How cryptocurrency Verge (XVG) pushes privacy and anonymity to the next level
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Have you checked Verge what position has on cryptocurrency market right now? It went from TOP 60 and climbed to TOP 20. Good investment opportunity or not? I heard about Vergein July 2017 and it catches me immediately. But I am a rational person and before investing I do a proper research. So I did with Verge and I hope this article may become a guide for you where you find all the important information about Verge at one place.
Shall we start with proper introduction? It shouldn't matter where we are now, we should always remember how we got here. Let's recap and build our tree of wisdom to connect the dots so that we can see throughout particular puzzles the whole big image.
Update December 2017: Due to increased demand Bittrex stopped register new users. If you want to buy or sell Verge, I recommend using Binance exchange.
Be careful, Verge gained momentum and went basically from zero to 0,16 USD. There will be volatility on the market. Sure there is a room to going up. Read my analyses bellow.
This change will not get around privacy concerns
Imagine standing right on the top of the mountain trying to learn how to fly because there isn't any other way to climb up. Welcome to the development in cutting edge technology that is totally reshaping our everyday lives, social connections and human's patterns. That's not a change, it is a huge break of status quo. From now, everything will be different.
Decentralization with blockchain technology brings us many advantages and yet we haven't appreciate them all. They are still evolving. Community projects slowly getting from underground into surface and we see how cautiously current companies connect with them. They know that their time is going to the end. To survive means to evolve. No exception.
Cryptocurrencies development has been active since 2009 and this year 2017 the old traditional companies started to realize for the first time for real, how big potential is behind it. They not only listen and follow, they cooperate, they invest, they partner up. They believe. And we are talking about big dinosaurs, like IBM or JP Morgan. They try to catch up!
Here we go! There haven't been better time to launch and run cryptocurrency than in 2017. Talking about the biggest potential we rather focus on financial services. Blockchain make quite a revolution in financial sector and I believe it will cause THE CHANGE we are looking for.
This change will not get around privacy concerns. On of the deepest problems of probably all technological innovation that are connected with social engagement.
That's is why today I want you to introduce Verge, the cryptocurrency that main focus is on privacy and anonymity in financial transaction. We already have some solution on the market, but the truth is that Verge solution is much more better. Moreover the solution that has been introduced to you as a anonymous cryptocurrency is not truly anonymous a privacy is not fulfill as you would expected.
Verge is innovative and I am happy to see another cutting edge technology that has a vision to change our future and push the most valuable figure — privacy — to the next level.
What is Verge? Another cryptocurrency doing what?
Verge is alternative cryptocurrency that is backed by bitcoin, but its main focus is on anonymous features. You can read in different sources highlighted that Verge is privacy focused cryptocurrency.
The video bellow is the first video that Verge want you to watch. Honestly, it is made from a photo bank gallery, it looks quite cheap and the most important thing is that the video doesn't explain anything about Verge. I don't see any point why it should be on the official homepage and pinned on Facebook page. Sorry for a sharp start. Anyway, watch it and judge by yourself.
You will get the point what Verge is aiming for — privacy and anonymity. The video should target everyone, not just geeks, I get this. But have you seen official videos from TOP10 cryptocurrencies? If not, go to YouTube, find them, watch them and you change your opinion.
When you launch a cryptocurrency you must show people what you do differently, how you do it, what benefit they get from it and how to start use it. Unfortunately, Verge hasn't sent proper message yet. It might be due to lack of involved people or different priorities as I described bellow.
Verge specifications
- Symbol (ticker): XVG
- Algorhytmus: Scrypt, x17, groestl, blake2s, and lyra2rev2
- Block time: 30 seconds
Rebranding DodgeCoinDark to Verge
The coin was created in 2014 as a DodgeCoinDark. On 15th of February 2016 DodgeCoinDark rebranded to Verge. The main reason for rebranding was that community and new users would understand that it is a serious coins and it does not support any illegal activity. The only change that happened was just rebranding, technology and team is still the same.
Verge has a public ledger
One of the advantage of digital coins that are based on blockchain is a possibility to keep a public ledger. That means that you are able to see all the transactions that happened with Verge, but you won't see who the transaction are going to or who are the senders nor receivers.
I think a blockchain should be public if it is a currency, because than you are able to see coins distribution and how many users use the currency. Verge goes here the right direction.
What you should know about Verge
Verge is open source project (see github here) as we are used to see in cryptocurrency market. There is no company behind Verge. The community is the power and the fuel for development and future as well.
The development is funded so far by developers themselves (especially by their time) and by donations. Sure, we are in early stage of Verge so far. They might be opening Merchandise store soon and Multi-Algorithm Pool Mining for boost the money flowing.
