Verge Currency Advent Calendar
Verge gathers support from a collection of amazing volunteers from around the globe; helping to promote our vision of delivering high quality technology, and innovation while fostering a community attitude with our ever-growing international community.
With this in mind, we wish to publish one story on our Medium each day between the 1st and the 25th of December 2018.
Thank you all for sharing your story with us ❤️
Without further ado, we present to you:
December 25, 2018 | Twitter: Sunerok (@justinvendetta)
December 24, 2018 | Twitter: CR (@CryptoRekt)
December 23, 2018 | Twitter: Mihael (@Mihael_CM)
December 22, 2018 | Several Reddit users
MARVIN — My personal story … is a bit more complex as it began in late 2017, where I got guided to have a look into cryptocurrencies at all. Meanwhile tracking down profits, I was also interested in understanding the technology behind cryptos and how they exactly worked. Meanwhile 3–4 months passed when there was this huge Facebook debacle and that was my main reason to improve user’s privacy in the first place and the first cryptocurrency that came into my mind was Verge currency and so I started to help Justin with small baby steps. After some time I got invited to work as an open-source contributor within the Core Team. I really appreciated the support I got from the community and the team, so I went back to work even harder as I have a goal on mind.
GHULLIE — My main reason for sticking with Verge is the fact that it’s a community coin, meaning if the devs disappear on it or funding runs out someone could always step in because they are working for free and believe in the idea. In my eyes there is a security in that.
GOOGOO_G_JOOB — For me I compared Verge to some of the top coins and found out XVG is superior and if market theory holds true the best coins would rise to the top. So far we rocketed into the top 100 and maintained in the top 50.
December 21, 2018 | Twitter Harry S (@XVGHS)
“Crypto will never be a currency it is unstable and volatile.”
That’s what the so-called experts say from their stable lives pushing a narrative that is ironically the root cause of instability in the world.
I was born under a barrage of scud missiles, I know instability.
Let’s be clearer, I was born in the 80’s Iran, at the height of the one of the longest large-scale trench warfare’s of the 20th century. My earliest memories include the sound of sirens ringing, images of chemical attacks on TV, mourning families in every neighbourhood, images of Martyrs plastered on walls, military marsh pounding from the radio everywhere, and the colour black. I was young, but the song is still stuck in my head today. “Mamad naboodi bebini” translates to “Mohammad you are not here to see” I hate that song.
The most vivid memory however is my mother’s eyes. Her younger brother was deployed to “Halabja” an area that was subject to an Iraqi mustard gas attack and other nerve agents. An anxiety started which she carries with her, to this day. Long lines of milk and bread that was purchased through coupons. Currency devaluation, hoarding of food by my grandmother because she was there for the WW1 famine, and overall the lack of stability.
But amid all these misfortunes there was also another side, Community of neighbourhoods and towns all over the country coming together, families joking and drinking, dreaming of a better tomorrow, sense of hope at the height of despair. We will get back to this point.
The tomorrow did come indeed, the war ended, images of soldier’s dying on tv slowly changed to returning pow’s with flower bouquet’s around their necks, colour black slowly started to fade into grey first and then other colours, military marshes into pop music, businesses started to open shop. Life finally returned to harmony. My father has a PhD in education from USC, and we had a big library at home. My child hood stories that I read consisted of big authors and big thoughts The Stranger by Albert Camus, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky…. etc. I grew up real fast.
We migrated to North America, Canada to be precise. I moved to United States not much longer after, life was good. The memories of the misfortunes back home seemed like an anomaly to me that doesn’t happen in life regularly. I believed in the system. Started looking at the stock market loved the trill, this is life, the expansion of an open market, the flow of capital without the interference of the government. I used to think to my self how stupid the rest of the world can be, not to follow this model. Bunch of corrupt thieves; that’s why I thought. And then came the dotcom bubble and hit my family like a freight train. I couldn’t believe it; these companies were all a bunch of shell companies? They didn’t make money? How can this be? Oh well it’s just the normal cycles they said on TV. Warren Buffet said if you must look at the stock prices everyday you don’t need to be owning stocks in the first place. Just invest in the economy because we are the beacon of the free world, it wasn’t just money for me… it was fundamental.
