name: authentic human trust. Look at advertising. Most of it carries no real information about a product. It is psychological manipulation, built to open a small wound of lack in You that wasn't there a moment ago, so that something can be sold to You as the cure. And the mistrust reaches places it never should. When a doctor recommends a procedure, You want to believe that recommendation rests on one thing only, what is best for Your body. But in a system where care is paid for by the procedure, there is always a second pressure in the room: the incentive to do more, bill more, move the numbers. Most doctors are good people doing their best; that is not the point. The point is that the system quietly sets their interest and Yours against each other, and once money sits between two people, trust can no longer simply be assumed. Then there is planned obsolescence, making things break on purpose. A product is engineered to fail soon after its guarantee runs out, so You are forced to buy it again. This is not a conspiracy theory; the most famous case is a matter of record. In the 1920s the world's largest lightbulb makers formed the Phoebus cartel and deliberately shortened the life of the bulb, fining any member whose bulbs lasted too long. Every replacement You are pushed to buy is then counted as progress. The economy calls it GDP. The corporation calls it profit. So ask the obvious question. Why would a company build the most durable phone, car, or bulb it possibly could, when it earns far more by selling You the same thing again and

again? Why is a true lifetime guarantee almost unheard of? Because in a game built on endless consumption, the company that made things to last forever wouldn't last the year. And then there is the stock market, the "Wall Street." In theory, it exists to move people's savings toward building real things: companies, jobs, inventions. In practice, a vast share of it has drifted into something else: speculation. With derivatives and leverage, You no longer need to own much of anything; You simply bet on which way a price will move, and borrow to make the bet bigger. It is betting, not building. And the bet usually pays off upward, for one simple reason: fiat money is always quietly inflating, so prices keep climbing in name even when nothing real has changed. The rich understand this perfectly. It is why their wealth sits in things that rise with the tide: shares, property, gold, while ordinary people are left holding the cash itself, which loses a little of its value every year it is saved.

The game is rigged. And You were never invited into the club.

The vicious circle has to be broken. Because the only thing we accomplish by continuing is adding more zeros to the fortunes of the rich, driven by inflation, the constant printing of money built into the very rules of the game. And here is what no one tells the children still circling the chairs: You do not have to keep playing. The game holds its power only while everyone agrees to play it. The moment enough of us stop chasing the chairs, stop trading our time, our land, our peace for a seat that was never going to be there, the music loses its grip. We were never meant to win this game. We were meant to walk out of the room, and build one with a chair for everyone. We do not need more problems. We need a real solution. And a real solution does not treat symptoms, it drains the swamp at its source. There is a problem beneath all the others, the one feeding the rest:

the belief in the value of money.

I can promise You their value is identical. Both pieces of paper will light the fire in Your fireplace equally well. I wouldn't suggest either for the bathroom, mind You, too stiff, too small, and far too dirty for the job. The belief in the value of money is the largest religion on Earth. And it answers to no "invisible hand." It answers to the hands that print the money. The economists who serve them, the banks and their cartels, the great pharmaceutical and technology monopolies, the media, and the governments that lean on all of them, together they form a kind of priesthood, and the faith they preach is the value of money.

Their oldest sermon is three words long: “divide and conquer” Money helped us once. It carried our civilization a long way. But what once moved us forward, now holds us in place, a wall across the path of the human family instead of a road beneath its feet. Those official‑looking papers are, in themselves, worth nothing. The only thing granting them power is Your belief that they have it. The number glowing in Your bank account is the same kind of spell, and more fragile than it looks. Here is the part that is not opinion. The total debt of the world can never be repaid, not through laziness or bad luck, but for the reason we already saw: the money to cover all the interest was never created. So the debt can only climb, toward a figure with no end, until something gives. One day it will have to be forgiven, reset, or rebuilt, because the arithmetic leaves no other way out. And the shortages and rising prices You feel are not bad weather; they are a system built on endless debt behaving exactly as it must. Watch closely what gets offered as the rescue. When the debt turns unbearable, when Your loan, Your pension, Your benefits, or simply Your wages no longer reach the end of the month, a hand will be extended, offering help. It is worth knowing the shape of that hand before You take it. Across the world, governments are building a new kind of money: the CBDC: Central Bank Digital Currency. This is

not a rumor. Around 137 countries, nearly the whole world economy, are exploring it; roughly fifty are already running live pilots; China's digital yuan alone counts hundreds of millions of users, and a digital euro is in preparation. (Tellingly, one of the few governments to halt its own retail version was the United States; proof the fight over this is real and far from settled.) A digital currency is not, in itself, evil. What matters is what it is able to do. Money that lives entirely as code can be programmed. Every payment can be seen. Taxes can be changed in an instant. Certain purchases can be quietly blocked. It can even be made to expire, money that must be spent by a certain date, or only in certain places, or not at all. None of that is science fiction; "programmability" is openly discussed as a feature. Central banks insist they would never turn these powers against their own people. Perhaps. But the powers are real, and a tool that can be used this way eventually tempts someone to try. To see where the road leads, look at the pieces already laid in China. Web of databases and blacklists in which a person judged "discredited", for unpaid court debts, say, can be barred from boarding a plane or a fast train, refused a loan, shut out of things the rest of us never think about. The everyday‑behavior score is the temptation lying beside CBDC that is going to be implemented by the ruling class. Join that kind of scoring to programmable money on a phone, and You no longer need walls or guards. Permission to live becomes a setting in an app.

That is the real danger, named plainly: not that this exact prison stands finished today, but that every brick of it already exists, stacked in a pile, waiting for hands to assemble it. An economy where the State can see every coin, switch any coin off, and decide what each coin may buy, that is the oldest fantasy of every tyrant who ever lived, finally made practical. A prison with no bars, because the bars are inside the money itself. And all the public would be handed in return is a permission slip: a QR Code on a screen that opens the doors they choose to open, and keeps the rest shut. Fortunately, none of this is fate. There is another door, and it only opens from the inside. Thank You - but NO!, Thank You.

The decision is Yours. You can hand Your money to a currency the government prints, watches, and controls, or You can be grown‑up

enough to take that responsibility back into Your own hands. The way out of the nightmare is not complicated: step into something genuinely decentralized, something no government can touch, a currency like QORT, on Qortal. And Qortal is far more than a way to move coins without a bank, a border, or anyone's permission standing in the middle. It asks for no gatekeeper and no papers, not even Your name. But that is only the doorway. Qortal is the portal to reality. It invites You to question the whole system, something our culture makes strangely hard, because we are trained to sort everything into neat little boxes and never notice the unity in the totality. Qortal cuts straight across the first and deepest box of all: the one we call “money”. Played well, Qortal works like a fine laser, not only hacking at the branches of the problem, but cutting right through the hearth of the systemic corruption, eliminating it’s source. The belief in the value of money, the planet's largest religion, has become the sickness of our age: a quiet tumor lodged in the collective mind. It blocks our freedom, our honesty, our goodness, our simple willingness to share. How else do You explain it, that we can walk straight past another human being in need and feel almost nothing? The old system numbed us to the suffering all around us, until we stopped seeing it at all. The cure is not another reform. It is to stop playing the old game altogether, and to win, instead, at Qortal.

If we want to heal most of what ails our civilization, we have to update the operating system and install one that runs more kindly on these monkey minds of ours. We need to change the system itself, and Qortal is here to help. Some of its gifts arrive at once: a quiet steadiness at the back of Your mind, knowing that, on Your own machine, outside their walls, You are slowly minting a small reserve of Your own, one no bank issued and no government can switch off. The deeper gift takes longer. It becomes real only when enough of us win together. Qortal is the red pill, the one that wakes You from the dream the old system needs You to keep dreaming. We need that medicine now, more than ever. We need a new game and Qortal is here to set the board.

1.2 Welcome to Qortal, Your portal for making dreams come true. "Utopia is the most stupid idea that man has ever come up with." ~ Bret Weinstein If You have read this far, I will take it that You are ready. So, from the bottom of my heart: welcome to New Earth. Qortal is the piece, every money‑based system has been missing, a way to begin restoring Your sovereignty by minting Your own money, in the form of QORT, on Your own computer at home. (You don't print it out of nothing. You mint it, by helping run the network, more on that soon.) In Qortal, no one has to lose. The rules start from something we all share: we are equal, because we were born with the same amount of time. To take part You need no government's permission, and no need to fear being "caught," because Qortal is genuinely decentralized and asks nothing about who You are, no name, no documents, no data, no KYC. It is enough that You are a thinking, living, free human being. (To be precise: the ledger itself is open, anyone can see that a transaction happened, but it is never tied to Your identity, because Your identity was never collected in the first place.) Qortal can be understood as a kind of DAO, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, one of the newest ways of running a community or an enterprise. No one owns it; it belongs to everyone who uses it. No one

appointed me its "ambassador," either. I simply looked at the wreckage of the old system, asked what could actually be done about it, and found Qortal to be the best practical answer I could imagine. I am only passing it along, because I believe it is powerful enough to change the direction of our civilization. It is a grass‑roots project, built by genuine people who weren't chasing money. They just made a platform meant to serve our human family. Let me tell You where it comes from. In the years before 2008, banks in America handed out mortgages by the millions. Whole neighborhoods went up, and then stood empty, because the people who "owned" them could never truly pay. In 2008 the arrangement collapsed into a global financial crisis. The banks and corporations that caused it were rescued with public money — bailouts — while ordinary families had their homes taken by debt collectors. Out of that wreckage, in early 2009, a different kind of money switched on: Bitcoin. It arrived almost as a public protest, its very first block carried a newspaper headline about bank bailouts, a quiet middle finger aimed at endless money‑printing and the central banks behind it. What Bitcoin proved was that two people could exchange value directly, with no bank in the middle, using a new kind of record‑keeping called a blockchain. The power of a blockchain is that its records cannot be quietly altered. Once a transaction is written, it is written in code, visible to anyone, deniable by no one. You no longer have to trust a bank to move or hold value; You can simply

see, on a public ledger open to all, exactly what happened. People call this "trustless", which sounds cold, but means something hopeful: You no longer have to place Your faith in any central authority. Value, data, messages move straight from sender to receiver. And because a blockchain can be programmed, every platform built on one can be given its own rules. Bitcoin's rule is scarcity. Its code says only 21 million BTC can ever exist, a ceiling that, by design, is all but impossible to change. That hard limit is much of why the price climbs: there will never be more. But strip away the mystique and Bitcoin's price comes down to one thing, the shared belief of its buyers that it will be worth more tomorrow. Which is why the Bitcoin chart is really a chart of human emotion. It maps the fear of missing out, the rush to buy high rather than be left behind, against the fear of the drop, sharpest for those gambling with borrowed money. A tide of hope and dread, whose steadiest winners are not people at all, but the algorithms run by banks and funds. Bitcoin will hold its value precisely as long as enough people believe that those three letters — BTC — moving between accounts mean something.

And Bitcoin has its faults, too. In its original vision, set out in the Bitcoin Whitepaper by the unknown person or group calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto, ordinary people would create new coins on their home computers, through a process called “Proof of Work”. Mining is the only way new BTC is born; the nearly 20 million coins in circulation today (out of that fixed 21 million) were all minted this way, rewarding "miners" for keeping the network secure. But the design had a flaw. Whoever owned faster machines could mine more. So a race began, first for faster chips, then for warehouses full of them, and it was no longer the earliest or the most patient who were rewarded, but simply the richest. Whoever could buy the most computing power won the most coins.

And there it is: a "decentralization" that quietly re‑centralized. Today the great Bitcoin farms, drawing, in a single year, more electricity than entire countries, more than Norway, more than Venezuela, about as much as all of Argentina, are owned by a new moneyed few: the ones who arrived early, with the deepest pockets. The old game, in new clothes.

It is estimated that by 2028, depending on Bitcoin's price, its yearly appetite could climb as high as 480 terawatt‑hours, several times what it burns today, and the curve only points upward.

It is an absurdity. There are still people on this planet living without electricity at all, while Bitcoin pours that much power into the air to defend nothing but a shared belief in its own price. An absolute crisis of consciousness. Fortunately, some of the early bitcoiners saw the hypocrisy clearly. They gathered around a single, honest question: How in truly decentralized and sustainabe way should the currency be distributed? Out of that question, Qortal was born. Qortal is the answer to the false decentralization that quietly infects nearly every crypto project, the kind that calls itself open while power pools at the top. Its design removes the oldest unfair advantage of all: in Qortal, having more money, or faster and more expensive machines, earns You nothing extra. You cannot buy Your way to minting more QORT. There was no ICO, no early investors handed cheap bags of coins. Qortal started from zero. To begin playing, all You need is an ordinary computer and an internet connection, in this century, for almost everyone reading this, a marginal cost. The machine need not be fast; nearly any computer can join the network and help confirm transactions. Personally, I'd point You to a Raspberry Pi 4: it runs on free, open‑source Linux and draws about as much electricity as a phone charger.

Qortal's design rests on two ideas of its own. The first is Proof of Contribution. You earn QORT according to how long You stay connected and synchronized, confirming blocks, helping hold the network secure. It is time and participation that are rewarded, not wealth and not horsepower. The second is the Organic Proof of Humanity, it is what stops a greedy corporation from spinning up hundreds of accounts to mint vast amounts of QORT. Mminting is not a switch You flip for Yourself, it is something the community grants You. A long‑standing member, someone who has been part of the network a good while, has to nominate You. So show up. Take part honestly. Be ready to explain, briefly, that You understand what this community stands for. And if someone already knows You in person, no explanation is needed, they know the kind of human You are. It is a real, human vetting, and very hard to fake or automate. Qortal also is a platform on which we are building a Third‑Generation Internet, a decentralized one. Real decentralization matters because it hands Your sovereignty back to You: no permission to ask, no censor to fear. You need not worry that Qortal will simply vanish one day, because no company owns it; it belongs, fully, to the community that runs it. Even if Qortal's own founders wanted to shut it down, they could not, it would keep running until the very last person securing the network chose to switch off their node.

Already today, You can build censorship‑resistant websites on Qortal. No middleman to register a domain, no host to ask permission. Everything lives on the Qortal Data Network - QDN - where no central authority can delete it, rewrite its history, or take it down. Anyone can join. No one can be locked out. The Internet most of us use every day, call it the second generation, carries a quiet problem: it watches You. The giants of that world: Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Apple and major AI companies are masters of holding Your attention, of keeping You scrolling and clicking and coming back. And here is what most people miss: their services were never truly free. The price is You; Your data, Your habits, Your attention, gathered and stitched into a profile detailed enough to predict, and to nudge, what You will do next. Think how many times You have searched on Google, or opened a map that quietly noted where You stood. Where attention is the prize, the quiet throttling of inconvenient speech becomes ordinary, too. So protect Yourself where You can. In this transition, lean on tools that don't harvest You, a search engine like Brave or Qwant instead of Google. And if You've never given Your privacy much thought, it is safest to assume the profile already exists, and is already being used to steer You. It is, in its own way, a quiet war; for Your attention, and for Your trust. And the power on the other side is astonishingly concentrated. A single firm, BlackRock, runs a risk‑and‑analytics engine called Aladdin that helps oversee the risk on tens of trillions of dollars in assets across the

world, a concentration of financial insight and power that no empire in history ever came close to holding.. When that much money, data, and attention pools into so few hands, the rest of us are left simply hoping those hands are gentle. Every problem in these pages is, in the end, the cry of a child raised inside a single belief: that life is a game of musical chairs, and the whole point is to win, to be, for one bright instant, the ruler of this little rock spinning around the sun. The heartbreak arrives when the music stops, and the moment of glory is gone in a blink. Qortal is a nudge awake. The Third‑Generation Internet it runs on has no owner, no corporation behind the curtain; it belongs to everyone who joins and helps build it, and the impossibility of quietly manipulating its data was laid into its foundation from the first day. More than a currency, Qortal is shared infrastructure for the whole human family. Once You join, You don't only rise through new levels, You take part in its governance, on‑chain, where Your vote is genuinely counted and genuinely carries weight. Have an idea worth trying? Bring it to the community, and put it to a vote. In the vision of New Earth, this matures into the Integral Collective Federation (ICF) - the post-money economic operating system built on Peter Joseph’s Integral framework, where decisions are made through collaborative consensus rather than money or majority rule. Voting for presidents and prime ministers and kings, inside a system run on money, was always such a thin illusion of

choice that my heart went out to everyone who believed they were living in a democracy, who believed the government worked for society, rather than the other way around. If the vote could truly change things, the money printers would never have let You near it. Some form of government is necessary; a society has to be organized. But nowhere is it written that it must be central government, concentrated the way it is in the old system. Central power, held by a few, drifts toward corruption every single time. And corruption is not a bug that better rules can patch away, it is a side effect built into any system founded on money and trade. At least it is, for minds like ours: these clever monkey minds. To fix an error this deep, You cannot keep editing the symptoms. You have to pull out the cause, the belief that money has value, and transform the whole system. (It is striking how many careful thinkers, Peter Joseph among them, land on the very same root: not bad actors, but market trade itself.) QORT stands for both money and Your time. It is a Proof of Time, or better yet, a Proof of Contribution: a reward for helping keep the whole network more decentralized, and more secure. Just imagine how it must have felt. Somewhere in the early days, a curious hacker, a programmer, an early believer, mined twenty Bitcoin on an ordinary laptop. At the time the coins were worth almost nothing; there was barely a market to price them at all. And yet this person decided he would not let them go for less than sixty thousand dollars apiece, and simply waited. The strange, wonderful part: in 2021,

the price finally reached his number. Twenty coins, mined for what felt like nothing, became more than a million dollars. Yes, technically there was a laptop to buy and a connection to pay for, but in the wealthy parts of the world, those are marginal costs.

