Pros and Cons

Zold is an experimental digital currency, which has its own pros and cons. It was designed as an alternative to existing dominating cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, Etherium, and others. As explained earlier, its mission is to support the revolution of the software development industry, Zerocracy is leading. Explaining what Zold is, I often hear the question: “What’s so unique about it?” Here is the answer.

Zold is not attempting to be the best cryptocurrency. It has its own features, which distinguishes it from other solutions. Bear in mind that some of those solutions may be more applicable than Zold to some business cases.

Here is the list:

  • There is no general ledger, each wallet has its own ledger; This makes Zold more scalable than Blockchain, where transactions have to follow each other sequentially.

  • Trust scores, the outcome of the proof-of-work algorithm, don’t confirm data integrity statically, like nonces in Blockchain, but are taken into account by the consensus protocol in runtime; This makes it easier to corrupt previous data, but helps maintain a larger amount of smaller servers.

  • The double-spending problem is resolved through a custom consensus protocol, which makes a decision according to a cumulative runtime trust score of all groups of nodes, which provide the data.

  • A wallet is a plain text file, which, unlike Bitcoin, doesn’t require any software to keep it alive.

  • Unlike Blockchain, Zold is more resistant to 51% attack, since a full validation of any transaction down to the genesis root wallet could be done in a reasonable amount of time.

  • Unlike Blockchain, a node doesn’t need to maintain the entire database (over 170Gb for Bitcoin), but may decide how many wallets to keep; This makes it possible to run micro nodes on cheap hardware, like mobile phones or even TVs and watches.

  • Transactions are not processed individually, but wallet modifications are delivered over the network in packages; This theoretically makes Zold faster than any per-transaction network, including VISA and MasterCard.

A more detailed description of each feature can be found in our White Paper.