I moved to shanghai, China and started an e-commerce business. At the same time my family and my self were heavily involved in the Vancouver real estate market. Mid 2000’s. Olympic was coming, the city was turning to a major metropolitan, all on the backs of the housing market. The pillar of the American Dream. My father used to always tell me son this is the only melting pot in the world where you can be who ever that you want to be. You just need to want it and be grateful and show gratitude to liberty but the reality set in 2008.
I experienced that devaluations in the first place, it was absolute horse shit, and the Dream is nothing but a mirage. Its the same bullshit everywhere. That’s when around 2009, a friend of mine which was a stock broker at Odlum Brown told me about bitcoin. A private digital money.
He told me let’s spend 10 k and set up a mining operation to mine this digital money and my response was you want me to spend money to make fake internet money? I said to my self this guy has done lost his marbles.
I don’t want to give you guys an auto biography of my life lol, but after a few years I was a bitcoiner. A fundamental believer, not about the value of the coin as an investment or lambo dreams. I’ve always been very fortunate. But for the first time I started getting feelings in my stomach that mimicked my childhood. The mixture of the hope and despair. A promise of a better tomorrow. In 2017 I started to investigate verge. For the record, I have never bought into an ico or been a pump chaser. I was always a bitcoin maximalist that had a little bit more of an open mind. As soon as I joined the verge community it reminded me of the time that the community came together in the middle of the war back home. The salty exchanges, the words of wisdom, the words of despair all under the roof of the community with one common goal: A better tomorrow.
Tomorrow did come for me indeed when I was a child.
Tomorrow will be here.
Tomorrow always comes.
December 20, 2018 | Telegram: Boris (@Borisinjo)
I started considering investment in Bitcoin back in 2014 but hadn’t heard a lot of opinions about cryptocurrencies from the people I knew so I decided to wait a little longer (unfortunately).
There was a free seminar about cryptocurrencies in October 2017 in our capital city and a few of my friends and I joined to expand our knowledge and perhaps start investing in crypto. The seminar was mostly about investing through their business and buying crypto from them, not so much about how everything works and what is it used for.
Firstly, I didn’t want to invest in Bitcoin because the price was already quite high at that time. My best friends invested in couple of different cryptocurrencies and began to trade. They never focused on HODL or even try to believe that one day crypto might replace FIAT. As they had jobs where they can be at computer all the time, trading wasn’t an issue for them. My job was different and I wasn’t able to day trade. As I started researching more, my good friend Mihael (now on the Verge Core team) was also involved in crypto. Mihael started introducing me to Verge before he was involved with the project like he is now. He was very enthusiastic and before his deep involvement with the Verge Fam he believed in the coin and its goal.
He decided to support XVG and he offered me a friendly deal…if I invest in XVG he would tip me (over Telegram) with a certain amount of XVG. I decided to invest and bought a small amount and decided to HODL.
So, in a few months of HODLing, XVG started to rise in price! Only a couple of months and my 100$ turned into 4000$ (of course that was when McAfee was tweeting about XVG).
At that time (end of 2017 and beginning of 2018) almost all cryptocurrencies spiked in price. All of my friends aka “day traders” earned a lot of profit…and all of us know what happened at one point, all cryptocurrencies went down…I was just HODLing XVG as I do to this day.
Let’s cut the story short…now because of my good friend Mihael I stayed in XVG and of all my trader friends have losses even today…they are still trying to get back to zero and I was never at a loss…only because I choose to HODL and believe in XVG.
Let me make my self clear, I do not have anything against day traders, but as I see the current market it is more profitable to choose a couple of coins, invest and HODL until you are satisfied with the profit. I no longer HODL Verge for profit, mostly because I am waiting for the future to come so that I can use XVG as a common payment option instead of using FIAT as I am now.
XVG was and still is intriguing to me because of its anonymity. I believe staying private is one of the basic human rights and all of us should have it our disposal. I like FIAT cash because it is also anonymous…but as everything is getting more expensive I need to use different banks and accounts…all of my money transactions can be traced. I feel exposed…I feel that not only government, but some other agencies can trace everyone if they want to. I am not a shady guy with bad intentions…I just want my privacy…
I believe that cryptocurrencies are our future…my personal opinion is that XVG will be among the top 5 cryptocurrencies in the world some day…my only fear is that people’s greed to earn profit in short amount of time will slow the process of “mass adoption”, I have seen it with my own eyes…my best friends still have that mentality even if I try to convince them otherwise.
