Just a few weeks ago we made our financial model public, here is the PDF with a brief explanation. However, despite all my efforts to make this model obvious and easy to understand, there are many questions. The first one is: So, what? And the next one is: How to become a millionaire? Let me explain.

Each decentralized payment system (aka cryptocurrency) relies on its most active participants, who maintain its hardware. The system is alive when it has a big enough number of nodes, which are servers working online 24/7, communicating according to the pre-defined protocol. Zold is not different. However, the way cryptocurrency users reward those enthusiasts is different in Zold, comparing to most other cryptos. There are no transaction processing fees. Instead, there are wallet maintenance taxes. Here is how they work.

Even though we have some documentation in GitHub, there are many questions from newcomers who want to join Zold networks and become Hosters to earn hosting bonuses and taxes—how to run a node? Were is the video? Why it doesn’t work for me? Who can help? Here is a short summary of how it is supposed to work. If it doesn’t, please post your comments below, one of us will help you out.

Zold is a decentralized system, which specifically means that there is no central directory of nodes, where a new node may lookup and find where to connect to (aside from a short list of master nodes, of course). The entire network may include tens of thousands of nodes, which may be up or down at any particular moment. There is no guarantee that any of them will be responsive or will even stay online the next minute. How does a node finds its place in this “chaos”? How do they know where others are located and which neighbours they can rely on?

Any decentralized system, no matter whether it’s a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum, or something else like Tor, Kazaa, BitTorrent, DNS, or Skype, need some amount of servers with a special level of trust. When new clients connect to the network they have to interact with some servers they can fully trust. Then, those “nodes” can redirect the clietn to other places. Something similar existed in Zold from the first day, but got a special name just a week ago.

The mechanism of garbage collecting was recently introduced in our server-side sofware. It’s simple: the node automatically removes all empty wallets, which are older than 10 days. What is the purpose of this process and what are its possible negative consequences? There are some, let me show you.

I explained earlier that the only way to “buy” zolds is to donate some cash into one of sandbox Zerocracy projects to receive zolds as a gift. Today we are announcing a new interface, to help you exchange zolds to bitcoins and vise versa. Here is a quick explanation of how it’s implemented and how it works.

It was promised earlier that Zold cryptocurrency is way faster than any other Blockchain-based solution can even dream of. We claimed that a million transactions per second is not the limit. Theoretically it’s true, because there is no centralized ledger in Zold. Each node maintains its own list of wallets. Thus, the bigger the number of nodes, the faster the network. We created a simple tool to prove our claims.