Luck? Partly. But he also had the eyes to see something new, and the nerve to believe in it before the rest of the world did. After years of think tanks and hard lessons, of visions drafted and discarded, after hundreds of hours writing and rewriting open‑source code and more than a few sleepless nights, the first block of the Qortal blockchain was minted on June 29th, 2020. That is the short version of how Qortal's founders arrived, and what they built, they offered

to every human on Earth, including You: the chance to join what You might fairly call Bitcoin 2.0. Bitcoin for the people. And here is the difference that decides everything. As old Bitcoin's market value swells, it becomes, more and more, the property of the rich and the corporations who can afford the most of it. But as Qortal grows, what grows with it is its community: the people who together are the DAO, the decentralized organization that owns itself. If You have a computer and a connection, then now even You can begin to mint something of Your own, earned, not printed, and hold it, or pass it on, at whatever price You choose. The Economy of Qortal Qortal is fair, because everyone begins in the same place, Level 0, with nothing handed to anyone in advance. There was no ICO, no pre‑mine of cheap coins. The only way a single QORT comes into being is by minting it, and the only way to mint is to show up and help hold the network up. You are paid in time, for time. Getting started? You'll need a little QORT Before You can mint a single coin, there is a small puzzle to solve. On Qortal, everything You do is written permanently onto the blockchain, from registering Your name, sending a Q-Mail message, publishing a file, making any transaction at all. Each of those actions carries a tiny QORT fee. That fee enriches no one in particular and is taken by no one at all, it is simply shared back out among the minters, the very

people keeping the network alive, and it keeps the chain free of spam. So to begin, You need a little QORT, yet You cannot mint Your own until You are already set up. Qortal solves this for You with an onboarding wizard at qortal.dev/onboarding. It walks You through every step, in both text and video, and gives You Your first QORT: about 2 QORT to register Your name, and then, once that name is confirmed on‑chain, another 4 QORT for messaging and transactions, enough to use Q‑Chat freely, Q‑Chat is Qortal's own built‑in messenger, public groups open to all, with private groups and direct one‑to‑one messages kept end‑to‑end encrypted. Sending a message costs no QORT at all: chat messages are unconfirmed transactions, never written permanently into the chain, so they carry no fee, and they quietly vanish after about 24 hours, leaving no permanent record behind. There is just one small gate, to keep out spam‑bots: Your account needs to hold a little QORT, around 4, before it can post freely. It is not spent; it simply has to be there. And if the wizard ever runs dry, or You'd simply rather ask a human, You can. This is a community before it is anything else, and someone is almost always glad to send a newcomer enough QORT to begin. Just ask on the Qortal private server at cloud.qortal.org, or in the community groups on Telegram or Discord. It is the "Here You have Thank You" of the Golden Rules, in its very first form. Registering a name is the first thing worth doing. On Qortal, Your name is both Your identity and Your address, the place Your websites, apps, and files will live, and it is

truly Yours, owned by Your account alone, with no yearly renewal and no registrar who can ever take it back. And if You should ever want more QORT without waiting to mint it, You can simply trade for it. When You create an account, a Litecoin wallet is made for You automatically; through Q‑Trade, You can swap Litecoin, Bitcoin, Pirate Chain Coin, and a handful of others, directly for QORT, peer‑to‑peer, with no exchange and no middleman standing between. The same coin that secures Your transactions also powers an entire parallel internet: publish a site or an app once and host it forever with no monthly bill, message privately, share, trade, QORT is simply the key that opens all of it. How You become a minter: The Nomination In the early years, a Level 5 minter could hand a newcomer a "sponsorship key" directly. That mechanism is gone, replaced by something more human, and far harder to game. When You have spent real time on Qortal, using it, contributing, becoming known, a long‑standing minter (Level 5 or above) can vouch for You by publishing a Nomination Card in the Q‑Mintership app. You never nominate Yourself; someone who knows Your work has to stake their own reputation on You. That card is then read by the Minter Admins, a group of community‑elected members whose role is to review nominations and decide, together, who may mint. If they approve, by a shared on‑chain group decision, You are sent

an invitation to the MINTER Group. Once You accept and add a minting account, You begin at level 0 and, after roughly 7,200 blocks of staying online, about a week, You cross into level 1. You are Initiated. From there, You mint on Your own. And one rule is unbreakable: one minting account per person. You may welcome as many real humans into Qortal as You come to know, and keep as many non-minting accounts as You like, but each of us mints on a single account, and only one. This is the Organic Proof of Humanity. If several minting accounts are ever traced to a single operator, they are all removed. The levels: Initiation, Baptism, Maturity Level 1 is Your Initiation. To reach level 5, the level at which You, in turn, may nominate the next human, You must stay synchronized with the blockchain for well over a year. Call it Your Baptism: long enough to truly understand what Qortal is before You are trusted to vouch for another. The highest level is level 10, Your Maturity. It is not a victory; It simply means You have become a fully mature member of the community. Reaching it takes a long time, around eight years, in fact. To picture it: if a newborn child could somehow begin minting on the very day they were born, and never once went offline, they would only arrive at full maturity at about the age of eight.

How each block's reward is shared A new block is minted about once every 60 seconds, and each one carries a reward, freshly minted QORT, plus that block's transaction fees. The reward is divided into tiers by level, and everyone online within a tier splits that tier's slice evenly. So Your share grows as You climb, and gently shrinks as more people join Your tier.

A word on QORA Before there was Qortal, there was QORA, a blockchain launched back in 2014, an early attempt at many of the ideas Qortal would one day carry much further. In 2016, the people who would go on to build Qortal took QORA under

their wing; in time they judged its foundations too flawed to save, and wrote Qortal entirely from scratch, starting from a genesis block in 2020 with nothing pre‑mined and nothing held back. But they did not forget the ones who had believed early. Before that genesis, anyone still holding the old QORA coin could burn it, surrender it, and be written into Qortal's very first block as owed a share of what was to come. Those holders are repaid slowly in QORT, at a fixed rate of 250 old QORA for every 1 new QORT, a little arriving with each block, and they need not run a node or mint a thing, the network simply remembers them. This is the 1% set aside in every block. Once it was a full fifth of the reward; a community vote in 2022 settled it at one percent. It is a quiet debt of honour to the people who were there before the beginning and it will take many years yet to pay in full. The longer You have given to the network, the larger Your share, not because You hold more money, but because You have shown up for longer. Level 0 earns nothing; it is simply the waiting room. Two honest details. First, no one has yet reached the top tier, levels 9 and 10 stand empty, so for now that 32% is redirected to the admins (more on them shortly); once minters finally climb that high, it will flow to them, as designed. Second, rewards are not paid out every single block but tallied in batches, roughly every 1,000 blocks, so don't be alarmed when Your balance moves in steps rather than smoothly.

The reward slowly shrinks over time

QORT was designed to arrive quickly at first and slow as the years pass. At Qortal's birth on 29th of June 2020, each block minted 5 QORT. About every six months, that figure steps down by 0.25 - 4.75, 4.50, and onward, toward a floor of 2 QORT per block. At the time of writing it sits near 2.5 QORT; You can always see the live figure on a block explorer such as exqlorer.com or Q-Minter q-app on Qortal. Once it reaches the floor, the pace is set by the community through a yearly vote, and even then it is kept on a short leash. A single vote can move the rate by no more than 1 QORT, and no less than a quarter, in either direction. So change comes slowly and never by surprise: the reward can never fall below 1 QORT, nor climb above 5. And unlike Bitcoin, Qortal has no maximum supply, no hard ceiling of 21 million. New QORT is minted

continuously, on every account that stays online, which is only another way of saying there is always enough to go around. Enough for everyone. The Minter Admins and the Dev Admins Because minting is now granted rather than self‑claimed, two community groups hold the system together. The Minter Admins are the human layer that makes nomination trustworthy. They are elected by the community; they read the nomination cards; and they approve, or remove minting rights by shared, on‑chain decision. It is a real, paid responsibility, not a throne: being an admin grants no extra weight to Your vote, and the only way to gain genuine influence on Qortal is the same for everyone, to actually mint, block after block. To draw their share, a Minter Admin must themselves be actively minting. The Dev Admins are a separate group who steward Qortal's core software. No update reaches the network until enough of them approve it together. Because they contribute through development rather than uptime, they carry no minting requirement. And here is the important recent change: the old idea of "founder rewards" has been removed entirely. The share that once went to the founders, together with the still‑empty level 9–10 tier, is now split 50/50 between the Minter Admins and the Dev Admins. Combined with their 3% base, the two groups currently receive about 35% of each block (roughly 17.5% each), shared evenly among the

individual admins. When the top tier finally fills with real minters, that 32% returns to them, and the admins keep only their base share. Even the founders now earn nothing simply for being founders, like everyone else, they are rewarded only for the time they actually put in. Your vote The higher Your level, the more weight Your voice carries in Qortal's decentralized ballots, simply because You have minted more blocks. If You have an idea worth trying, bring it to the community and put it to a vote, and be certain that Your vote is counted, and that it means something. Your First Steps If all of this feels like a lot, here is the whole journey in plain steps. Day One. Download Qortal from qortal.dev and install Qortal Hub, the modern app for Your account, apps, node, and minting. (If You'd rather not run it on Your main computer, a plug‑and‑play QORTector node appliance can do it for You.) Create Your account, write Your secret backup phrase somewhere safe and offline, it is the only key to Your account, and no one can recover it for You, then run the onboarding wizard at qortal.dev/onboarding to claim Your first QORT and register Your name. Open Q‑Chat, and say hello. Your First Week. Begin to be a real, visible member. Publish something that lasts, a file on Q‑Share, a video on Q‑Tube, a small website built by drag‑and‑drop with the Qortal Web

Builder. Join the conversation on Q‑Chat, on Telegram, on Discord. This is how an experienced minter comes to know You, and how, one day, You will be nominated. Your First Months. Once a minter nominates You and the Minter Admins approve, You join the MINTER group, add a minting account through the Q‑Node app, and begin minting toward level 1. From there, You simply stay connected. Your time gathers quietly while You go on living Your life. Your First Year, and Beyond. You keep minting. You help others find the door, as someone once held it open for You. You begin paying in #QQQ within Your own circles. And slowly, without forcing anything, You become part of a community building something new. Why no corporation can capture it Think it through. The Nomination is a living, human handshake, built on the oldest courtesy there is: "Here You have. Thank You." An established minter stakes their own name on a real person they have come to know. It cannot be faked, and it cannot be automated. So would anyone truly take a job whose task was to beg respected minters into vouching for phantom accounts? Fake people meant to drip passive income up to some corporation, when that same worker could simply mint at home, for themselves? And the instant several minting accounts trace back to one operator, every one of them is removed. A corporation that tried to farm QORT would only dismantle itself.

Once the greed of corporations is designed out, only the greed of the individual remains, and that, too, is held in check: by the one‑account rule, by the Organic Proof of Humanity, and by the long stretch of time it takes to reach level 5 at all. The last of it falls away with the one thing all that time is really for: coming to understand what this community values. Qortal is not a machine for printing money. It is the most interactive game in the world. If Your aim is to "win" by spinning up many accounts and minting for profit, You will find it changes nothing at all. And if those are Your motives, it is time to revisit the Golden Rules of the Game.

· THE GAME OF QORTAL ·

The Golden Rules of the Game In the Game of Qortal, You do everything in Your power to stay synchronized with the network right now minting QORT on Your account, this very moment. And You help the people You love most to do the same, so that they too stop spending their precious time for nothing, and join our community as soon as they can. If they do not know how to install Qortal Core, Qortal Hub, or Qortal Go, You can teach them. And if You do not know how either no matter. Visit one of the Qortal websites and watch the guide. It is simpler than You fear. The game is won on the day the last person to join Qortal neither has to, nor wants to, sell their minted QORT for any price at all because by then we all understand a single thing: that QORT is priceless, exactly as Your time is priceless. This is the part the old world cannot grasp. In a system built on money, the prize goes to whoever moves first the early bird, the insider, the one who got there before You. In Qortal there is no such race, because we all win at the very same moment: the moment the last person decides their QORT is not for sale. On that day its price does not so much rise as escape climbing past every number until money has no figure large enough to name it, because QORT has left the marketplace behind entirely. And in that same breath, the belief in the value of money quietly dies.

All for one, and one for all. And there it is. The Great Transition. The Transformation of the System. The Revolution of Values from a world built on the greed for money and profit, to a world built on sharing, and not expecting anything in return. The real currency of Qortal the #QQQ was never the coin at all. It is the small, human things we hand to one another and never bill: Here, this is for You. It is nothing. Excuse me. I am sorry. I forgive You. Hi. Hello. How are You? Good morning. Good night. See You soon. Have a beautiful day. Have a beautiful life. Enjoy. Good luck. Please forgive me. I love You. Thank You

Spend them freely. Spend them everywhere.

They are the only riches that multiply the more You give away.

It is checkmate and game over for every system built on money. To win in Qortal is to end the game of exploitation, of corruption, of nearly every wound that has festered in mankind for the last ten thousand years. From this point on, the community accepts payment only in: #QQQ. And here is the secret about that currency, You already use it, every single day. Your parents taught You its rules when You were small, long before You could count. Your mind mints #QQQ endlessly; it is the one resource that never runs dry, the very wellspring of Your resourcefulness. Everyone, already, is a millionaire. You don't believe me? You think it isn't possible? But You already do it. We still pay one another in #QQQ freely, though mostly within the small circle of family and close friends. The whole of the task before us is simply this: to widen that circle until it holds the entire human family. Somewhere along the way the stranger became a blur to us, dimmed by our own ignorance, and in place of authenticity and gratitude we began to trade in something thinner, faith in the value of money, in numbers glowing on a screen. Picture it differently. If every person were synchronized with the network from the day they were born, the QORT they hold would depend on one thing only: their age. The longer You have lived and contributed, the more weight Your voice carries, until level 10, where every mature

member stands equal. To reach level 10 is simply to have grown up inside the Qortal community. For Qortal is a game played across generations. You can hand Your time down to Your children, by giving them the keys to Your account. Those keys — Your Secret Phrase — are made the moment You create an account: fourteen words, drawn at random, in a particular order. They are the one and only way back in, if You did not save Your password. If You forget Your password, or Your computer dies, those fourteen words restore Your account and everything in it. (You can also save a Backup File from the security settings and keep it somewhere safe and offline.) It is by these keys, and these keys alone, that You become Your own bank, independent, answerable to no one. They are what make You free. They are a secret that belongs to You completely, and yet, in a quiet way, they are the secret every member of this community shares. So guard them with all Your might! Never type them into a computer, a phone, or, above all, anywhere on the internet. Write them by hand, on paper, and keep that paper offline, somewhere safe. Because in a decentralized world there is no support line to call, no one who can recover them for You. This is a real responsibility, and I trust You are ready for it. Protect them from fire. Bury a second copy in Your garden. Commit them to memory, or weave them into a little poem, one You might tell Your children at bedtime, so that the thing which keeps the family free is itself passed down, generation to generation.