If you read about Verge for the first time and asking, “How come that I haven't heard about them sooner if they are so successful and revolutionary?”, I totally understand. The real issue is marketing strategy and we need to know that there will be always priority in development instead of marketing. And that is a good set up, I think.
White paper — Verge Black Paper
Before you invest any money into any cryptocurrency, I highly recommend you to read a white paper. It is a document where you will find all the important key information about particular cryptocurrency.
The interesting thing is that Verge team calls their White paper as a Black paper. It has just 10 pages so you read it within 30 minutes. Right from the introduction you go into technical details because the core of Verge lies in privacy innovative channel. If you won't understand clearly, just read it all first and than read it all over again. Seriously, you need to understand what is behind the cryptocurrency that you want to invest in.
From the ground to e-commerce
Commerce on the Internet has become reliable on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. The system works but it suffers with fees. Not just by them, the most inherent weakness of today's Internet and financial services is trust based model.
That's why decentralization has come and claimed it's place. Decentralization means no central control, no central repository of information, no central management, no central point of failure.
Bitcoin started with vision of decentralization, but from 2009 it's ecosystem changed a lot. The naked truth is that most of the e-business and e-services built around bitcoin are centralized. E-commerce systems are run by individuals in specific locations, they use vulnerable computer systems, that are susceptible to legal entanglements.
Verge is one of the truly decentralized cryptocurrency, not like bitcoin.
A successful decentralized P2P network requires good scalability of its services to ensure the size of content or transaction sharing can continue to grow. Verge build its success on Tor and I2P services that allow the highest privacy and anonymity standard today possible.
Tor, the onion router for Verge
Tor (The Onion Router) is a IP service which enables anonymous communication across a network. What Tor does is direct traffic through a network consisting of more than 7000 relays. The goal is here to obfuscate anyone who wants analyze traffic information or work with surveillance tools. Tor is designed as a layered circuit based network, like onion. Data go through the layers and protect privacy of users as well as their freedom. In other words, Tor keep Internet activities from being monitored.
But even though Tor does all the good work, its servers are often centralized. That is why I2P comes into play.
I2P: when another layer of anonymity is needed
I2P (Invisible Internet Project) is even a bit harder for non-technical person to understand. The developers building this project since 2003 and it is used nowadays for anonymous web surfing, chatting, blogging or file transfers. It uses layered encryptions and allows anonymous access to online content. It also uses two distributed hash tables (DHTs) to coordinate the state of the network — a decentralized P2P network.
Put it simply, I2P is a obfuscated tunnelling service using IPV6 that anonymizes all data being sent over the network. This provides a higher level of security, redundancy and reliability to the network. If you are interested, learn more how I2P works.
Why is Tor and i2P better than VPN? Isn't VPN secure enought?
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) encrypts network traffic like Tor does, but when you use VPN you put your trust in VPN provider that it does not log any of your activity. VPN is able to track it and keep all the records and logs without even knowing you. There is no way for you to be sure what your VPN does.
Remember, when using VPN, the only encrypted part of connection is from you to VPN provider. From VPN provider onwards, the communication is the same as it would have been without a VPN. VPN is glorified proxy. It is not secure.
How is Verge different from another cryptocurrency focused on anonymity?
Most of the current cryptocurrency that claim themselves as a anonymous and private crypto they only mask or hide transaction on their network. The real issue here is IP address of users. If you can't protect user's IP address you just shouldn' t claim your project private or anonymous based. The only cryptocurrency other than Verge that follow this rule is Monero.
Verge has a transparent ledger that allows anyone to view all of its transactions, but protects user identities and locations by integrating both Tor and I2P to not expose IP addresses.
Why is privacy so important?
Protecting privacy as a priority one can be for some people associated with “dark web” or illegal activities. Bitcoin faced this problem from the very beginning but now it is considered more as a revolutionary money for new generation than illegal channel for transferring or money laundry. Every big innovation has two sides, like a coin (flip a coin and choose: head or tail). It always depends on people how they gonna use it.
Lets just imagine that you are a business owner and all of your cash transfer would be visible to customers, suppliers and partners. That does not sound like very good biz idea, does it? It is better to keep these information for yourself otherwise there will be no business for you. And that's ok! Privacy is basic human right. It is okey to keep your records for yourself (and financial institution if they ask). Transparency is not about showing everything to everyone (compare with the movie Circle). It is more about showing relevant information to relevant audience.
Privacy is something that, I believe, will become more important as we move as society forward. With spreading the Internet, globalization and social media push it will be more important than ever to protect privacy and we should start from here and from now.
