What is Vertcoin?
Vertcoin (VTC) is an ASIC-resistant P2P payment network that uses the Proof of Work(POW) consensus mechanism to settle transactions.
The video above gives an excellent introduction to Vertcoin.
As you might have noticed, the key focus of Vertcoin is decentralization. This is achieved with ASIC resistance, enabling it to be fair and accessible for everyone to mine profitably using consumer-grade hardware. For example, the recent hard fork to Verthash (their own hashing algorithm) makes it one of the most profitable coins to mine for graphics cards with 2 GB VRAM.
What is ASIC, and why is Vertcoin against it?
An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use rather than intended for general-purpose use like GPUs. For example, a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficiency bitcoin miner is an ASIC. — source wikipedia
ASIC enables miners to mine a specific coin faster and efficiently, resulting in a better profit.
You can read more about ASIC resistance here.
But, wait, that doesn’t sound so bad at all.
Even though ASIC is efficient and more profitable, it is costly. Even if you can afford to buy one, you are not getting the best one available. Let me elaborate. ASIC costs a lot of money to develop and produce, somewhere between hundreds of thousands to multi-million dollars. Therefore, they are sold at a steep premium, and the companies producing these ASICs use them to mine a coin first. This means you are either getting a used ASIC miner or an older version of it. If you can shell out tens of millions of dollars, you might be able to get unused or the latest ASIC miners. As a result, only the rich can afford to mine using AISCs profitably. The only way to buy the coins mined using ASIC is from those ASIC producers or big mining farms.
The consumer of an ASIC mined coin doesn’t control what happens as Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned when he said one CPU one vote. Rather, this practice gives all the power to the large mining farms or the ASIC producers. Since those entities only care about the profit and not the protocol, it sometimes creates conflicts between the developers/users of the protocol and the mining farms. The prime example of this is the Bitcoin fork to Bitcoin Cash. You can read more about it here.
Because of the reasons above, Vertcoin was created in 2014 from a clone of Litecoin’s codebase (itself a clone of Bitcoin’s code). It kept all the parameters of Litecoin, such as max block size (1MB), average block time (2.5 mins), and max supply (84 million). However, the algorithm for mining was changed so that it is profitable to mine via a consumer-grade GPU.
Relation between Vertcoin and Bitcoin:
Vertcoin’s code is similar to that of Bitcoin except for some parameter changes I mentioned above. This means that any updates/upgrades done to Bitcoin can also be ported to Vertcoin. For example, the SegWit (2017) and Taproot (2021) upgrades. Vertcoin activated both of these upgrades before Bitcoin. This makes Vertcoin the closest thing to a GPU mineable Bitcoin. In addition, having a similar codebase means they are Atomic Swap, submarine swap, and Lightning network compatible.
Atomic Swap:
An atomic swap is a smart contract technology that enables exchanging one cryptocurrency for another without using centralized intermediaries, such as exchanges. — source investopedia
You can learn more about atomic swap here.
Submarine Swap:
Submarine Swaps are atomic on-chain to off-chain swaps (and vice versa, often called Reverse Submarine Swaps) of cryptocurrencies. — source investopedia
Read more about Submarine Swap here. In addition, here is video proof of Submarine Swap between on-chain Vertcoin and off-chain Lightning Network Bitcoin.
Lightning Network:
The lightning network is a second layer technology applied to bitcoin that uses micropayment channels to scale its blockchain to conduct transactions more efficiently. — source investopedia
You can learn more about the lightning network here.
Mining Vertcoin:
Decentralized mining is the key objective of Vertcoin and will always be its top priority above anything else. Since the recent fork to Verthash, anyone can mine Vertcoin at home using their PC profitably. Even though it is not as profitable as Ethereum to mine now, once ETH moves to the Proof of Stake (POS) consensus, I expect Vertcoin to be more profitable to mine in the coming days.
The recently released One-Click Miner 2.0 (OCM) makes mining Vertcoin as simple as clicking a button. The miner takes care of all the mining overhead, like creating a wallet and connecting to a pool. Additionally, a new iteration of OCM lets you swap your mined Vertcoins to LN BTC from within the miner itself. Although it’s still in beta, it’s been proven to work without any issues.