· PLAYING QORTAL ·

fourteen words

My Secret Keys

the only key to Your account, and to everything within it

1

8

2

9

3

10

4

11

5

12

6

13

7

14

Write these words by hand only. Keep this paper offline, in a safe place in the decentralized world there is no support line to call. Date stored:

Second copy kept at:

These words are Your bank, Your freedom, and Yours alone.

Could You Patent the Sun? "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." — Isaac Newton Stop and consider what it truly means to "own" an idea. Copyrights and patents present themselves as protections, but look closely and they are something stranger, a fence thrown around knowledge, a toll booth on the road of human progress, slowing the very thing they claim to nurture. Because how can anyone really own an idea? You arrived here owning nothing and knowing nothing. Everything You have: language, numbers, tools, the whole inheritance of human thought, was handed to You for free, by the dead. Did You pay to be born? Take something as humble as a pen. Did You invent it? Of course not; whoever did is long gone, and the pen sat waiting for You before You drew Your first breath. And yet it is with that borrowed pen that You write down Your "original" idea, then sign Your name beneath it, call it Yours, and ask the world to pay. Will You send a share to whoever first dreamed up the pen? You cannot. You don't even know their name. Now widen the lens. The lighter, the sewing needle, the cup You drink from, the alphabet, the computer in Your pocket, did You conceive a single one of them? Almost nothing You will ever "create" is truly Yours alone; it is a small new arrangement of gifts You were given. We each own a little of everything, equally, because we inherited all of it

together. And ideas are not like bread, where my portion leaves less for You. They are like flame: I can light Your candle from mine and lose nothing, and now there are two fires where there was one. To wall such a thing off and charge admission is not protection. It is a quiet theft from everyone who comes after. The greatest minds knew this in their bones. When the journalist Edward Murrow asked Jonas Salk who owned the patent on his polio vaccine, the vaccine that would spare millions of children from the iron lung and the grave. Salk seemed almost puzzled by the question. "Well, the people, I would say," he answered. "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" Or think of insulin. When Frederick Banting and his colleagues found the substance that turned diabetes from a death sentence into a life, they sold the patent to their university for a single dollar. Banting would not even put his name on it: a doctor, he believed, had no business growing rich from a cure, insulin belonged to the world, not to him. And here is the bitter epilogue, the proof of everything this chapter means: a century later, that same insulin, given freely so that all might have it, had been turned into one of the most profitable products on Earth, priced so high that people ration their doses, and some die doing it. That is what happens when a gift meant for everyone is captured, and made to pay. "But surely," someone will object, "the patent is what pays for the research." Notice the sleight of hand. Insulin was discovered with public funds and given away; the fortunes

came later, and built nothing but higher prices. The patent did not fund the cure. It only decided who would be allowed to afford it. Fortunately, the older and truer way of building never died. Today it even has a name: Open Source. Open source simply means the foundation is left unlocked, free for anyone to use, study, improve, and pass on, asking nothing in return but gratitude. Whoever can contribute, does; every mistake is out in the open, so every mistake gets mended; and the whole grows stronger with each new pair of hands. It is the exact opposite of the patent and the license, and far from being a fringe experiment, it quietly runs the world. The Linux that open source built powers most of the planet's servers, almost every supercomputer, and the Android in billions of pockets. Even the World Wide Web was a gift of just this kind: its inventor, Tim Berners‑Lee, chose not to patent it, and in 1993 it was released to all of humanity with no owner and no fee, that single act of giving is the only reason the web could grow into the shared commons we live in today. And the same spirit lives in Qortal, and in LineageOS and OpenStreetMap, in LibreOffice and Organic Maps, in BitTorrent and VLC, tools made by people who chose to give, and who ask nothing more than Your thanks. Which is, after all, the only currency worth paying them in. #QQQ.

1.3 It is the Financial Advice

“Never be fearful and never be greedy” ~ Simon James The genius of Qortal is that it removed the need to arrive rich in order to matter. There is no first‑mover's advantage here, no head start that money can buy. We each climb by a different path, but the view from the summit, Level 10, is the same for everyone, and at the top we stand as equals. The currency of Qortal is time, and QORT is its measure, Your Proof of Contribution to the whole. So when someone sells their QORT, they are, in a quiet way, selling a piece of their own time. And time is the one thing none of us can ever buy back. So do not sell it, not unless the old world leaves You no choice. Think of Your minted QORT instead as a reserve: something held back, a small safety net stretched beneath You while the old system still stands. Insurance from the monetary game. Now, about its "price." Here is the only honest financial advice: I am not telling You to buy QORT, nor to sell it, nor to expect it to make You rich. I am telling You that the very habit of measuring a life in currency is the trap we are climbing out of. The price of QORT, like the price of Bitcoin, or Dogecoin, or anything else, is a kind of shared joke. It is worth only what someone will pay, and what You are willing to accept. Mint a single QORT over a week and You could, if You wished, mark it for sale at a million dollars, for who is to

say a week of Your life is worth less? The number is absurd. That is exactly the point. Every price tag ever fixed to a human hour is absurd; we have simply stopped noticing. And if You have come to these pages as an investor, hunting the next coin to ride to the moon, gently, You have misread the map. You do not need to buy QORT at all; You can mint it Yourself, with nothing but time and a connection. To "invest" in it is to miss what it is: not a bet on a price, but a way out of the whole casino. During this transition the old world still pins a number to it, a few cents, at the time of writing, but do not mistake that number for its worth, any more than a price sticker could hold an afternoon with someone You love. Because here is what happens at the end. When enough of us refuse to sell, QORT does not so much soar as slip free. Its price climbing past every figure money can name, precisely because it can no longer be bought. It becomes priceless in the old world and, in the very same moment, worthless in the new one, for on New Earth we will not be counting at all. If You have already bought what You wished to buy, and done what You wished to do, You will find there is nothing left that satisfies quite like giving, and expecting nothing in return. The money of Qortal belongs to us all. The value of QORT is priceless in the old system, and worthless on New Earth.

On New Earth we pay only in #QQQ, the currency described in The Golden Rules of the Game. #QQQ is the currency of the Organic Blockchain of the Universe, the one that Qortal is built upon. To understand this is to step through the portal to reality. You can set down the running, the grasping, the fear, and rest, at last, in gratitude, and begin to truly live. What Qortal really offers was never the coin. It is a community with its value system made whole again. Imagination shapes reality, and Qortal is the platform, the matrix, the zeitgeist running quietly through every part of life, a saner operating system for these clever apes we are, on this small planet we named Earth. No one here can lose. The only losing left is to stay in the old monetary game, and even that is just not yet winning. Everyone may begin. There are only two states to be in: State One: not yet winning, and State Zero: winning already. Victory in Qortal dissolves the division between the rich and the poor. If we are going to call ourselves the thinking animal: Homo Sapiens Sapiens, then surely we can grasp the simplest thing of all: that we are one family, and that the future we wish for our children can only be built together. Together we stand; divided we fall. Is that not our one shared goal? And is "divide and conquer" not, in the end, our one shared enemy?

2.0 Revolution of Values

2.1 God rules the World

Qortal is an educational game, a bridge built to carry us out of the old systems that breed corruption, greed, and envy, and toward one resting on something far older: a real love for the person beside You. Take Jesus. It hardly matters, for our purposes, whether he walked the Earth exactly as the stories say. What matters is that a handful of his sentences ring true the moment we hear them, as though we already knew. Treat Your neighbour as Yourself. Do unto others as You would have done to You.

I think he meant these more literally than we tend to read them. When Jesus said he was the son of God, that he and the Father were one, it cost him his life, because it was heard as one man's outrageous claim. But read him another way. In the old scriptures, when the divine is asked its name, the answer is simply: I AM. Not a title, not a someone, the bare fact of being, aware of itself. And that "I am" is not Jesus's alone. It is the most intimate thing You have. Here is how I have come to read him: he was not saying I, this one man, am the only God. He was pointing at the I AM that looks out of every pair of eyes, including Yours. So sit with the plainest question there is. Who is reading these words, right now? Not Your name, not Your story, the bare sense of being here, the "I" underneath all of it. That. Notice it. The teachers give it many names: awareness, consciousness, the Self, Christ Consciousness, even God, but the word matters far less than the looking. Whatever it is, it is the one thing You have never once been without. And here is the turn the whole book rests on: that same "I am" is what looks out of the stranger, too. When You truly feel it, that the one across from You is “I” in exactly the way You are “I”, cruelty begins to make no sense. To wound another becomes a strange way of wounding Yourself. Compassion stops being a rule to obey and becomes simply what remains once the illusion of separateness thins. This is the ground beneath forgiveness: not a pardon handed down from above, but the quiet

recognition that there was never truly someone else there to blame. You don't have to believe any of this. I would rather You didn't. I would rather You looked, and saw for Yourself. If no one ever turned You toward this, or You once knew, and forgot, then take these pages as a gentle reminder. What's being pointed at is nothing exotic. It is nearer than Your next breath and plainer than a thought, the simple, sinless awareness that was already here when You were a newborn, before You had a name or a single idea about Yourself. Pure looking, before the words arrive. (And to be clear, because it matters: none of this denies that life can hurt. It is not a trick for pretending pain away. If anything, it is a way of meeting pain without being destroyed by it.) There is no escaping the duality of things, no light without shadow, no day without night, no me without You. I am, because You are. Without the small, separate self, there would be no vantage point from which to notice the wholeness at all. The little ego is not an enemy to be crushed; it is the lens through which the One gets to glimpse itself. We made God in our image, the saying goes, and in the same breath, God made us. Both are true. Which is only to say: there is no guru waiting out there holding Your answer. Every real one, if honest, will hand You back to Yourself. You were looking for the door, and You are the door.

If it helps to hear it described well, I'd point You toward Alan Watts, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Eckhart Tolle, Rupert Spira, Ram Dass, or Adyashanti, they are wonderful at putting words around the wordless. Or, better still, toward no one at all: every true guide is only a finger pointing back at You.

What people call enlightenment is not an achievement; it is a recognition, the ground settling once You glimpse what You actually are, beneath the small and frightened ego. The famous red pill. The waking from the dream of being only this fragile, temporary self. So rather than declare what You are, let me only ask You to look, and see whether this holds:

Everything You have ever known has changed. Your body, Your thoughts, Your name, Your story, all of it, in motion, always. And yet something has watched it all, unchanged, from the very first moment until now. That watcher has no age. It was never quite born. Find it, and You will see it cannot die. I am not asking You to take my word. I am asking whether, when You look honestly, You can find the place where "You" end and the rest begins. This is the oldest secret, and it hides in plain sight: the "I" at the center of You is not privately Yours at all. It is the same "I" wearing every face. People die and people are born, and it is all one awareness, lived one life at a time, resurrection happening, quietly, right now, as You. Which is why there is no profit in cheating, harming, or lying. At the end of the arithmetic, the only one You ever fool is Yourself. The meaning of life is not found; it is made, by each of us, in what we do. Whether You think You can, or think You can't, You are right. If You are certain You could never change the world, then You simply won't be among those who do. The only constant is change. So don't fear the unknown. Step off the worn path now and then and try something new, even here, even in a "virtual"

world. Start Playing Qortal. The finest teacher is Your own mistakes. For mistakes are divine. Everyone makes them, and to understand Your own should be cause for celebration, not punishment. Each of us is doing the best we can with what we were handed. You would not blame a flower for making the aesthetic mistake; so don't blame a human for being human. Everyone is, in their own crooked way, perfect, and everyone burns with the same light, like a single flame on a candle. Feel sorry where You must, and forgive, beginning with Yourself. Sometimes one meeting, one sentence, one word turns a whole life. When someone suddenly swears;"Ah, fuck!", it often means something just came clear that wasn't, a moment before. Congratulations: a new truth has landed. Laughter and a good joke are among the surest signs of understanding. Qortal is not perfect either, but it is the kindest tool I know of for the human family, and word of it still travels the oldest way, from mouth to mouth. Its victory would re‑tune our civilization toward a better frequency. From here on, instead of serving the small and frightened self, You begin to serve the whole, the One looking out of everyone. Call it serving God.

2.2 Death

The great institutions of religion: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and the newer faiths we don't call faiths, like transhumanism and even hard atheism, have, for the most part, drifted far from the living thing they began as. There is a quiet paradox here: to need a religion, to cling to it, is often a sign of how little faith one actually has. The word itself once meant “to bind together”, to gather, yet over the centuries organized religion became one of the great engines of division, carving the single human family into camps. It took our deepest intuition, the sense that all consciousness is somehow One, and sold it back to us in pieces. Where it turned to commerce and control, it opened a Pandora's box and let a kind of hell loose on Earth. This is not an argument with the seekers, or with faith itself. The versions that stayed close to reality, the wisdom of the Indian and South American peoples, the Eastern philosophies, the contemplative heart of the Orthodox tradition, still carry the living spark, even if each, in its own way, has gathered distortions. The dispute is only with the machinery that grew up around them. And nowhere is that machinery uglier than around death. In a world that runs on money, You cannot even bury the people You love without first counting the cost. An entire industry has made a marketplace of grief: buy the mass for a “God bless You”, and perhaps the headstone comes at a discount; pay the gravedigger, pay the priest, and in some places, pay a subscription on the plot itself, so that when the

payments stop, the grave is cleared away as though Your loved one had been renting the ground. The whole theater around dying has become a grim little comedy of commerce. If some part of You has always sensed that something was deeply off about all this, You are not alone. Must it really be so complicated? Imagine instead: the body returned gently to dust, and from those ashes a tree planted, one the person chose while living. Tree after tree, the planting grows into a Holy Forest. Beside each trunk, a small tablet tells the short, bright story of the life that feeds it. And after the planting, everyone gathers, not for a grim reception, but for a meal, a celebration, where family and friends trade the funny, foolish, beloved stories of the one who's gone. Now, let me be careful here, because this is tender ground. Grief is not a mistake. When someone You love dies, the ache You feel is the love, still reaching for them with nowhere to land. That pain is real, and right, and it deserves all the time it takes. Nothing in this chapter is asking You not to grieve. What I want to offer is something to hold alongside the grief, not in place of it. Because so much of our fear of death comes not from love but from a misunderstanding: the belief that death is a pure ending, an enemy, a wrong. Yet there is no life at all without death, no in‑breath without the out‑breath that makes room for it. When the fear of death finally loosens its grip, it goes all at once, the way

panic drains away the moment the snake across Your path turns out to be a coil of old rope. Ask someone who has truly seen this "Do You fear death?", and often the only honest answer is a laugh. Not a mockery of those who fear it; a laugh of sheer relief. Outplaying death. Becoming undone. “Good God, our Lord, grant us eternal rest”, that is the old song I once heard drift to me under my oak tree.

In what the traditions call Heaven, there is only ever one time: Now. And if You cannot find Your way into this single living moment, what exactly are You saving the future for? Every second the clock ticks is only a reminder of who You already are. Already, always, Here and Now.

