Proof-of-Work is the core principle behind many blockchains, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. The idea behind it is simple: a node, in order to win the game and earn something, has to compete with all other nodes. There is only one thing that guarantees success in the competition: its CPU power. The faster and more expensive the computer, the higher the chances that it will find the nonce for the next block.
Each Zold node has a score that reflects the amount of CPU power it managed to invest into the system. It is expected that the longer the node is online, the larger the score. However, this is not the case, because the score expires in 24 hours and has to be re-calculated again. Here is a quick summary of how exactly score farming works.
We’ve been having technical issues recently and they all were caused by one serious problem—our nodes were not responsive enough. This literally means that they were not responding to HTTP requests as fast as it would be required for the network to function correctly. Why response time is important and what happens when nodes get slow? Here is my post-mortem analysys. Yes, the problem is gone and now it’s time to analyze why the speed of data delivery is so crucial for Zold.
As you know from the White Paper, each wallet has to pay taxes to some network nodes in order to stay alive. The taxes those nodes collect is the incentive for their owners to keep servers online. In other cryptocurrencies this mechanism is called mining, we call it taxes. However, while the network is still young, the amount of taxes we can collect is way smaller than what server owners pay for the hardware and electricity. That’s why, to incentivize them, we pay hosting bonuses, on top of taxes.
Blockchain, obviously, is a hot market trend. Every single person I’ve met over the last few months has had a business plan somewhere in the area of cryptocurrencies and, of course, Blockchain. Very few of them, when I’ve been asking “Why Blockchain?” were capable of giving any reasonable answer. The savviest ones have been saying that it’s a very reliable and immutable database. Others just claimed that “It’s the future!”
Each Zold transaction requires an invoice. This may sound a bit confusing, since most other cryptocurrencies don’t have such a thing. Here is a quick explaination of invoices: what they are for, how they improve security, and why they usually are not visible during payments making.
Any distributed database that consists of anonymous zero-trust servers must have a certain consensus protocol, which guarantees that conflicts between different versions of the same data are resolved in favor of a dominating part of the network. Zold has its own consensus protocol, which is different from what Blockchain uses. However, Zold, just like Blockchain, relies on the proof-of-work principle.