Privacy-Centered Altcoin Zcoin Implements Merkle Tree Proof as PoW

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Privacy-centered altcoin, Zcoin, has announced the first working implementation of Merkle Tree Proof (MTP) as a proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm. The Zcoin team claims the development will promote high performance, high security and egalitarian computing.

Poramin Insom, Zcoin's lead developer, describes centralization as one of the biggest challenges of PoW. The founder of Zcoin reiterated the original intent of proof-of-work which is to have decentralized security so that you don't have to trust or rely on a centralized authority.

He says:

"In a network that is dominated by ASICs, security is left in the hands of the few people who have the capital and technology to dominate the hash rate. It's been argued that with ASICs, the network is more secure due to the increased hash rate. In my opinion, it's not the absolute hash rate that matters, but rather the cost and the barriers to entry that you need to overcome to overtake the network."