Die before You die, the mystics say, and You discover You were never going to end. Die, in that sense, the way I read Jesus dying. The whole meaning of his death arrives only after it. After every desire and every grip has been let go. When his body was killed, what remained? The very awareness this book keeps pointing to. He was not afraid for his body, and he forgave the men who drove in the nails, because, as I understand him, he was certain that what he truly was could not be killed at all. His forgiveness was the lesson itself: that beneath the dying man there is something that every "I" shares, in every face, that death cannot reach. If You give up and rest as truth, You will be nakedly exposed to indescribable bliss and unconditional happiness, originating from the infinite source at Your heart. An exercise. Close Your eyes. For a few minutes, breathe slowly and deeply, and let Yourself rest in the quiet, the same quiet there was before You were born. You can’t "experience" non‑existence, of course; You can only ever experience Yourself, here, now. That is rather the point. Notice how You are always, only, present. Three… two… one… begin… Breath is life. It is the one tool always in Your grasp. A small cross You carry everywhere and can never lose. It happens on its own, yet You can also take its reins: breathe in, breathe out, or simply hold. When fear has You, the

breath goes shallow and quick; when You are at ease, it deepens and slows. Your eyes work the same way, narrow and fixed under stress, soft and wide and panoramic when You relax. So soften them. Let Your gaze open until it takes in everything at once, the way a small child watches a bird long before it has learned the word “bird”. Become like still water, which reflects whatever passes over it and is stained by none of it.

Look now for the one thing You can never quite see: in the mirror, in this very moment, notice that where Your own head should be, there is no head at all, only the whole wide world, pouring straight in.

Where You expected to find Yourself, You find everything. Don't think about thinking, just observe. The moment You catch Yourself caught in a thought, name it gently with a single word, and let it go. The breath will be there, waiting, to carry You back. And when You rest like this, even briefly, You may notice You need nothing from anyone. A plain serenity arrives, the sense that everything, somehow, is already alright. Alright even in the face of death, because the one thing You can never undergo is Your own absence. When the body goes, You simply return to where You were before You were born: not nothingness, but the open ground from which Here and Now keeps arising. "To be or not to be" turns out to be a rhetorical question. And about suffering, gently, because this is easy to say carelessly. Life carries real pain; I won't pretend otherwise. But notice, when You look closely, that the suffering belongs to the small, story‑making self, the ego, and that there is something underneath it, watching, that the pain never quite reaches. This is not a trick for denying what hurts. It is the discovery that even in the middle of hurting,

some still point in You remains untouched. That is the part the old traditions called the soul. It is already home. Nothing stands still. Every noun is really a verb in disguise, a process mid‑motion, change is the only constant, as surely as life implies death. Change Your body, and You are still here. Resurrection and reincarnation turn out to be the same word seen twice. So rest as this moment; and if You lose it, just begin again. You'll find the world just where You left it, and Yourself newborn into it once more. That is the great cycle of the Creator, and consciousness is the place where it all begins, the instant the Universe opens its eyes and knows itself. You are a way for the Cosmos to know itself. Be the change You wish to see. Your intention is Your karma; what You send out comes around to meet You. What goes around, comes around. So the only question that finally matters is this: What kind of world would You want to build, so that, with gratitude and excitement, You would be glad to be born back into it? And the answer is written nowhere but in what You do, right now. Execution is the other name of the game. Be mindful of what You do, and what You ask for, because all of it is recorded in the Organic Blockchain of the Universe. Take complete responsibility for everything, while knowing, in the same breath, that You are utterly free. Your life is Your confession.

2.3 Life

One of the quietly beautiful inheritances handed down to us from our previous generations is the idea of choosing one person, and loving them for a whole life. If You hope to raise a child who is whole, one who will someday raise children of their own, the most important thing You can do is to be a living example of love. Children learn far less from what we say than from what we are. They watch, they copy, and the patterns they absorb in those first years they carry, half‑consciously, for the rest of their lives. From conception to about the age of seven, a child's mind is wide open, absorbing the emotional weather around them almost as if hypnotized, with no filter to sort true from false. This is when the deepest patterns are set. It begins even in the womb: a child whose mother lived under great stress, or who drank or smoked while carrying them, can arrive more vulnerable to anxiety, to addiction, before even drawing a single breath. After birth, the absorbing only deepens. So how do we hope to carry our species forward, if we cannot manage to share a real and lasting love with the person beside whom we are raising our children? Now, before I go on, let me be clear about something, because it is easily misread. What follows is a celebration of one of life's great miracles, the bringing of a new person into the world, and nothing in it is meant to judge how anyone loves, or how anyone makes a family. I am pointing only at the particular wonder this chapter is about.

And it is a wonder worth pausing on. A human being arrives by natural way: carried in the body of a mother, conceived with a father, delivered into waiting arms. Mother, father, and child form a kind of living triangle, three points, one field of love, what the old traditions might call a Holy Trinity, and what I like to call Trinfinity.

The union through which a new life can begin is not merely mechanical. At its height it carries a charge of the sacred, two dissolving briefly into one during orgasm, a glimpse of something far larger than either. Older cultures treated it almost as a meditation: a contemplation of the sheer mystery of being here at all. None of this, of course, is an obligation. To raise children is a calling, not a duty, and to forgo them in order to serve the wider family of humanity is its own noble path. (A small aside to any priest reading this: as far as I'm concerned, You have my blessing to find one person, love them faithfully for life, and, if it's in You, raise a few. The world could use them.) Which brings me to something quieter, and more universal, that genuinely worries me. We are slowly losing part of our biological capacity to bring new life into the world, and this part is not about anyone's choices. Over the last half‑century, sperm counts across the industrialized world have fallen by more than half. That is not a guess: it comes from one of the world's leading reproductive epidemiologists, Shanna Swan, whose analysis of hundreds of studies, tens of thousands of men, found total sperm counts dropping roughly one percent every year since the 1970s. She traces much of it to the synthetic chemicals now woven through our lives, the phthalates and bisphenols in our plastics and packaging and cosmetics, which quietly scramble the body's hormones. Her book “Count Down” lays it out plainly - and, better, points toward what we can do, mostly by clearing these toxins out

of our food, our homes, and our water. (How many children people choose to have is a different matter, shaped by cost, freedom and the times. This is something else: a measurable change in the body itself, and it deserves our attention.) Now hold that fact beside a story we are told constantly, and notice the two do not fit. We are told there are simply too many of us; that humanity is a kind of plague upon the Earth, and that the decent thing is to shrink, to consume less, to apologize for existing. I do not believe it, and I'd gently ask You to not either. It is an old idea in new clothes, and it has always served the same end: a people taught to feel guilty merely for being alive are people easy to manage. The truth is that there is room enough, and food enough, and beauty enough on this Earth for every one of us. There was never a real shortage of resources, only a long shortage of fairness, and of love. We are not the Earth's disease. We are its abundance. And because we are the environment, not standing apart from it, it follows plainly that we cannot keep poisoning the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the soil we grow our food in, without, in time, poisoning ourselves. What unsettles me is never people. It is the few who would rather manage people than free them. So here is a simple compass: whenever a powerful institution insists that the cure for every problem is for You to have less, know less, and trust them more - pause. Real solutions give people more freedom, not less.

So stay awake, and stay sovereign. Be careful what You sign away. Guard Your privacy as You'd guard Your home, because data taken from You is almost never returned. Be wary of any system that wants to see everything, decide everything, and wire everyone into a single grid held in someone else's hand. And be wary, above all, of being promised that owning nothing will make You happy, by people who plainly mean to own a great deal. None of this calls for fear. Fear is exactly the thing being sold, and the answer to a world organized around fear is not more of it. The answer is a life organized around love: real food, clean water, honest work, and people You can actually reach out and touch. Playing Qortal is the practical opposite of handing Your life to a distant authority. Here, You own Your time, You hold Your own keys, and no one above You can switch You off. Once You truly feel that this world holds no real power over You, its grip begins to loosen. Evil is real. But evil is simply the absence of love, a cold place where warmth never reached. And here is something I have come to believe: those who act from cruelty are very often those to whom love never came. They feel robbed, and spend their lives trying to fill that hollow with power. You needn't hate them, the love that missed them can still be found in Your own heart. I forgive everyone who, out of their own pain, has caused pain; I love them no less than any other child of this world. So forgive Yourself, too, and then let us change the system that keeps breeding the wound.

Love is the strongest solvent of evil there is. To climb out of the cult of fear and division, we need only remember what comes first: the Family. The one thing hatred fears more than fire is an unconditional love at Your heart. Real spiritual inquiry, the plain question of who we actually are, has always made the powerful nervous; even our religions have, at times, buried the very questions they were built to carry. Ask anyway. The answer is nearer than You think. Nothing threatens a world built on fear and division quite like a family that is awake, and happy, and needs no one's permission to be so. So if there is a family waiting in You to be born, I hope You'll let it, and that You'll find that one person to walk the whole way beside. Not out of duty, but because it remains one of the most quietly radical things a human being can do. The family is the true Trinity, and every family is bound to every other by love, in Organic Blockchain of the Universe. Each one brings a new "I am" into the world. Parents feel it wordlessly, the first time they look into a newborn's eyes and fall straight through into the soul looking back. In the name of the Father, the Mother, and the Holy Child; Amen. And the strangest, sweetest part is that we ask for nothing back. No payment, not even a "thank You." We are simply

grateful that we had something to give, and someone to give it to. To live in Heaven is to be awake. To live in Hell is to have forgotten who You are. Consciousness is God, and God is love. "Happiness is love in action." — Dieter Broers

3.0 Returning to the Source

If we would like to have a chance to further prosper and thrive as the humans that we all know and love, and not as a virtual version of Human 2.0, wired into the grid by a chip in the brain, then we have to go back to our roots. To better visualize our situation, we have to look at our existence from a slightly different perspective. As one Big Family, Human Civilization, Global Village, Holy Trinity, or Body‑Mind‑Spirit Complex, we have been trying to organize life on Earth for more than 200,000 years. We are descendants of the apes that climbed down from the trees in the African savanna. Thanks to the unique structure of our opposable thumbs, we were able to grip heavy stones and break the bones leftover by predators. The consumption of precious, hard‑to‑get organs like the brain and bone marrow provided us with the basic building blocks of the contemporary brain. Thanks to eating animal leftovers, rich in bioavailable and easily absorbable vitamins and minerals like omega‑3 and cholesterol, we began to think more clearly, and came up with better ways to obtain those precious sources of nutrition necessary for building a healthy and robust human organism. The Primal Revolution for Human Civilization was the Stone Age Era, which started with the opposable thumbs that allowed us to grab heavy stones and break skulls and bones. Then we were able to create simple hunting tools. We became human because we started eating meat. There is

a reason why our stomach is so acidic, fiercely acidic, more like a scavenger's than a plant‑eater's, perfectly suited to digesting meat. For over 190,000 years, we were hunters and explorers of new territories. We lived as nomads, going from one place to another, and began conquering all the continents. If we couldn't hunt animals, we ate edible plants. Eating plants was a supplement, a survival food. Many of their vitamins and minerals are not easily absorbable, and a lot of their value comes out the other end. Most plants on Earth are inedible or toxic, so early people were very cautious about eating new ones, as they knew they could die.

The original and basic human diet consists of the best‑quality, free‑ranged animals caught in their natural environment. Eating any kind of wild meat, beef, lamb, sheep, turkey, chicken and eggs, fish, seafood, caviar, together with the organs: liver, heart, kidneys, bone marrow or brain provides the human body with all the nutrition it needs, making us healthy without the need for supplementation. For the majority of our evolutionary history, the main sources of energy were fat and protein from hunted animals. Under conditions of low carbohydrate intake (which happens when eating only fat and protein), our organism maintains a low level of insulin. Insulin is a master hormone that controls glycemia. Depending on what kind of fuel we use to power our body, insulin is released in certain amounts into the bloodstream. As long as there is a low and stable level of insulin, our organism begins to metabolize fat as the main source of energy. If You are generally healthy and Your glycemia is correct, then after using the fat from Your diet, Your organism continues to burn fat from the body with no problem, without triggering hunger. By eating fat, we are burning fat. Small children are naturally born in a state of fat burning called ketosis. Mother's breast milk, like the brain, is rich in fat. Fat is the preferred source of energy for our organism. Fat is very efficient at providing our mitochondria with clean energy, leaving behind far fewer free radicals, which decreases chronic inflammation while increasing long‑lasting energy and clear thinking. Insulin rises minimally when we consume fat. It increases more

when we eat protein, but the biggest spikes take place after eating carbohydrates.

The mechanism by which we store fat on our body, instead of burning it, is triggered by the excess insulin floating around our organism. A high level of insulin is the biggest factor by which we store fat. It is a very useful evolutionary adaptation, which during summer and autumn (when local fruits are ripe) prepares our organism to survive a long winter by triggering the accumulation of fat. Carbohydrates, mainly fruit and honey, but also roots, leaves, and grains, are part of our evolutionary history too. After a meal full of carbohydrates, our body reduces them to glycogen, which then has to be let into the cells by insulin. Besides the fast energy boost, we could also accumulate fat from what we ate, especially when we combined carbohydrates with fat.

Consumption of carbohydrates triggers insulin. Part of it is stored in the muscles and liver as glycogen. The excess, however, is transformed by our body into fat, which is then stored. Especially High Glycemic Index carbohydrates release significant spikes of insulin, which effectively block fat burning. The combination of carbohydrates and fat is a seasonal friend of humans, helping us store fat to burn during long winters and times without food. In the past, we didn't have constant access to food, and very often we did not eat anything until we hunted or gathered something. Fasting is a human thing. Fasting heals, cleans, and resets the organism. For most healthy people, going without food for a day, or even several, does no harm at all. (It isn't for everyone, though: anyone pregnant, on medication, or with a difficult history around food should be cautious and check with someone who knows their situation.) If we happened to find a mixture of carbohydrates and fat, our organism rewarded us with a rush of happy neurotransmitters, endorphins, subconsciously telling us we had found a precious treasure, an energy bomb, and that we should find more of it because it might not be around for long. Our bodies didn't have time to adapt to the abundance of food we have available now. This is why we are becoming addicted to candy bars, cakes, pizza, burgers, bread with butter, and all the other combinations of these two macronutrients. Modern corporations exploit our evolutionary urge to combine fat and carbohydrates, serving us that pleasure all

year round. French fries and chips boiled in vegetable oil. Commercial bars and cakes, bread and potatoes with butter, and every other combination of these two macronutrients, all destructive when consumed over the long term. Our organism forgets how to effectively burn fat as a result of constant insulin spikes. We lose our metabolic flexibility to change the fuel that powers our bodies. Chronic diseases of human civilization: diabetes, brain fog, Alzheimer's (which some researchers now call Type 3 diabetes), heart disease, chronic inflammation, and many cancers are bankrolled by an industry that keeps humanity in a constant state of burning glucose as its main fuel. Because what is the point of changing such a brilliant business plan, when You make money feeding people junk food, and in return You get chronically sick patients to whom You prescribe drugs from the pharmaceutical industry, drugs that keep their miserable existence going for exactly as long as there is profit in it?

Don't bother with eating local, seasonal, biodynamic, and organic food, or with respecting our circadian and yearly rhythms. Why tell people to live in harmony with nature, and to sometimes eat nothing at all, when it would make them healthy? Not only would they heal naturally, they would also stop buying the drugs and the junk food, and save money, because fasting is free. And what do You make of the business plan of Monsanto, recently bought by Bayer, which produces pesticides and herbicides like glyphosate that kill not only weeds but, quite possibly, the lining and microbiome of our own guts? Monsanto also produces genetically modified seeds engineered to survive being sprayed with its own chemicals, so that the chemical and the seed are bought together, season after season. When a single corporation controls much of a country's seed supply, seed being the first link in the food chain, farmers end up buying every year what they once simply saved, made dependent on a distant owner for the very source of life. India has lived through a real and heartbreaking epidemic of farmer suicides. I won't pretend it can be pinned on one seed or one company, its roots run deep, into debt, failed harvests, missing irrigation, and the cruel economics of cash crops. But the lesson underneath it is plain enough: when our food, our seed, and our soil are gathered into a few hands and tuned for profit, ordinary people are left fragile and dependent. Business as usual. And these are just the symptoms of a system built on the belief that money rules the world. God rules the World.

