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 a non-blockchain cryptocurrency without a central ledger. Each Zold wallet has its own list of transactions, both positive (coming in) and negative (coming out). Two wallets take participation in each payment. The first wallet gets a money spending transaction and the second one gets a money receiving transaction. In order to spread the knowledge about a new payment both wallets get distributed to as many nodes as possible. The question is how long will it take for the entire network to accept new payments, if they are coming in at high speed? What will be the so called “confirmation time”?
CoinMarketCap provides an interesting statistics: there are only 25 mineable coins in the Top 100 coins based on the market capitalization. The rest 75 in Top 100 are pre-mined. Only 25% at the top of the list. Down the list the picture is even more dominated by the pre-mined coins.
One can ask: what’s wrong with the pre-mined coins? Nothing in particular. The only issue is that the action of pre-mining entirely contradicts the very essence of the consensus money system. Any monetary system is not only about the distribution of the money to its participants and the transactions between them. A monetary system starts with the creation of the money, then moves to its initial distribution, then—transactions/redistribution, then expansion, then contraction, and the final stage in the monetary system—sterilization/utilization of the redundant money supply.
It seems that the concept of trust in Blockchain is not understood clearly enough. Most of us believe that Blockchain is an “immutable ledger,” but how trustable it is and what is the difference between Blockchain and, for example, MySQL—are the questions usually left without explicit answers.
As you know, each node in Zold continuously calculates a trust score, by finding hash suffixes (the White Paper explains the mechanism in details). All scores together constitute a summary score, which is called NScore (network score). Here is how it affects the decisions to be made by Zold users.
The first version of Zold is implemented in Ruby, a semi-object-oriented programming language. It was my personal decision to choose Ruby, even though I’m pretty fluent in Java, JavaScript, C++, and PHP. “Why Ruby?” is the question I’ve been hearing since the first day of our Telegram group. Here is the summary of my reasoning.
To make a payment in almost any digital cryptographic system you need a private RSA key. Your public key is visible to everybody, but the private key is what makes it possible to make modifications to your wallets. This is exactly how Zold works too. However, remembering those long multi-symbol cryptic texts is a hassle. For micro payments it’s easier to use keygaps.
It may look like Zold is yet another cryptocurrency. And it actually is. However, aside from a simple desire to dominate the market of digital payments, we do have a bigger vision. We see Zold as a vehicle to help Zerocracy fix the software development industry.