Future is near! Future is here! Future is VERGE!
December 19, 2018 | Twitter: NiteShadow (@NiteshadowXVG)
Hello out there, NiteShadow here!
I started my cryptocurrency journey around early November 2017; I had followed Bitcoin in the past but was not really involved until then. I started with LTC as it was cheaper than most available options at this time.
Around December, I learned how to trade cryptocurrencies. It was my first experience with this, and I noticed XVG was extremely high when I sorted gains in percentage — I didn’t know much about it at the time, and I started to research it. I learned that it was an open source community, and project that was aiming toward privacy, and faster transactions then Bitcoin offered. I also learned the transaction fee was much lower than Bitcoin. I looked at its history and joined their discord to ask questions to the community and get to know more about what it was all about.
I felt immediately at home. I felt the passion of the community, and most importantly from the core team members. There was a huge rave going on around late December for their new wallet upgrade, and the community was bustling. I sat in Discord, and chatted with like-minded individuals, and excited for the upgrade to their wallet. It was like a party in there, and I remember spending my New Year’s Eve in there — drinking some whiskey, and having fun talking with other fans in the channel. I really had no idea how much potential cryptocurrencies had, on that level — until I learned they can evolve and be used for everyday purchases. I decided this could be a replacement for currencies globally. Not only that but offer them privacy. As the year continued, I continued to hold what I purchased, and even bought more. Shortly after the new wallet release, there was an announcement for an opportunity and something big for Verge’s future. They announced a crowdfunding platform for Verge — to lock the deal. I was excited to be a part of this and decided to donate some of my XVG to the cause. I watched all the videos, and social interactions from Verge. Mainly Verge’s main and lead developer Justin, excited me for what the future can bring with cryptocurrencies and most importantly, Verge. His videos and his talks amongst the social media world really encouraged me for the future and inspired me further into the cryptocurrency world. April is upon us, and the announcement came out to the world. The idea of partnering with a company like Mindgeek was something pretty huge, something everyone has heard of one of their products all over the globe, and it was to become a huge partnership in my eyes — and showed me that this was the first major step for people who have never heard of cryptocurrencies, and Verge — to be educated, and at least see it in their everyday lives. Mass adoption was going to start on this day. This is what started the domino effect, with so many companies, exchanges, vendors, and the community all wanting to get in on. What Verge is!
As the months went on in 2018, my interest in Verge and its future grew a lot. I got a hold of some members and asked if I could help in anyway, for months I was behind the scenes talking to some core members, and offering help — Graphic work, mainly. I received word that XVGNinja was going to a blockchain conference in Germany, and I thought it was a great opportunity to donate to the team and make up some bumper stickers to hand out at the event. I offered the idea, and I was immediately contacted by several team members. We had a tight deadline, and had to ship and get through customs, within days. This proved to be difficult, but after contacting a media and a print supervisor in the Netherlands, and after spending hours on the phone, getting approvals, and being put on hold — I was able to get them to print my order which I donated for the conference. It arrived a day before the event, and was flashed on twitter, and social media. It was cool to see our work out in the wild, and more importantly the community wanting more of it.
I wanted to play a greater part of this, but I was limited in what I could do, by what I knew, design. So, I decided I should apply officially, my wife did too, as she has followed me in my, now our Verge journey. We got together and worked on some graphic concepts, and made digital formats together, so that we can see how the project is, and where it’s going on screen. It’s a lot of work, luckily, we enjoy it, and we get to work together on an amazing product, that helps us play a part in this unfolding revolution!
We were interviewed and accepted to join the core team mid-November 2018 and immediately was taken by several different projects, giving me handful of projects! My wife, and myself have been working toward mass adoption with every free hour we have available — on top of our weekly hours spent with our careers. Not just us, but EVERY team member is working hard, every day, and every hour — to make this dream a reality. These guys are organized machines, and they will not STOP until the mission is achieved. They all are volunteers. We do not get paid a penny, and all expenses into projects, come from our own pockets. Please remember that when you might see some negative conversations going on. These guys are working very hard, I can’t put it into words just how much!