You can observe the trend even now. There is Monero, Dash, Z-cash —they've got a huge market capitalization and all of them focus on privacy and anonymity. Privacy is an issue that solve other cryptocurrencies as well. Ethereum introduced ZK-SNARKS. Stratis introduced Breeze Wallet with Thumblebit. We will see more upgrades as we go with digital money along.
Team Verge
It is always about people. The idea can be good but if the execution is not good enough, you can’t expect success.
Currently, Verge has a few developers team. The core team with 11 developers, the website team with 18 people and marketing team with couple of people. There is usually one main developer/director and others work as contributors. You can see the full list of Verge team here.
When I went through some of them, it is obvious that just very few people are deeply involved and Verge does not have a good stable structure yet. The development is dependant on contributor's work. The progress will be probably slow until they gain some momentum from a new senior experienced developer or investor/partner up with a bigger company.
Verge coin — XVG mining and supply
The total supply of Verge is 16,5 billion coins (exactly 16 555 000 000). Not all the coins have been released, there is time-line for releasing. 9 billion coins were released in 2014 (the first year) and 1 billion coin is releasing every single year until total supply cap will be reached.
It is important for every cryptocurrency to have a large supply that's why team decided to put the number 16,5 billion coins. It is also crucial not releasing all the coins at once to avoid price fluctuation and avoid major ownership of one person or group of associates.
Verge was designed as a multi-algorithm cryptocurrency so people can mine Verge with different type of mining device. It is one of the only cryptocurrencies to support 5 hash functions (namely Scrypt, X17, Lyra2rev2, myr-groestl and blake2s) combined on one blockchain. That increases security and protection of the system. Wider range of people can mine Verge hence equal distribution of Verge is served.
Verge did not do any premine. That means that all of the Verge developers bought the Verge coins like everybody else. That is a good sign, because sometimes we can see that developers of some cryptocurrency allocate a certain amount of a currency to go to a particular address before releasing it to the open community.
How to mine Verge?
Verge is quite easy to mine on your GPU. There are plenty of mining pools that you can join and benefit from. Those who are interested in mining Verge, see this page.
Where can I buy Verge (XVG)?
There are just few exchanges where you can buy and sell Verge (XVG). The most popular used to be Bittrex. Unfortunately based on enormous demand (December 2017) Bittrex stopped registration for new users. I recommend Binance Exchange. Trading volume on Binance is 49,5% so it is today No 1 Exchange for Verge.
But as you can see, Bittrex is the one so far that took a lead. No doubt that small exchanges won't make any relevant impact on the price of Verge coin (XVG).
I am sure that we can expect more exchanges coming with Verge pretty soon. As we were witnesses in the past, supporting cryptocurrency by a popular exchange can cause very high pump of the coin's price. There is expectation for Verge that by the 1Q 2018 it will be listed at least on one of the biggest exchanges like Poloniex, Bitfinex or Kraken.
XVG Price — Verge coin rise value
The crypto currency Verge has an impressive rise in value this year from $0.000019 in January to $0.0077 currently in September. Verge is very young on exchanges and we will see huge volatility. There was a big pump during June followed with a dump and we are back on track in September.
Verge XVG used to be on 56. position in CoinCap.io.
- Market capitalization: 104 000 000 USD
- Price: 0.0074 USD
I heard many of you saying that is good time to invest in Verge in this early stage when you can buy 1 Verge for less than a penny. To be honest, it is not approach that I take when investing.
Every time when someone talks about investing in cryptocurrency that is worth less than 1 dollar, it reminds me penny stocks strategy. I would not recommend going with this as the only strategy you follow. I am a big believer in value investing and since cryptocurrency reached some level of trust I always try to find as many information as I can to see a bigger picture and find a value of the project.
Update: Verge in December 2017
Cryptocurrency Verge gained momentum and went up 0,14 USD. It is nwo one of TOP20 cryptocurrency.
Verge Wallets
If you buy Verge you shouldn't keep it on exchange. There is always risk to keep a cryptocurrency on exchanges. Wallets are the best place where to keep your digital coins safe and sound.
Fortunately, Verge team developed many wallets option so whether you are Win user, Mac user or Android/iOS guy, there is already solution for you. I recommend you to jump on Verge official page where you can download a wallet with your specification.
Also check Verge social media accounts. On the 7th September was released CoinPouch wallet that support XVG — fast and reliable blockchain wallet solution for iOS users.
Verge is a leading player of innovation in the mobile cryptocurrency space. The team developed two very unique and first of their kind android wallets that operates on Tor and i2P. They were build around the premise of anonymity.
Electum Wallets
Electrum is one of the only wallets to provide native Tor and i2P support.
One can achieve anonimity by using Electum with Tor and I2P. Both IP address and transaction information is secured and does not leak.
There are many advanteges using Electum wallet, such as:
- Electrum enables multi-signature support (requires more than one key to authorize).
