I am an original Qora ICO investor with a level 5 Qortal minting account, I am not associated with the development team behind Qortal in any way, what I write is my own opinion.

So far I have not sponsored anyone, and as it stands today, I don't think I will be for quite a while. This might sound harsh, but it is the truth, so far I haven't seen anyone here or on discord who deserves a Minting account that doesn't already have one, but I will continue observing, and if/when I see quality candidates I will gladly help them get established.

A Qortal Minting account is like an Asic miner, it earns money, but a minting account runs on regular hardware, doesn't burn much electricity, and will never become obsolete, so in every respect, a minting account is superior to a PoW miner, and the block reward is perpetual, so it will continue to generate income for as long as this project exists.

A Qortal minting account is as close to a crypto Willie Wonka "Golden Ticket" as I've seen, and IMO a Minting account is a very valuable "asset", not something that should be given away to a random person who posts their public key on discord, not unless they deserve it.

The more Minting accounts there are the lower the individual rewards for each Minter will be, so the game theory here is pretty obvious; a level 5 Minter should sponsor people that contribute to the ongoing development & growth of the project. This isn't NEM in 2014 where in order to bootstrap a community from nothing all that was required was posting "Interested" in a BTT thread, Qortal already has enough committed people to run nodes now!

Users of the Qortal platform don't need to run a Minter anymore than users of Bitcoin or Ethereum need to run miners; if you want to use the BTC or ETH networks you buy coins, and that's what will happen with Qortal, people who want to use the platform will buy coins on the market.

Every person I sponsor will eventually shrink the number of coins I Mint per block over the life of my Minter, guys getting sponsored today will eventually level up with me, and they'll reduce the number of coins I can Mint.

Minting is a competitive system. If someone adds something to the Qortal ecosystem, makes the value of the coin increase, then it's worth my while, I get fewer coins from Minting but they're worth more! BUT, if all you do is run a minter and shrink my income, and you don't add more to the ecosystem, what is my incentive to sponsor you?

I know a lot of people might not agree with me, and a lot of level 5 guys will sponsor anyone who asks, at least during this initial phase, and that's fine with me, but for those guys posting their public keys on discord, if you want to jump the queue I suggest "doing something", write a blog, send some tweets, add a Qortal signature etc make yourself standout, while the bar is still relatively low. In the future Minting accounts will be very valuable, given to family & friends only, or people who do A LOT for the ecosystem.

Remember, there was a time when a NEM stake that literally cost the recipient an "interested" thread post was worth +2M USD, I think a Qortal Minter account is MORE valuable than a NEM stake, but if you want one you need to earn it IMO, this isn't 2014, Qortal already has a lot of Minters who've been following this project for years.

Before people jump to attack me I'll tell you what I did to get my level 5 Minter:
- I ran a Qora node for years, even when it was "dead"
- I bought a bag of Qora from 2014-16, total cost +15 BTC, worth ~300k USD had I sold those BTC in dec 2017
- I followed all Qora communications for 6 years

I'm not expecting new guys to have as much skin in the game as I do to get sponsored, but I expect more than just posting your pub key on discord, otherwise, I have plenty of family & friends I can sponsor.

IMO it's no different to how "valuable" things work in most other areas of life, if a friend or family member asks me to give them something valuable I will always think "if there isn't a good reason to say NO, say YES", BUT, if a stranger asks me to give them something valuable it's a "transaction", a trade, or it's begging.