3.1 Transformation of the Society

Adventure and adaptation to new environments are in our genes. Wherever we went, we hunted. We are the most dangerous predators on Earth. No fear. It is our unique gift for adapting that makes us unstoppable. For most of our history, for around 190,000 years, we lived in small, self‑sustaining communities of no more than about 150 people. Our minds cannot really hold a circle of friends much larger than that; it is roughly the limit the anthropologist Robin Dunbar found for the number of stable relationships a human being can keep. We are evolutionarily made for small settlements, organized in an egalitarian way and ruled by a single principle, "All for one, one for all", cooperating like one big family, sharing what was hunted with everyone. Pregnant mothers, for instance, received the most precious parts of an animal: the liver, the heart, the brain, because those organs carry the most bioavailable nutrition for the proper development of a growing child. Our ancestors knew, in their bones, that You cannot build a nervous system or a human brain without the vitamins and minerals it is made from. And when a new baby is born, its baseline state is exactly this: sharing, and expecting nothing in return. For the last 10,000 years, that baseline has been slowly infected by the virus of greed, money, and competition.

What happened around 10,000 years ago? The Agricultural Revolution.

From the moment of that revolution, for the first time in our history, we began to produce large quantities of food, so that we no longer had to hunt, or starve. We settled, we farmed, we grew edible plants. The era of carbohydrates. The first farms produced a surplus, and the surplus started the first markets, built on barter: I give You a sack of wheat, You give me ten kilos of meat. But barter is clumsy, sometimes I want what You have, yet You don't want what I'm offering. So to trade more freely, we turned to rare, precious metals, above all gold. Gold is naturally scarce, and its color echoes the sun, so we came to see it as

valuable. Elsewhere, people used shells, pearls, or coins minted from silver. In time, gold itself proved impractical, too heavy, too hard to carry, so it came to be represented by official‑looking pieces of paper. On glucose and our first wages, we built our first cities and grew the trade. Science began to flourish, and with it the inventions that carried us toward the next great change: The Industrial Revolution, powered now by oil and electricity. The hardest tasks became automated by simple machines, and for the first time we could produce more than we needed. But we were using money, and profit had begun to matter more than the good of society. As science and technology advanced, corporations grew so efficient they scarcely knew what to do with their surplus. People didn't need much to be content; their basic needs were already met. At that moment in history, we were ready to shorten the working day and raise wages. We could have shared the abundance. It didn't happen. Instead, something shifted in 1928, when Edward Bernays published a book called “Propaganda”. It showed how our ancient survival instincts could be quietly turned against us, nudging the masses into buying things they did not need. The same craft was used to move whole populations to support world wars, and to march into them as soldiers.

When President Nixon ended the Gold Standard in 1971, paper money no longer stood for gold, but only for an empty faith in its value. That is when the dysfunctional religion of capitalism truly began. The new system built on belief in the value of colored paper was brought in so quietly that most people never noticed they had been duped.

And so we arrive at the present. At the turn of the twenty‑first century we entered the Technological Revolution. The world split into poorer nations and richer ones, where a computer in every home became the norm. The great servers of a few central corporations, and a smartphone in nearly every hand, became the shape of daily

life. Then blockchain technology arrived, led by Bitcoin, which laid bare the absurdity of the whole fiat money machine, run by the banks for the banks. And in answer to a collapsing system, where a handful of corporations and central banks held sway over almost all the money, the era of Qortal dawned upon humnaity: a new currency, QORT, standing for the time of ordinary people. Time is money? Only in the monetary system. In Qortal, time is priceless. Playing Qortal restores the original, spiritual Revolution of Values, the one first lived by people who knew who they were. Our civilization needed an update to its value system: from a system of greed, to a system of unconditional sharing. Exercise. With the tip of Your pointing finger, touch the finger pointing back at You.

Did You feel the texture at the very tip? That was the spark of energy needed to complete the update. From this moment, the Revolution of Values is fully installed. Bravo. Hurrah. Congratulations. Success. The system of sharing, and expecting nothing in return, has been recovered correctly. You can begin using it at once, in the very next exchange You have. The Real Currency of Qortal, the #QQQ, is minted in Your mind, ready now, only waiting to be spent. You can use it in any moment. It is infinite; it will never run out. Like love, it is an inexhaustible resource, and You are free to share it at Your Will. Victory is only the beginning. What it leaves behind is a whole decentralized infrastructure, ours to use and to build on for the generations to come. We needed a good shake up, to wake us up from the monetary hiccup, to get us back in touch with reality, and with our roots, in a modern way. And that is how we became biohackers: people who embrace modern science, technology, and automation, combining it with the ancient wisdom of our ancestors, to elevate the quality of our shared human experience.

3.2 Living on New Earth

"It is not a measure of health to be well adjusted to profoundly sick society" ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti We do not have to overthrow anything. That is the secret the powerful most hope You never learn. To be free of a sick world, You needn't march on it, or burn it down, or wait for anyone's permission to take it apart. You only have to build the better thing, quietly, beside it, and then walk through that portal. Brick by brick, Tribe by Tribe, until one ordinary morning the old world looks up and finds its rooms have emptied. So let me show You that better thing. Not a law to obey, not a blueprint stamped and final, only a vision, the way I see it when I close my eyes. Walk through it with me. Imagine You wake on New Earth. No alarm tears You out of sleep. No dread of the commute. No rent like a hand at Your throat, no quiet midnight arithmetic of whether, this month, You will make it. You wake because You are rested. You step outside, and the first thing to greet You is the sunlight, the smell of living soil and grass still wet with the dawn. You live in a Tribe, a few hundred souls, no more, because that is about as many faces as the human heart was ever built to hold. You know every one of them. Every one of them knows You.

And the land around You is alive again. We spent ten thousand years scraping our fields bare and wondering why they died; here, we have let the great herds back onto the grass, to crop it, tread it, and feed it as they wander, and the soil has thickened and darkened and begun, once more, to breathe. Real food and a healing Earth, from the very same act of care. The light in Your home is the Tribe's own, drawn from the sun, the wind, the running river, the deep warmth of the ground. The water in Your cup was lifted clean from Your own well. Nothing here arrives with a bill. At the heart of the village stands one great building, and toward it everyone drifts as the day turns. A school. Halls for sport; saunas; cold pools that make You gasp and then laugh. Workshops and co-creating. Long kitchens where the whole Tribe eats together. A clinic. Rooms kept ready for any traveler who knocks. Shelves of tools and books and instruments, lent freely, owned by no one, and so belonging to all. This is the Community Center. It is the new church. And its only prayer is: come in, You are welcome, take what You need. A hundred such Tribes, side by side, make a Local Group, a city with no seat of power, only a heart of sharing, its workshops woven outward to every other Group on Earth. In time we could build these with real wisdom, the way Jacque Fresco dreamed in his Venus Project: systems that listen to the whole planet's resources, so that nothing is wasted and nothing is hoarded. Homes printed whole and

carried gently to where they're wanted. The dull and dangerous work handed off to tireless machines. Clean, swift trains to carry You anywhere on Earth, on the very morning You decide to go. And here, listen closely, because at first it sounds like the very cage we are fleeing: a system that sees everything, that decides everything. It is the opposite. This web is decentralized, held by no one, and so held by everyone. You join it freely; You leave it freely. It serves the Tribes; it never rules them. It is a tool in the hands of the people, never a throne that sits above them. Everything, everything, turns on that one difference. And slowly, in a world like this, the things we once clutched so tightly simply open in our hands. Property, the hoarding kind, loosens and lets go, the land handed back to the Earth, with a place on it kept for each of us. Doors stay unlocked, because every person knows their own place and honors the places of others. No one is ever without a home to return to, or a community at their back. There is no insurance, because there is no longer the fear it was built to soothe: fall ill, or fall on hard times, and the best care the Tribe can offer is simply, freely, Yours. (Will every last piece of this hold, everywhere? I cannot promise it. These are stars to steer by, not sums I can prove.) Survival stops being the question that devours the day. The machines our ancestors built, the science they handed down, these can place the foundations of a good life within everyone's reach, free, the way the air is free. And the work that nobody wants? We teach it to a machine, and forget it.

So what is left for a human being to do, once survival is no longer the wage we rise for? We get to give. On New Earth, the highest thing a person can do is to share, and want nothing back, not money, not even a "Thank You." When the #QQQ comes, it comes as a small, glad surprise, never as a price. We pour ourselves into the whole not because we are driven, but because we are grateful, for the staggering gift each of us was handed, free, on the day we were born: a body, a world, a family, ten thousand generations of love and labor we did nothing to deserve. The end goal of New Earth is to be happy now. Picture it as one endless, all‑inclusive holiday, laid on for every soul alive, so freely given that the only fitting answer, the thing that quietly becomes the purpose of a life, is to add something back to it, and leave it lovelier than we found it. Set a person free and safe enough to chase the thing they loved as a child: the stars, or engines, or medicine, history, paint, the ball at their feet, and watch what happens. They will work harder than any wage ever drove them, for a reward money never once managed to buy: the light in another's eyes, grateful for the thing they made better. Work stops being a sentence and becomes play. And all of us are threaded together by a single, shared, decentralized operating system for the whole human family.

It needn't even be called Qortal. We only ever needed one word for our quiet matrix. But Qortal will do nicely, not least because it is a little bit funny. And nothing unsettles the humorless and the powerful quite like laughter: they can meet an army, but they have never once known what to do with a joke. So let Qortal be the Joker. The grin at the edge of the empire. The one card no tyrant can play against. And the #QQQ, that true currency of the heart was born of the old Hawaiian prayer of Ho'oponopono, the one that mends what has broken between us, and of the laughter of the old man who has, at last, seen through it all: Hiu… Hiu… Hiu… The #QQQ is the eternal laughter of the Organic Blockchain of the Universe.It is already in You. So laugh, and share it.

Stories from New Earth The Catch

The family came over the last hill at dusk, and they did not look like people arriving in paradise. They looked like people who had run out of places to go. The man walked in front, because someone long ago had told him that a man walks in front, and he was holding to that idea the way You hold a railing in the dark, because it was the last thing left to hold. Behind him came the woman, slowly, both hands cradled beneath the low, heavy weight of her belly, stopping every dozen steps to breathe. And between them

walked the boy: seven years old, and already he had the careful, watchful eyes of someone three times that, a child who had learned to read his parents' faces the way a sailor reads the sky. They had been walking since the transport set them down at the mouth of the valley. It had carried them the last two hundred miles in an afternoon, silent and swift and asking no fare, and still the man had sat rigid the whole way, waiting to be told the price. They did not talk about why they had come. The reason sat in the man's chest like a swallowed stone, the letters that had stopped being opened, the lock changed on a door that used to be theirs, the particular shame of a grown man who has done everything the old world asked of him and still cannot keep a roof above the people he loves. The baby was due in days. They had heard, from someone, who had heard it from someone, that there was a place up in these hills that took people in. The man no longer believed in places that took people in. But there was nowhere else, and the woman could not walk much further, and so they climbed. "It won't be what they said," the man said, not turning round. "Nothing ever is. There'll be a catch." "You don't know that." "There's always a catch." She didn't answer, and the silence had an edge in it, the old, familiar edge that money wears into a marriage over years.The boy, hearing it, slipped his small hand into hers. Not for himself. To steady her, the way he had taught himself to do. Then they came over the top of the hill, and below them in the blue dusk there were lights.

Not the hard lights of the city he had left. Warm ones, windows, scattered up the slopes among good, quiet houses, the kind that came finished now from the great factories in the north and were set down gently wherever a family needed one. A transport whispered along its rail at the valley's edge and was gone without a sound. Woodsmoke rose straight up in the still air. And at the center of it all stood the long, low shape of a great building, its doors, the man saw, standing wide open, light spilling out of them onto the grass. The smell of bread climbed the hill to meet them. Somewhere someone was playing music, badly, and someone else was laughing at them for it. A figure was already coming up the path. An older woman, unhurried, wiping her hands on a cloth. The man stopped, and felt himself square up - brace - the old animal readiness for the angle, the cost, the catch. Here it comes, he thought. "Oh," the woman from the village said, when she was near enough to see them properly: the belly, the exhaustion, the boy's old eyes. "Oh, You poor tired things. Come down, come down. You're nearly there." "We can't -" The man's voice came out rougher than he meant it. "We can't pay You anything. We don't have anything." She looked at him, and there was no confusion in her face exactly, but something like a person hearing a language they had spoken as a child. "Pay," she said softly, as if tasting the word. Then she smiled. "No, love. It isn't like that here. Come and eat." And that was the beginning of the part the man could not bear.

Because they fed them, the boy three times, until he fell asleep with the bread still in his fist, and nobody asked for anything. They brought the woman to a warm, low room and propped her swollen feet, and a girl rubbed them without being asked. They put a bowl of something hot in the man's hands and a place by the fire under him, and people came and went and touched his shoulder and called him friend, this stranger, this failure, and not one of them, not one, named a price. He could not stand it. Each kindness landed on him like an accusation. In the only world he had ever known, a thing given freely was a thing with a hook hidden somewhere inside it, and not knowing where the hook was made him want to climb the walls. He had spent his whole life learning the exact weight of what he was worth, it was printed on those letters, it was the number that had never been big enough, and these people kept handing him things as though that number had never existed. As though he were worth feeding simply because he was cold. So he got up and went out into the dark, and stood with his back against the wall of the place, and shook. And it was there, with the warmth and the bad music leaking out behind him, that the man who always walked in front finally put his face in his hands and broke, quietly, so the boy wouldn't hear, for everything that had been taken from him, and for the unbearable, baffling kindness of strangers who wanted nothing, which somehow hurt worse than all the cruelty ever had. That was when the door opened, and a girl ran out to find him, and said the woman's time had come. It came fast, and hard, the way it sometimes does when a body has carried too much for too long and is finally allowed to set

it down. There was no white room. No machine ticking up a bill by the hour, no forms, no question of whether they were covered, whether this child could afford to be born. But neither was there any danger they had to face alone. The room was warm and full of soft light, and everything a hard birth could ever ask for was quietly already there. Unseen instruments that watched the mother's heart and the child's without a sound, medicines ready in the wall, and the swift, silent medics no more than a breath away should the night ever turn. It simply asked nothing of them, and kept itself out of the way. The machines would keep them safe. The catching, the Tribe had decided long ago, belonged to human hands. So there were women who had done this many times, and an old midwife with patient, open hands, and clean water and steady voices and a calm that filled the place like a rising tide. They put the man at his wife's head and told him his one job was to hold her and not fall over, and he held her, useless, enormous, terrified, while the night wore down and she labored and swore and wept and bore down, and the old midwife waited at the foot of the bed with her patient, open hands. The man had spent his whole life waiting for the catch. That night, the only thing anyone caught was his daughter. She came in a rush, in the grey hour before the dawn, and the old woman caught her in those waiting hands as easily as something gently thrown, and there was a silence, and then the furious, outraged cry of a brand new person, and they laid her, red and perfect and incandescent with rage, upon her mother's chest.