- The Electrum server does not store user accounts.
- Your private keys are not shared with the server.
- If you lose your wallet, you can recover it from its seed.
One Electrum wallet is on your primary computer, the other on your smart phone — the coins cannot be spent without a signature from both devices. Thus, an attacker must gain access to both devices in order to steal your coins.
Future development of Verge
Verge is not going to be just a cryptocurrency (XVG). Team realized a potential of smart contract and currently developing RSK Smart Contracts (Rootstock) that will go head-to-head with Etherium's today offerings.
That's pretty exciting!
Talking about smart contract we need to look for the scaling ability. So far there are 400 transactions per seconds avaliable in RSK. The development team said that they are working on Lumino Network project (second layer technology) that will allow 2000 transaction per second. The Lumino Transaction Compression Protocol (LTCP) can be compared to the Lightning Network.
To give you an idea, PayPal worked with 193 transaction per second and Visa proceed 1667 transaction per second on average in 2016. VisaNet is capable of processing more than 56000 transaction messages per second. Be aware that comparisons of transaction speed are tricky (due to the different infrastructure, push/pull method, point of failure, etc).
Verge is one of the only cryptocurrencies to already offer P2P solutions for Twitter, Reddit, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Slack and Steam. The idea peer-to-peer transfer on social media is a great idea. I think it is just a first step, they follow the nowadays trend — people tend to spend their time on social media more and more so why not give them a chance to move their financial life into that channel? It is a good shot but we will have to wait for more use cases to see the true adoption and benefits from it. The final goal here is to allow users to send and receive funds on the fly, no matter where they are and regardless if they have an actual wallet installed or not. To achieve this with the level of privacy and anonymity is not an easy target.
On the official website you can see the roadmap that lists items Verge team is currently working on. They didn't write down any long-term items because (as they claim in White-Black Paper) things change too fast in crypto to anticipate that far ahead. I agree with the second part of the sentence but totally disagree that this should be a reason not to put long-term item for development and grow strategy. It looks more like they focus just on development anonymous cryptocurrency and will try to do exit ASAP — like cooperate with a big company who basically buy them for running their own ecosystem. Not a bad idea, indeed. We could see this approach by other cryptocurrency focusing on privacy and anonymity.
What concerns me a bit is a schedule on Verge website — they don't have any challenge for upcoming months. The last items were planned for development for August. But we are in September, aren't we?! Why don't they update their website and inform public, share information, feed the media? And that is not just a website problem, even though they created many social media accounts to prove their digital life, but they are not active on them. Sure, it is a marketing thing, but you can't win without connecting with new users. The rules are pretty simple here.
Verge's challenge for September
I am looking forward to seeing Wraith Protocol implemented in Verge. The community should introduce it as stealth addressing channel in September 2017.
What will Wraith protocol serve you with?
- Sending and receiving addresses are impossible to decipher.
- Transaction cannot be revealed by using a blockchain explorer.
- IP addresses of both the sender and receiver are totally obfuscated.
Conclusion — Will Verge (XVG) go to the Moon?
The price of Verge (XVG) is still very low so it might be a good time to get in the game. Especially if you see public trend moving towards privacy based cryptocurrencies, technologies and development as general. Of course there are other coins already established in crypto market like Monero, DASH, Z-Cahs or PIVX, but you might consider diversify your portfolio. And remember, pump the price from 0,008 USD to 0,024 USD is much easier than to pump it from 330 USD to 990 USD (but it is still +300% change for both numbers), especially if the market capitalization of Verge is quite low so far.
No flashy ICO or major launch, that is good, I like that. So far we can see one major developer and many volunteers working together to create a privacy-focused crypto currency and trying to change the world we are living in. Development is going slow and we cannot see a roadmap for near future, the website nor social media aren’t updated as top cryptocurrencies usually do. Verge is missing people, contributors who would push the trajectory and speed up the whole process.
Verge as a technology based cryptocurrency has an inside value, no doubt. They break status quo and work for a new standard of privacy and anonymity. I like that and many today's businesses do as well. There won't be just one winner in cryptocurrency market so Verge has a true potential become one of the leading player. We are still in early stage of development and establishment cryptocurrency economy in the world. Talking about Verge, I would call it more as a speculation than smart rational value investing. We don't see any particular achievement or use case of Verge that change social or economical function in today's world so far. Also see The best Cryptocurrency Picks for 2018, unfortunately Verge wasn't chosen.
On the other hand, Verge has a good start. It has been on market since 2014, rebranded, got a new visual as well (maybe they underperformed potential of marketing waves). The team go right path due to technology development and social needs. Let's see how they keep going and if any of big traditional companies or investor appear and change the game a little bit.
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