The biggest problem with mining using your PC is that you cannot use it while mining, let alone play games. However, the new mining algorithm Verthash spectacularly solves this problem. As a result, not only can you use your PC while mining (I am currently typing this post from my PC while also mining Vertcoin), you can also play nongraphics intensive games like Minecraft, League of Legends, Dota, etc. without any significant performance impact. Check out this post for an example.
Another benefit of Verthash is that you can underclock your GPU’s core clock and reduce the power limit; doing so will not affect mining at all and keep your GPU running cooler. For example, my GPU never sees more than 70°C while mining, and the fans are quiet. As a result, even on a hot day, the temperature of the GPU remains below 70°C.
Verthash is memory intensive which means developing an ASIC is rather hard. However, even if one is ever developed, it will have performance similar to a high-end GPU.
If mining Vertcoin is something you are interested in, then head over to vertcoin.org and download the latest version of the One-click miner. Here is what you need to do after you have downloaded it.
- Extract the zip file
- Add the executable file to the windows defender/AV exclude list. (If you don’t do this, it might get flagged as malware, rest assure it is not. Every mining software is flagged as such, and it’s a false positive. However, if you don’t trust me and want to find out for yourself, the code is open-source, and you can have a look at it for yourself. Also, try to compile it yourself if you know how.)
- Launch the OCM by clicking on the executable file
- Enter a password for the wallet and remember to note it down somewhere. You will need it to send funds to other wallets. If you forget it, there is no way to retrieve it later.
That’s it; you are now mining Vertcoin. Next time you want to start mining, click on the executable file, and you are all set.
51% attack:
Sadly, Vertcoin has had two 51% attacks in the past. Even though they weren’t profitable for the attackers, it is still a big deal. Unfortunately, there is nothing developers can do to remedy that. The only way to prevent the next attack is to get enough miners on the network to make it impossible or unprofitable. However, there is some good news. Attackers conducted the last two attacks by renting hash power from Nicehash. Fortunately, it is no longer possible since Nicehash has publicly stated that they will not be supporting Verthash on their platform. Here is the proof.
Fairness:
- No pre-mine: Vertcoin has been fairly mined since its inception, and developers do not hold many coins. Every coin was distributed among miners for securing the network.
- No airdrop: Being a minable coin, this is impossible unless there was a large pre-mine which is not the case with Vertcoin.
- No ICO: No pre-mine means this is not possible either.
Marketing and Exchange listing:
Since Vertcoin is a community-funded project maintained by volunteers with no pre-mine, there isn’t enough money for wide-scale marketing. That is why you don’t see tons of bots awarding and upvoting every single post in Reddit forums and other social media platforms. Also, because of the lack of funding, a marketing team cannot run digitals ads or pay influencers to promote Vertcoin, which is why it is overshadowed by other crypto projects, both genuine and scams.
Vertcoin is listed in four bigger exchanges, Bittrex, Changelly pro, Hitbtc, and Bitvavo (Only for Europe). Unfortunately, every other exchange contacted by the marketing team or the volunteers asks huge sums of money for a listing they don’t have.
You can find links to all the trading pairs listed here.
Future:
I cannot tell you what the future holds for Vertcoin. The developers will keep working on it to ensure it is up to date with Bitcoin and ASIC resistance; the community will always support and mine it.
I also have some predictions based on current events, and they are as follows:
- More miners will start mining Vertcoin after ETH move to POS.
- If the lightning network takes off or another layer 2 solutions is developed for Bitcoin, Vertcoin will always be compatible with it and might fill in gaps where Bitcoin lacks.
- Vertcoin developers will develop solutions to make it easier to convert Vertcoin to Bitcoin and vice versa without a centralized entity like exchanges and KYC.
- When Bitcoin goes mainstream and everyone is using it in their daily lives, we will still be able to mine Vertcoin with our PC and convert it to on-chain Bitcoin or off-chain Bitcoin and have a reliable source of income.
I hope this post helped you understand what Vertcoin is and what makes it special. When scams are rampant, and it’s hard for us to find out which crypto is genuine, I wanted to shine some light on the crypto that brought me to mining and taught me a lot about cryptocurrency and the future of finance.
Peace.
Disclaimer: All artwork belongs to its respective owners, and I have no claim over them.