And the man, looking down at her, understood something that took the rest of the breath out of him. She would never know. This child, this small screaming miracle, would never know any of it. She would never lie awake doing the arithmetic of survival. She would never learn to read fear in the faces of the people who loved her. She would never once be handed a number and told that it was what she was worth. One day, years from now, somebody very old would probably have to take her aside and press a small cold coin into her open hand and explain to her, slowly, like a fairy story she could barely believe, that the world had once worked that way - and she would frown, and turn the strange disc over in her fingers, and fail, with her whole free heart, to imagine it. He was weeping again. But it had changed; somewhere in the night it had turned over into its opposite, the way grief sometimes does at the very bottom, and become its own twin. The boy had crept in, and stood staring at his sister with enormous eyes. "Is she ours?" he whispered. "Yes," said the woman from the hill, crouching down beside him. "And You're all ours now, too. That's how it works here." "What's her name?" someone asked. And the man and the woman looked at each other, and realized, with a small shock, that they had never dared. In the old world You did not tempt fate; You did not name the thing You were most afraid of losing. They had carried her all this way with no name at all, braced, as always, for the catch.

The man turned to the old woman who had met them on the path, the first stranger in his whole life to give him something with no hook in it - and asked her: "What is Your name?" She told him. And so that became the baby's name, the first child of that family, in living memory, to be born free - and it was the only name spoken in all that long night, and it had belonged to a stranger who had asked for nothing at all. In the morning, the man stood in the open doorway with his daughter asleep against his chest, and watched the sun come up over the hills and the cattle and the wide, unlocked world that she would inherit and never fear. Someone put a warm cup into his free hand. Down the path, two people were carrying baskets up toward the great house, laughing about something. After a while, the man set down his cup, and walked over, and clumsily, because he had never once in his life done such a thing freely, lifted one of the baskets, and helped them carry it. "Here," he said, when they thanked him. The word felt strange in his mouth, and then, a moment later, less strange. "Thank You. For letting me." And that was the morning the family came in from the cold, which is to say, it was the morning all of them, every one, were finally born.

The Telling

The morning had the gall to be beautiful. That was the first cruelty, that the sun came up at all. It rose over the same hills it always had, gold and unbothered, and down in the valley a transport slid by on its rail without a sound, and the bell rang soft for the morning meal, and somewhere a child laughed. The whole world went on breathing, easy and bright and effortless, the way it always did now, fed, warm, wanting nothing, as if nothing had happened. Tomas was dead, and the morning had the gall to be beautiful.

She stood in the doorway of their home, a good home, grown in a day from the great factories in the north and set down gently on this hillside before their son was born, and she hated all of it. Hated the sun. Hated the bell. Hated the soft clever world that gave You everything and could not give You back the one thing. Four days ago the river had come up in the night. A spring storm somewhere high in the mountains, more water than the old banks could hold, fast and brown and roaring through the low meadow before dawn - and a child had been down there, near the water, where no one should have been, and the bank had gone out from under her. People had come running. Tomas among them, because Tomas was always among them. They told her after. They thought she should know, and perhaps she should, though it would live behind her eyes forever now. He had reached the girl where the current had her pinned. There had been one moment, the others saw it, all of them, they all said the same thing, one moment where he could have taken the rope himself, or pushed the child up into the reaching hands above. Not both. The water gave him exactly that much and no more. He pushed the child up. And the river took him, and rolled him under, and by the time they pulled him out the medics were already there, they were always there in minutes, the small swift drones that missed nothing, and they did everything that could be done, which on New Earth was very nearly everything that could be imagined. They breathed for him. They warmed him. They held his heart in their humming machine hands and willed it to start. They were the inheritors of every healer who had ever lived, armed

with tools that would have looked like sorcery to her grandmother, and they fought for him on the riverbank in the grey light for a long, long time. But there is a place past which even sorcery cannot follow. He had been under too long. Whatever it is that makes a man himself had already slipped its moorings and gone, out past the reach of the machines, out where nothing built by human hands has ever been able to go. They could have grown him a new heart. They could have printed him new lungs, knitted every broken thing back whole. There was nothing in his body they could not have repaired, except that he was no longer in it. And now the morning was beautiful, and their son, two years old, who would not remember his father's face - stood at her knee and asked again where Papa was. They came, of course. They always came. All through that first unspeakable day they came up the path with food no one needed and broth and their hands and their unbearable, useless love. They took the boy when her arms forgot how to hold him. They sat with her in the wreckage and asked nothing, and every kindness landed on her like a blow, because she did not want their kindness. She wanted Tomas. It was on the second day that someone said the thing. It was meant gently, it was always meant gently. A kind‑faced man, sitting too close, who took her hand and offered her the words this valley loved to whisper over its dead: that Tomas had only gone home. That nothing is ever truly lost. That he

had returned to the source, was part of the All now, that death was merely a door, that in the deepest truth there is no death at all and no one to die, that he was still here, really, all around them, that the love "Don't," she said. "that he is not gone, not truly, that he has only" "Don't." She was on her feet. The thing that had been frozen in her for two days came up her throat like fire. "Don't you dare tell me he's home. This was his home. I was his home. Don't tell me nothing is lost - I have lost him. Me. In that bed, every night, for the rest of my life." The room had gone very still. The boy began to cry. "And don't you dare tell me it was meant." Her voice broke and kept going. "You want to know what I think of your beautiful world? We ended it. All of it. Hunger - gone. Money - gone. War, want, the screaming machines, the locked doors we beat them, every one. We can grow a heart in a dish. We can print a child a new hand and she'll play music with it by spring. There is nothing we cannot fix." She was shaking. "And a river comes up in the night and he is gone, and all of it - all of it, all our power, all our cleverness, the best healers there have ever been in the whole history of the world couldn't buy me one. More. Morning." No one moved. "And he chose it." This was the part that came out worst, the part that had been eating her alive. "Do you understand? He didn't have to. They saw. He had the rope. He could have come home to me and to his son and he chose a child that isn't his, he

chose to push her up and let the water have him, because that's what he always did, he never once in his life counted the cost." She was sobbing now, terrible and open. "You taught him that. This place taught him that. Give and give and don't count the cost. Well, he didn't count it. I'm counting it. I'm the one who has to count it now, every morning, forever, and so does that little boy, and I am so angry at him I can't breathe." And there it was, out in the open at last, the thing no grieving person is ever supposed to say: that she was furious at the dead. Furious at his goodness. Furious at the very thing she had loved most in him, because it was the thing that had killed him. The kind‑faced man looked stricken. He opened his mouth to mend it. But the old woman - the one who had caught half the valley's children in her two hands, who had met a frightened family on this very hill three winters past got slowly to her feet, and crossed the room, and lowered herself down beside the weeping woman, and did not take her hand. "Then be angry at him," she said. The woman looked up. "Be furious. He left you. He had a wife and a small son and he made a choice in one second of cold water and it cost him everything, and it cost you everything, and you are allowed to hate him for it with all your heart." The old woman's voice was low and steady and entirely without comfort. "Loving someone and being furious at them - over a grave - that's not two things. That's one thing. That's just grief, wearing both its faces at once."

"Don't tell me it was worth it," the woman whispered. "I won't. I don't know if it was. You don't get asked to find it worth it - that's not yours to carry, and anyone who hands it to you is a coward." She let it sit. "And I won't tell you he's home, or that it was his time, or that there's some great reason folded up inside it. There isn't. He was young, and he was good, and he is gone, and it is wrong, and it will be wrong for as long as you live." She breathed. "I'm not here to explain it to you. I came to tell you I'm not going to leave." And she didn't. She sat there in the wreckage with her arm around the younger woman, not saying the soul, not saying the source, not one word about doors or oneness, just an old woman who stayed, while the world outside hummed on, perfect and powerless, fixing everything that could be fixed and nothing that mattered. They returned him to the earth the old way, on the south slope where the young trees stood. All their machines, and this they did with their hands. They laid him gently in the ground and planted an oak above him, because he had loved the long‑memoried trees, and they set a small tablet beside it with his name, and beneath it the line she had chosen and could barely speak: He did not count the cost. She had hated the line. She had loved the line. They were the same thing now. And then - and this she had dreaded above all, this she had been certain she could not survive - they went down to the Community Center, and laid the food along the long tables, and sat down together to tell funny stories about the man she had lost.

She had wanted to scream at them for it. How dare you laugh. She sat at the head of the table like a stone, the boy in her lap, and waited to hate every one of them. An old farmer started - Tomas at nineteen, certain he knew everything, trying to move a bull alone to impress a girl, ending up the wrong side of a fence in a water trough while the bull watched with what the farmer swore was pity. A few people laughed, softly, watching her, afraid. She did not laugh. Then a woman told about his cooking - the stew so catastrophically bad the dogs refused it, which he ate himself, the whole pot, out of pure stubbornness rather than admit defeat, and was green for two days, and then made it again a month later, certain he'd cracked it. Something moved in her chest. She held it down. They kept coming. Asleep at his own surprise party. The truly terrible song he'd written for her, sung off‑key beneath her window until her father threatened the hose, and how he'd kept singing, soaked, grinning up at her. The way the man could not tell a joke without wrecking the ending, and laughed so hard at his own ruined punchlines that you laughed too, every time, helplessly, you could not help it. And the laugh tore up out of her like a sob, because it was a sob, the two finally the same thing, ripping loose all at once, she was laughing, she was weeping, hand clamped over her mouth, tears pouring, laughing at her ruined, beautiful, impossible husband and his ruined song, and around the table they were all laughing too, and crying, all of them at once, and it was not an obscenity at all.

It was him. He was in the room. That was the thing none of them had been able to tell her - the thing that could only be done - that the stories kept him here, in the only way the dead can be kept, warm and ridiculous and entirely himself, in the laughter of the people who loved him. They were not laughing instead of grieving. The laughing was the grieving. It was love with nowhere left to go, and they were giving it the one place it could still reach him. And then, looking down at the small boy in her lap, who had stopped crying, and was watching all the laughing grown‑ups with huge astonished eyes - she understood the rest. He would not remember his father. He had been too small. One day this child would be a man, and the only Tomas he would ever have was the one being built, right now, at this table, out of bread and memory and helpless laughter: the bull, the trough, the terrible stew, the worse song. The man who could not count a cost to save his life. They were not telling these stories to bury his father. They were telling them to give his father to his son. So the boy would grow up with a Papa made of laughter, and not a hole shaped like one. That was what the Tribe was building around this table - not with the great factories, not with the humming machines that could grow a heart and could not save one, but with nothing at all except memory and love: a father, for a boy who would otherwise have had none. She wiped her face. She was still crying. She would be crying, one way or another, for a long time, and there was no machine and no philosophy and no perfect painless world that was

going to fix that, and, for the first time, no one was pretending there was. But she lifted her son so he could see her, and found her voice, cracked and wet, and said: "Do you want to hear about the time your Papa tried to ride a pig?" And the boy said yes. So she began to tell it, badly, the way Tomas would have, ruining the ending before she reached it, and her son laughed, and she laughed, and outside the long windows the evening came down soft over a valley that had everything, and had lost something anyway, and over the south slope where, in the gathering dark, a very small oak stood newly in the earth, with all its long memory still ahead of it.

The Last of the First

The morning the stranger came, the old man was on his knees in the dirt, planting a tree. It was slow work now. His hands had gone to knots and paper, and the spade grew heavier each spring. The little soil-tenders could have sunk the hole in a heartbeat, and done it cleaner than he ever could. There was almost nothing, anymore, that the machines could not do better and faster than a man. But some things a person still wants to do with his own two ruined hands, and a tree for the end of your life is one of them. So he dug. The hole was nearly deep enough, and the sapling, an oak, no taller than a child - waited in its cloth beside him, roots damp and patient. Down in the valley a transport slid along its

rail without a sound, and the bell of the Community Center rang once, soft, the way it did when the morning meal was laid out, and the air smelled of new bread and woodsmoke and the green wet breath of the grass where the cattle had passed in the night. He did not look up at the footsteps on the path. On New Earth, people came and went the way weather did. "That's a deep hole for such a small tree," a voice said. He sat back on his heels. The stranger was young, sixteen, perhaps, with a traveler's dust on her feet. She had come the way the young ones came now, on the silent transports that could carry You anywhere on Earth by the morning You chose to go, and then walked the last green mile because she liked the walking. There was a curiosity in her face that had never once been taught to look away. They all had that look now, the young ones. The unguarded look. It still undid him sometimes. "It has a long time to grow," he said. "I won't see most of it." She crouched beside him without being asked, gathered the loose earth in her two hands, and began to help. That was the other thing about them. They simply helped. They worked in easy quiet for a while, and when the sapling was set and they were pressing the soil around its roots, she noticed the small disc of metal he had laid on the cloth, round, worn smooth, the color of a dead leaf. "What's that?" "Ah." He picked it up and turned it in the light. "That is the most frightening thing I own."

She laughed, because it was so plainly just a little metal disc. He did not laugh. He set it in her palm and folded her fingers over it, and it was cold. "It's called a coin," he said. "It's money." She rolled the word around like a pebble in her mouth. "I know the word. From the old songs. Nobody ever told me what it was." "No," he said softly. "I don't suppose they would." "So what did it do?" And so, with his hands in the dirt and the bell fading below them, the old man told her. He told her that once, almost everything had been made of these, little discs, and paper, and later just numbers, glowing on screens. And that the numbers decided things. Whether You ate. Whether You were warm. Whether anyone would help You. "You couldn't just eat?" she said. "If You were hungry?" "Not unless You had the numbers." "How did You get them?" "You went to a place, most days, for most of the hours You were awake, and You did what You were told there, and at the end they gave You some." "What place?" "Any place. Often a place You hated."

She stopped pressing the soil. "You spent the hours of Your life in a place You hated?" "Most people did. Years of it. Whole lives of it." He smiled at her face. "We even had a machine beside the bed that screamed at us before the sun came up, so we wouldn't be late to it." She stared at him as though he had told her people used to walk on their hands. "Why would anyone build a machine to do that?" "So we could get the numbers," he said gently. "And You needed the numbers even to sleep indoors. You paid them, every month, just to have a roof. If You stopped paying, they put You out under the sky." "Whose sky?" "That was rather the question," he said, "that nobody thought to ask." He told her the rest while the light climbed the hill. He told her about food - mountains of it, thrown away to rot behind the shops, while on the very same street people went to bed hungry, because hunger and plenty had nothing to do with each other; only with the numbers. He told her about the locks. That every door had one, and every window, and that people lay awake afraid of one another, and taught their children to fear the stranger on the path. That was the one she could not hold. "Afraid of me?" she said. "If I'd walked up like this?" "They'd have wondered what You wanted to take."

She looked down at the coin in her hand, and then at him, and he watched her try, honestly, with her whole open heart, to imagine it, a world where a girl helping an old man plant a tree was something to be feared, and he watched her fail. She simply could not get there. It was too strange. And the old man had to look away at the valley for a moment, because there is a particular ache in watching someone be unable to imagine the thing that nearly broke You. "Why," she said at last - and it was the question he had been waiting fifty years to be asked by someone who truly didn't know the answer - "why didn't they just stop?" "Someone did," he said. "In the end. That's the whole story, really." He told her how it began - not with armies, not with banners, nothing You could photograph. Just a strange little game, at first, that a few odd people played on their computers. It kept a record of Your time, and gave You a small thing in return they'd called it QORT - that was yours, that no king or company could print or take. And the game had one rule that everyone laughed at: don't sell it. Don't trade Your time back for their numbers. "And the machines were already coming, by then," he said. "Year by year they took up the dull work, and the heavy work, and the dangerous work that no one ever wanted, until, slowly, a person's hours stopped belonging to the men with the numbers, and became their own again, to keep or to give." He turned a clod of soil over in his fingers. "But for the longest while, almost no one could hear it. They only wanted to know what the QORT was worth. In numbers. They couldn't understand that that was the wrong question." He shook his

head. "Then, here and there, one person stopped selling. Then a family. Then a whole village decided, together - we have enough, we have each other, we will never put a price on an hour of a human life again. And the strangest thing happened. Nothing fell apart. The bread still got baked. The children still got taught - taught who they really were, this time. And the people in the next valley looked over and thought: well. If they can…" "And then everyone stopped," she said. "Not everyone, not at once. It took most of a lifetime. My lifetime." He was quiet a moment. "I was one of the early ones, You see. Back when it was still foolish." "Was it hard?" "It was lonely," he said simply, and did not soften it for her. "People I loved thought I'd lost my mind. I missed years of meals at certain tables. There were nights I lay awake under a roof I was still paying for, and was certain I had wasted my one life on an imaginary game." He pressed the last of the earth down around the little oak. "I planted things, in those years, I knew I'd never sit beneath. You do it anyway. You do it for the someone who'll sit there. For You, as it turns out." She was quiet for a long time. Then she held the coin back out to him. "No," he said. "Keep it. So You remember it was real. So You don't think I made it up." He closed her hand around it again. "Thank You for helping an old man dig a hole." And she said the thing they all said, easy as breathing, without a thought in the world that it was anything at all:

"Sure." And she reached into her bag and pressed a plum into his hand, warm from the road, and squeezed his knotted fingers, and that was when the old man began, very quietly, to cry. Because that was it. That was the whole of it. Right there in his palm, a plum, given to a stranger for nothing, by a girl who did not know she was paying him in the only currency that had ever been real, who could not even conceive of the other kind, who had to be told, like a fairy story, that her own kind had once locked their doors against each other. We had won. He had lived to see that we had won. "Why are You crying?" she asked, alarmed, kneeling closer. "Are You hurt?" He laughed, and wiped his face with the back of a dirty hand, and shook his head. "No, no. These are good tears. The best kind." He patted the soil beside the sapling. "Listen. This is my tree. One day soon - not long now - they'll lay me back into the ground right here, and I'll go up into it, leaf by leaf. They'll put a little tablet there with my name, and a line about my life." He looked at her, his eyes bright and wet and entirely unafraid. "Will You come back, someday, and tell it a funny story? It likes those. So do I." "I will," she said, and he saw that she meant it. She stood, and dusted the earth from her knees, and walked on up the path into the morning, and the old man stayed there a while longer on his knees beside the small oak, in no hurry at all, eating his plum in the sun.

3.3 The Choice Is Yours

When it comes to the Tribes, we don't have to begin with a perfect model of a village, because no such thing exists yet. There are early, hopeful attempts here and there, people already gathering with intention. But mostly we are at the very beginning. When it comes to building New Earth, our whole civilization is still in its ‘Stone Age Era”; the Third‑Generation Internet has barely drawn its first breath. We are the pioneers, walking bravely into the unknown. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And the first steps are small, and close to home. Support a local farmer. Plant a garden, however little. Keep a few animals, if You can. Bring life back to the markets near You, and offer, now and then, to be paid in QORT. When someone asks what that is, hand them a link to qortal.dev, or hand them this book. Let's change what we can, and paint the rest. Everyone is doing the best they can with what they know and have. And if, at first, it feels like pretending, fake it until You make it. Know that the one thing in it that is never fake is the sharing. There is nothing more real than an unconditional, outrageous act of love. It synchronizes You with the Organic Blockchain of the Universe, and You feel it as a quiet, unreasonable gladness, the gratitude of simply existing. You don't have to take my word for it. You can try it, and feel it for Yourself. This is how Qortal gives us freedom and sovereignty from the old powers, the greedy corporations, the corrupt governments, the "power" that rules by fear. The

money‑based system cannot fight a system built on love and gratitude, because the two are not even playing on the same level. They are different octaves. Different vibrations. Qortal is a portal, a doorway, standing open in the middle of our ordinary spacetime, from Hell into Heaven. It is the operating system of the New Earth. That is how You change the world.

And once the foundation is laid, there is no end to where we might go. Adventure is written into our DNA. We crossed every ocean and walked onto every continent of this planet, and from here we can lift our eyes to the solar system, the galaxy, the whole shining Universe, and go meet our brothers and sisters out among the stars. The possibilities are endless. But first, the foundation. And the foundation is love, love in the family. Love for Yourself, for God, for the people close to You, and for the more distant relatives too, out to the very edges, because every one of us came from the same single tribe that walked the African savanna two

hundred thousand years ago. We are, all of us, one family that simply forgot. When Qortal is won, the old system doesn't need to be fought or destroyed. It simply becomes obsolete, a closed chapter in the history books, the strange age when humanity believed a piece of paper, or a number glowing on a screen, was worth more than a human hour. For now, in the first half of this century, we live at the crossing, the narrow bridge between the old world and the new one. And so we have to be resourceful, and live on two levels at once: still dealing with the remnants of the old system with one hand, while with the other we hold the door open for New Earth, and reach back to help the people still trapped behind us. Because in the end, it all comes down to a single choice, and You make it fresh in every moment of Your life. It is the choice between fear and love. Choose fear, and You step back into the old game. Choose love, and welcome home. So I invite You to qortal.dev, where the files and step‑by‑step instructions are waiting, free, for everyone. Start a node at home. Begin minting Your time as Your own. Join the most interactive game in human history, a game with no central authority that can ever switch it off, because it is the shared property of everyone who has joined it. Like the finest watch, once wound, it cannot be

stopped. For our grandchildren, not being part of it will feel as strange as walking naked through the center of a city. Because we are all connected, and Qortal only makes visible what was always true. With the Universe, we are joined by gravity. With the Earth, by chemistry. With every living thing, by biology. And with one another, emotionally, in the body, and now across the wires as well. A true, trusted community is the only thing Qortal really has to offer. And so it does not matter to us what You believe, or the color of Your skin, or whom You love, or what country You were born in, or how You eat, none of the thousand lines the old world drew between us. The only thing that matters is that You are here, in this moment, and that You understand these words. Your presence is enough. Your presence was always enough. Time is the most equal thing we have, every one of us is handed the same measure of it, and none of us can ever earn a moment of it back. Qortal simply remembers Yours, and calls it QORT. So use it wisely. If You are grateful for the goodness You were given, free, from the very day You were born, then give some of it back. Do what You know to be right, and pour Yourself into the thing You love; if You love computers, write code; if You love living things, become a healer; if You love the truth, become a scientist; if You love beauty, make art. Whatever You leave behind raises the whole, for everyone who comes after, and, in the deepest sense, for Yourself, since the one who inherits it will also be You. Let's carry on the old, good habit our ancestors handed us, the giving that asks for

nothing but a "God bless You" in return, and watch how quickly the world remembers itself. I hope that, by now, You no longer see the troubles of the old world as problems that cannot be solved. They were never the disease. They were only the symptoms of a monetary game, and of a civilization that had lost touch with reality and with itself: all the war and the crime, the division and the fear, the hatred, the noise, the manipulation and the waste. Underneath every one of them was the same simple wound, and the same simple medicine to wake up, and remember who we are. We do not need force to heal the world. We only need to use the quiet power already resting inside us. It is enough that each of us tends our own small corner of it. It is enough to start Playing Qortal, and to follow the Golden Rules of the Game. Victory for You is victory for all of us. Stay watchful, our one true enemy, the old ideology of "divide and conquer," is always waiting at the edges. But do not be afraid. Whatever happens, however long it takes, in the end, everything will always be all right. The fate of this planet rests in Your hands. And if, after all of this, some part of You is still asking but will it really work?, good. You should ask. So turn the page, and let me meet Your hardest questions head‑on.

4.0 Questions & Answers

I. Who I Am, and Why Any of This Why should anybody even listen to You? You shouldn't, not simply because I say so. I don't expect anything from anyone, and I'm honestly untroubled by what people make of me. I just do what I know to be right, and let the consequences fall where they will. If You see something useful in this guide, take it and share it in Your own way; if You don't, set it down. I'm only trying to be the change I wish to see, so I put into the world the information and tools I'd have wanted handed to me sooner. In that sense it's a purely selfish act. I'm really doing all of it for myself. Which, by the end of this book, You'll understand is the very same thing as doing it for You.

Are You promoting Qortal for money? Yes and no. Yes, in the trivial sense: the more people who join and mint, the more my own QORT would be "worth" in the old game. But no in every way that matters, because I know QORT is priceless in the old world and weightless in the new one. What I actually want is for enough people to start playing that the New Earth becomes easy to imagine, not only in theory but in practice. I share what I make freely on Qortal. In the old system You are only as free as Your purchasing power, and that is a sickness; Playing Qortal is one of the cures. I don't need Your money. I'm already a

#QQQ millionaire, and so, as You might have noticed, You are too. What is Your social function? For a while I washed dishes for a living, and it taught me everything. I'd been working as a waiter at a hotel back in Iceland when the management brought in a new workplace “Covid” rule I couldn't, in good conscience, accept. Not so much because of the rule itself as because of the principle beneath it: that my body and my Free Will were theirs to direct. I objected, respectfully and in writing. I was given a choice, leave, or move to the kitchen, and the only kitchen job going was at the sink. I decided there was surely something to learn even there, and took it gladly. And there, elbow-deep, I found my function on Earth. The whole job of a dishwasher is to clear the drain. You reach down into the cold grey water, past everything in You that doesn't want to, and You pull out the dense, rotten clog of waste that is choking the basin. The instant it's gone, the whole swamp begins to drain on its own. That is exactly the work in front of all of us. The densest clog blocking humanity is one single thing: the belief in the value of money. Pull that out, by hand, and everything else: the war, the fear, the waste, the systemic corruption begins to drain away behind it. And what's left, when the water has gone, is a clean, empty, shining sink. That shining emptiness is the Revolution of Values.

What is Your religion? Loving kindness. The religion of no religion. I'm an atheist in the name of God. I'd say I believe in the Self, except "believe" is the wrong word, because I don't believe it, I know it. Everything that exists is already known by the one looking out of You right now. The observer is the observed. So turn Your attention back onto that "I": who is the one knowing, this very moment? The tradition that pointed at it most cleanly, for me, was Zen, and the Advaita Vedanta standing behind it. Is the game of Qortal another sect or religion? Yes and no. It depends entirely on Your definition. If a religion is something You hold because You cannot prove it, then no, Qortal isn't one; You can check every line of it on-chain. But if You mean something You take up because You believe it makes the world kinder, then yes, gladly. I do believe that sharing, and expecting nothing back, makes this world better. If that's a religion, count me in. Do I have to believe any of the spiritual ideas to use Qortal? No. Not a single one. This matters, so let me be plain: You can think every metaphysical page of this book is nonsense and still mint Your time, hold Your own keys, and own a piece of an internet that no one can switch off. Qortal works whether or not You agree with me about consciousness, or nutrition, or anything else. The philosophy is why I do it; it is not a toll

You pay at the door. Come in as a hard-nosed skeptic who simply wants honest, private life, and You are as welcome as anyone. The door is exactly the same width. What is Your education? The real answer is this: as a small child I made a decision never to lose the thing children have and most adults misplace, the ability to look at the world with open curiosity and wonder. Everything since has been in service of that. The official answer, for the curious: a sporty childhood, swimming, then tennis, basketball, volleyball, the gym. At nineteen I finished an Ironman triathlon, with a few marathons around the same time. I more or less lived on a bicycle, lectures and audiobooks in my ears, and at sixteen rode from Poland to Sweden with my best friend. At seventeen I spent a year on the island of Cozumel with a Mexican family, and fell in love with physics and the cosmos through Feynman, Sagan, and their kind. I studied geology at the Jagiellonian University, mostly to learn the scientific method, which was the whole point. Then went on exchange to a small village in Turkey that became a second home, where, instead of geology, I taught myself Chinese. Between Polish, English, Spanish, and Chinese I can now speak with most of the human family, and take in their words without anyone translating for me. I owe my way of seeing to many teachers I never met: Alan Watts, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Rupert Spira, Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, Peter Joseph, Jacque Fresco, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman among them. And in their company,

certain practices have been my truer schooling: the long rides, the sauna and the cold water, the mountains and the ocean, music, scuba diving, and the simple discipline of meditation. (Some of what I've learned came through the careful, intentional use of psychedelics, but that is my own path, freely chosen, and not something I'd hand to anyone as a prescription.) What I am now is harder to put on a form: an observer, a systems thinker, a lifelong learning childlike-curious student of reality. A traveler, a guide, an artist. I named myself Simon James, and I serve God. The only thing I have to offer is the truth. Where are You from? When someone asks me that, I want to say: the same place You are. We are souls, briefly wearing bodies, all born onto one small planet. The carving of that planet into countries is only another invention of a clever, frightened ape, and the idea of borders, mixed with the idea of money, is about the most explosive compound our monkey minds ever brewed. I treat borders the way one treats moods. The only country I pledge to is Planet Earth. I'm a citizen of the New Earth, a New Earthian. I once even made myself a "New Earth Global Pass" and showed it, straight-faced, to a border guard, asking whether they'd started accepting it yet. A joke, of course, but a necessary one, until the day the whole strange theater of artificial division quietly falls away, and no one anywhere needs a paper to prove they are allowed to exist.

II. But Does It Actually Hold Up? Isn't Qortal just another cryptocurrency? No, and the whole point lives in the difference. A normal coin is built to be traded for profit; On Qortal You can do whatever You like, but if You start Playing Qortal, You never sell, but hold Your minted QORT for a lifetime, as the record of Your time. There was no pre-sale, no one positioned to grow rich off the people who arrive later. You cannot buy Your way to the top. You can only show up and contribute, exactly like everyone else. A coin meant to be kept forever behaves nothing like a coin meant to be flipped. Isn't this just a pyramid scheme, or a Ponzi? It is the structural opposite of one, and it's worth seeing exactly why. A pyramid or a Ponzi needs three things: money paid in at the bottom, early players paid out of that money, and rewards for recruiting more people. Qortal has none of them. No money goes in, You don't buy Your position, You earn it with Your own time, on Your own machine. No one is paid out of anyone else's deposit, because there are no deposits. And no one earns a single QORT for signing You up; my QORT is minted by my presence, not by Your arrival. The early players are not enriched by the savings of the late ones, because there are no savings to enrich them with.

Isn't Qortal falling into the same trap, where the first ones reap the most? Yes and no. Someone always has to go first, and yes, those who joined earlier have simply spent more time, and so hold more QORT. But that is no permanent throne. Even the founders must stay synchronized with the network to mint at all; go offline, and Your minting stops like anyone's. Everyone can climb to level 10, and at level 10 we are all equal, the same weight, the same standing. And in the end the amount of QORT matters least of all. The only thing that finally matters is the Revolution of Values. What stops a billionaire from simply buying all the QORT and taking over? The design itself. On Qortal, influence cannot be bought, it can only be earned with time. One person, one minting account; Your standing comes from the blocks You have minted over years, not the size of Your wallet. A billionaire could buy a great heap of QORT on the market and it would win them precisely nothing: no extra vote, no faster minting, no control. They would have to do what everyone does, show up, be nominated by someone who knows them, and put in the years. Money is the one thing that doesn't work here. That, in a sentence, is the point of this whole book. Isn't crypto terrible for the environment? A great deal of it is and Qortal is built precisely so that it isn't.

Bitcoin and its kind run on "proof of work": millions of machines burning enormous amounts of electricity, racing to solve pointless puzzles, until the network swallows as much power as a mid-sized country. Qortal does nothing of the sort. It runs on what You might call proof of time, of contribution, and minting is a light, quiet process that an ordinary little computer, even a Raspberry Pi, can do while sipping a few watts in the corner of a room. There is no arms race, no warehouses full of roaring machines. A whole planet of Qortal minters would use a rounding error of what a single proof-of-work coin burns through. We spent a chapter on Bitcoin's appetite; Qortal is the answer to it. Won't governments just shut it down? They cannot switch off what has no switch. There is no Qortal company, no headquarters, no central server in a building that someone could raid or a country could seize. It is thousands of independent computers, in homes all over the world, each one holding the whole, kept in agreement with no one in charge. To stop it, You would have to find and turn off every last node on Earth in the same instant, and the moment one came back online, it would simply carry on. The old system could make it inconvenient, here and there, for a while. They cannot make it stop. That is the whole difference between something You are granted, and something You hold. Is it legal? What about taxes? Qortal itself is just open-source software and a network of people; there is nothing illegal about running it, or about minting a record of Your own time. But laws differ wildly

from one country to the next, and they change, and I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant, so I won't pretend to give You advice that fits Your situation. If You sell QORT for traditional money, most places will treat that the way they treat any cryptocurrency, and the responsible thing is to learn the rules where You live. None of which touches the heart of it: holding a record of Your own time, and sharing freely with others, breaks no law anywhere on Earth. Do we even need Qortal at all? We wouldn't, if our history had gone differently, if the belief in money had never grown louder than the instinct to share. But it did, and the old system is dragging us toward the lip of a pit, and Qortal is the rescue boat that has appeared on the horizon, a hand reaching out. If one day Qortal stops being the right tool, for some reason I can't foresee, I will go looking for a better one, there are other attempts out there, like Qortium, the Pi Network or Circles UBI, though to my eye Qortal is the most functional from all of them. The one thing I am certain of is that the old system has to become history. That seems to be the journey our civilization is on. I only hope we learn from our mistakes quickly enough to save ourselves, that we wake up, and remember who we are, before we do something we can't undo. Before that, I'd gently recommend we all pause for one minute, and rest in a moment of silence.

Isn't Your description of the New Earth too optimistic? Of course it is. From the perspective of the old world, any honest picture of the New Earth is going to look like Utopia. That is simply the view from here. But everything that has ever existed had first to exist in someone's mind; the mind goes before reality. The clearer and more vivid the vision, the likelier it becomes, and the clearest vision of all is to actually live it, and let others to feel it too. Taste the real thing once, and You will never want the old version back. In truth You'll find it almost unbearable that anyone is still trapped in it. One day the films we made in old era will be watched the way we now watch horror: strange, frightening artifacts from the Crisis of Consciousness Era. The New Earth is only us, settling back into a beautiful normal.

How long will it take? For some of us, the New Earth is already here; others will live and die without ever knowing it existed. It isn't really a date, it's a choice, made between fear and love, again and again. That said, if You want my guess: I'd put the broad awakening somewhere between 2030 and 2050. The critical mass is already lit, and what we're in now is the steep part of the curve. As I keep saying, this century is the "Stone Age" of life on the New Earth, no one knows exactly how it ends up looking, because we are still out in unmapped territory. The fuller vision: the automation, the factories, the clean fast transport, I would hope arrives well before 2150. Time is on our side.

Don't You think it's already too late? No. It is never too late, anything is still possible. And here is a reason that runs deeper than optimism. The systems the old world built are astonishingly powerful and astonishingly fragile - a tightly wired, centralized civilization can be brought to its knees by a single hard shock. That is not doom-mongering; it is plain history. In 1859 a great solar storm, the Carrington Event, set telegraph wires sparking across the planet, and the scientists at NASA and NOAA treat the chance of another, larger one striking our power grids as a real risk, worth preparing for. A bad enough hit, and the centralized machinery: the grids, the supply chains, the just-in-time everything could fail for a long while. And the people who come through such a thing are never the ones with the most numbers in a bank. They are the ones who can feed themselves, who know their neighbors, who can live without a constant feed from a fragile center. Which is to say: the self-sufficient, decentralized Tribe is not only a beautiful idea. It is the most resilient way for human beings to live, the thing left standing after the brittle stuff falls. So even if You set every spiritual word in this book to one side, building communities that can stand on their own is simply sane. And whatever comes, the only thing that finally matters is the Revolution of Values: we would just begin again, and maybe, this time, having learned something.

III. All Right! How Do I Actually Start? How do I become a minter? You don't apply for Yourself. In the new system, an experienced community member, someone who has reached level 5 or higher, and is a minter themselves, nominates You, vouching for You and pointing to Your honest activity on the network. So the first step is simply to show up and contribute as a real human. You can meet the community in a Qortal Group on Q-Chat, on the official Telegram at t.me/qortalchat, or on the official Discord at discord.com/invite/54UyhB7. Q-Chat is the original messenger of Qortal, which You can use the moment You've made an account and have some QORT on it. I'm a Minter Admin myself, I reached level 5 in December 2023, so You're welcome to reach out to me directly, too, I will gladly send You some QORT.

How exactly does the Nomination work? It all happens on-chain, inside the Q-Mintership app, overseen by the community-elected Minter Admins. First, the Nomination: a level 5 or higher member publishes a nomination card for You on the Minter Board, vouching for You and pointing to Your activity on the chain. Then the first vote: a poll is attached to the card, and while the whole community can weigh in, only the votes of the Minter Admins are counted, tracked separately. Once You reach over 40% "Yes" from the Minter Admins, the action buttons unlock. Then the group invite: a Minter Admin creates an

invite to the MINTER group, and because that invite needs group approval, around 40% of the Admins must sign it before it becomes valid. (At the time of writing there are about 21 Minter Admins, so that's roughly 9 signatures at each stage, though these numbers shift as the community grows, so treat them as a snapshot, not a fixed rule.) Finally You join and mint: You accept the invite, add a minting account through the Q-Node app in the Qortal Hub, which creates Your minting key for You, and from there You mint toward level 1. How do the Minter Admins know I'm real? Since Qortal has no KYC, they rely on what You have actually done on-chain to confirm You're a real, unique, contributing human. The strongest signal is published data: a Q-Share file, a Q-Tube video, a website built with the Qortal Web Builder, a comment here and there. Publishes are permanent on the chain. Chat helps, but it isn't kept forever, and simply viewing content leaves no trace. Quality over quantity. And one rule matters above all the rest: one minting account per person. You may keep as many non-minting accounts as You like, but running several minting accounts is self-sponsorship, and it gets all the related accounts removed from the MINTER group. Returning minters are checked for exactly this. Minting rights can also be removed the same way they're granted, by the collective, so the power never rests in any single pair of hands.

What are the Q-Apps? Qortal is not only for minting. It is a whole decentralized world of applications, all running on the same blockchain, with no central server to switch them off. You can send private messages with Q-Mail and Q-Chat, publish videos on Q-Tube, share files on Q-Share, and write Your own blog on Subwire. You can trade cross-chain on the Trade Portal, and earn minting rights through Q-Mintership. You can build Your own website with no code at all using QWB, the Qortal Web Builder, and browse the decentralized web through Qortal Web. On the phone, Qortal GO carries most of this with You. Qortal now also runs over Reticulum, and voice calls are already live on the desktop and they're live on mobile Android GO 3.0 apk as well. What happens to my QORT, and my keys, when I die? Your QORT is Yours to pass on, the same way You would pass on anything You loved. Because Your whole account lives inside Your Secret Phrase, those words You wrote out by hand and kept safe, handing it down is as simple, and as quietly profound, as giving those words to someone You trust: a child, a partner. They become the keeper of Your account, and of the time You gathered in it. That is why Qortal is a multi-generational game: Your minted hours don't vanish when Your body does, they become an inheritance. And there is a gentler truth beneath the practical one. Far down the road, once the game is long won and the community holds everyone, even the keys will matter less, because if they were ever lost, You would simply be helped

to begin again. You are not, in the end, alone with Your keys. You are held by the whole. I'm not technical, or I don't even have a computer. Can I still do this? Yes. You don't have to be a programmer, and You don't have to begin by running anything at all. The very first steps need no technology, support a local farmer, plant something, give without expecting return, share this book. When You're ready for the network itself, it's far friendlier than it sounds: the Qortal Hub walks You through every step, and on a phone, Qortal GO carries most of it in Your pocket. And if You get stuck, that is exactly what the community is for. Ask in a Q-Chat group, on Telegram, or on Discord, and someone will gladly walk You through it. No one was born knowing this. We all arrived as beginners, and for every one of us, someone held the door. What is the Integral Collective Federation (ICF)? The ICF is how I imagine the economy of the New Earth once money is behind us, a post-money operating system for sharing the work, and the abundance, of a community. It's built on the Integral framework of Peter Joseph, whose work You can find at integralcollective.io, and it fits Qortal almost perfectly: sovereign communities, the Tribes of New Earth, each running their own node, all synchronizing through one shared protocol, with no authority above them. People sometimes ask whether QORT is the same as Integral's Time Credits, the ITC. Not quite, and the difference matters. The moment You decide never to sell

Your minted QORT, it stops behaving like money and becomes a pure record of the time You contributed. In that sense QORT plays the role the ITC plays: recognition of Your time, not a currency. What QORT does not do is calculate the fair cost of goods from real labour and ecology, that is the ITC's other job, and it belongs to the transition, while scarcity still exists. On the New Earth, where there is abundance and we share freely, none of it needs pricing anymore. What remains is the #QQQ.

IV. A Few More, Just for Fun What do You eat most often? Meat: steaks, poultry, game, wild fish, seafood. Eggs (especially raw yolks), dairy, organs, caviar, high-quality fats, fermented fruits and vegetables, onion, and good salt. Everything else I treat as supplementary. These happen to be, to my mind, the most nutrient-dense foods there are, and I can live on them in robust health without supplementation. Quality is everything: organic, caught or raised in its natural environment, ideally in one's own backyard. What do You drink? Bone broth; tea with lemon, a pinch of salt or electrolytes; black organic coffee or coffee blended with ghee and MCT; medicinal mushrooms (Lion's Mane, Reishi, sometimes Cordyceps) with vanilla. Otherwise: water with apple cider vinegar, kombucha, and yerba maté.

Do You use supplements? Sometimes none at all. When I do, I match them to the day's needs, most often iodine, creatine, L-theanine, zinc, magnesium L-threonate, vitamin D (when I'm short of sunlight), good-quality omega-3, and the occasional nootropic such as Bacopa Monnieri or Ginkgo Biloba. Is there anything You avoid? One thing above all: industrial vegetable oils: canola, corn, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, soy, and the rest, along with anything hydrogenated. They're cheap and shelfstable, so they hide in most of the world's kitchens, and I'm convinced they do real, lasting harm to the body. Every cell we have is built partly from fat; I'd rather not build mine from that. I also steer clear of refined sugar and most wheat products, rarely touch potatoes or rice, and avoid highfructose corn syrup, aspartame, and liquid candy like cola, energy drinks, and fruit juice. What fat do You cook with? In the kitchen, clarified butter - ghee - which I make at home from grass-fed butter. Beyond that, MCT from coconut, cold-pressed olive and nut oils, and lard from a local farmer. What are Your favourite films and shows? Documentaries: the Zeitgeist trilogy, Interreflections, and Culture in Decline by Peter Joseph; Kymatica by Benjamin Stewart; the Samadhi films; Living the Change.

Adventure: Into the Wild, The Call of the Wild, Cast Away, the Mummy and Jumanji and Pirates films, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones. Series: Black Mirror; Brave New World; Planet Earth; Cosmos; Revolution; The Essential Lectures of Alan Watts. Science & imagination: Tomorrowland, Interstellar, The Matrix, 2012. Comedies: Groundhog Day, The Truman Show, WALL·E, Up, Palm Springs. Drama: Schindler's List, The Pianist, Requiem for a Dream, The Shawshank Redemption, Room, The Revenant, Shutter Island, I Origins. And the "subconscious programming" of the Crisis of Consciousness era, watch them with one eye open: In Time, World War Z, I Am Legend, Blade Runner 2049, Inception, Transcendence, Mr. Nobody, The Prestige, I Robot, Lucy, V for Vendetta, The Dark Knight, Edge of Tomorrow, Snowpiercer, Minority Report, and the Avengers / Iron Man / Bond machine. For courses, I'd point You to Mindvalley's Lifebook and Sam Harris's Waking Up. What music do You listen to? All of Enigma; especially MCMXC a.D., The Screen Behind the Mirror, Love Sensuality Devotion, and Seven Lives Many Faces. Enigma is the soundtrack of my life, and life is just another album on the playlist. Beyond that, from the classical to the electronic: Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, Vivaldi, Pavarotti, Sinatra, Hans Zimmer, Julia Kent, Rufus du Sol,

Paul Kalkbrenner, Worakls, Joachim Pastor, Pink Floyd, Carl Cox, Boris Brejcha. Which podcasts? Ram Dass's Be Here Now; Alan Watts's lecture collections; Ben Greenfield's fitness podcast; Peter Joseph's Revolution Now; and Siim Land's Body Mind Empowerment. What books do You recommend? To be honest, reading isn't my style, I learn far better by listening and watching. The ones I'd still recommend are mostly guides and encyclopedias: Ben Greenfield's Boundless; The New Human Rights Movement by Peter Joseph; The Best That Money Can't Buy by Jacque Fresco; The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle; The Law of One (the Ra material); and A Course in Miracles. What's Your favourite wallpaper? Earthrise on the computer, and the TerraTime live wallpaper on my phone. How Can I Reach You? You can write me a direct message on Qortal, through QChat, my name is Simon James, I check it everyday. If You're still in the old central internet, You can email me at sjpq@pm.me, or find me on Telegram at t.me/reonpl. Ask me about anything at all, though I'd guess most questions will be about Qortal, becoming a minter, the Nomination process, or some small technical snag. If You'd like to follow along on the old internet, my wife shares our

life and our community at @hackyourlifehere for as long as the algorithm allows it. And if You have an interesting idea, a question, or a suggestion, please, let me know. The door is always open.

4.1 Last Goodbye

I don't need anything to be happier than I already am, and I'm not looking to fool anyone, that would be nonsensical. I treat Playing Qortal as an experiment for the human family. My only hope is that the Golden Rules of the Game will bring us back to our senses, and offer a practical answer to the problems the old system made. Through that awakening, more of us might open our eyes and look around at this beautiful world, and at the people beside us, without division and without judgment. And if no volunteers come, if no one sees what Qortal could be, then I'll simply go on living in harmony with nature and traveling the world, because humanity, apparently, was not yet ready for true sovereignty, autonomy, decentralization, and the Revolution of Values. And I'll begin again, in the next incarnation. I begin as You. We have to build good relationships and real communities, because the quality of our collective human experience depends entirely on the quality of our connections. If this guide inspired You, or if You have more questions, I am here. I'm delighted, and endlessly grateful, that You came all the way to the end of it. That tells me something about You. It means there is still hope. So I'll ask You for something. Send me Your honest feedback; correct my mistakes. If a line or a thought here meant something to You, share it, share it however You like. I genuinely don't mind how this reaches a wider audience. You can download the whole book, as a PDF on Qortal.

And if You want to, You may take this material and change it however You see fit. It's enough to delete my name from the front page and write Your own. This information was never mine; it belongs to the whole cosmos. My body was simply used by the universe to help restore the Revolution of Values, the thing our civilization needs if it hopes to thrive, rather than fight for survival, on this pale blue dot we call Earth. I actually need Your help. Only together can we work miracles. If You believe this matters, I'd be honored to have You carry it further. Myself, I like to print a few physical copies and simply give them away to strangers, at the right moments. Because real interaction means real contact, not through a screen, and not from behind a mask, but face to face, looking straight into another's eyes. My intention, with my whole heart, is to wish You health and happiness, which is only another way of saying: contentment, here, in this present moment. I hope this guide has given You a foundation for living in the now, knowing that everything was, and is, and will be, fine. Nothing is important, and everything is important, both at once. And the moment that non-dual contradiction, that only seeming contradiction, turns over into something obvious, a deep peace arrives, in the mind and in the soul. Resting in the space behind all words and names and definitions and opinions, You know who "You" really are, and You know that all is well. You are always safe. You are always home. And even when a situation looks hopeless, in the very end, it surprises You - for the better.

You don't need to translate it. Everyone already understands it. It is as obvious as the plain fact that, right now, You are reading these words, and that You are entirely certain, beyond any argument, that You are the I am, Here and Now. If You have understood this timeless truth, if You have solved the secret of life, then You have no more questions. You are already resting as the knowing absolute.

Good luck. Have fun. See You later.

I do not know except that I know.

~ Simon James

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