It’s only been about a month that my wife and I have joined Verge. So, what have we been up to?
Well we have already worked on things like NetCents, to get it adopted outside of the digital world — but to educate shop owners like the brick and mortar and mom/pop shops. We marketed a proposal and requested permission to get advertising with both Verge and NetCents — which was approved. We have made digital print brochures, so the community can distribute them, and educate store owners in their areas. We wanted it to be easy, and even let them scan the brochure to get started accepting XVG at their stores. We also created a “Pay with Verge” store decal for merchants to put in their windows.
We also have been working on the Fueled by Verge project. Most recently, we just created, and released the Fueled by Verge webpage to the world. Huge credits to Waveon as well for the graphic design work on that page! We have also been working on many other things, but that is not to be revealed… just yet!
Much is in store for the future — and these are only things I can talk about which is out to the public already, but we are excited for what the future brings! We are also very eager to take on whatever comes next!
Our goal is mass adoption. We will not stop until everyone knows what Verge is, and how they can become a part of this great project! If you want to get involved, please get a hold of any of our Verge team staff. We are actively looking for people who want to get more involved with the project.
Also, please remember — We are nothing without ALL of you!
I wish you all peace and love this holiday season!
NiteShadow
December 18, 2018 | Twitter: Frank Dashwood ( @DJ_Erock23)
I won’t be talking about things like prices and shit like that because it is all superfluous to the longer term.
I was one of those guys who when they saw the article concerning Bitcoin, decided “hmmm, that sounds interesting, how do I get involved” back in 2009.
Any who…
I was involved with a LUG (Linux Users Group) and some of them were down with the idea, so they helped me set up a miner on an old Pentium 4 1.8 GHZ
I wasn’t even sure I was doing anything but receiving other people’s blocks and propagating them
but I let it run for a few months. It was noisy. It was hot. It used up 90% of my system resources. But it was fucking exciting for me because I saw the promise.
I watched the genesis of the housing bubble growing around me and understood it for what it was. Back in 2004 or 2005, I saw a boom in housing developments around me… All over the place.
Big ass fields of deer lay-downs and cattle grazing ground was turning into tracts of “McHouse’s” all over the place. Not cheap ones either; I’m talking big ass, double-deckers with gates and brickwork and shit. I was like, “what gives?”
All these fucking executive level houses being built and I am beating my head for additional hours at a dormitory kitchen position…
WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE JOBS, THAT PAY THE WAGES TO AFFORD THE MORTGAGES ON THESE FUCKING HOUSES? WHERE ARE THE ROADS THAT WILL LEAD TO THE JOBS THAT WILL AFFORD THESE HOUSES?
Then it dawned on me. There won’t be any jobs. The priority on federal funding assistance was on getting people into houses whether they could afford to stay in them or not.
I knew the housing bubble would happen and that it would completely crater. I discovered that my gut was telling me what Peter Schiff was telling Congress. I had no idea the epic level of waste fraud and abuse that was unfolding but I had some clue as to why it was happening.
Fast forward to 2008. I’m working for myself as a vendor of snacks. I go into businesses who have agreed to allow me in and I sell their staff snacks, toys and such. It’s fun, plus it gives me time, and environment to do what I do best.; notice things.
One of the things I notice is this office, some of the most expensive office space in my area, that it isn’t just an office. It’s a heap of offices with a lot of people working for GMAC Financing. GMAC Financing were a funder of auto loans, but now there signing up people for NINJA housing loans. NINJA stands for “no income, no job or assets”. There are hundreds of people that work in this office. It was good for me, I’d always walk out a few hundred dollars richer in a couple of minutes.
Time is moving on. It’s a few months before Wachovia and Lehman. Staff are starting to thing out. Half of the people at the Goldman office don’t want to see me anymore. Next thing I know Goldman is closed, GMAC is closed and my old broker working in one of the buildings I was servicing was white-faced, sweating from the 12-hour long ass-chewing he’d copped from his clients.
The DOW fell off a cliff and lost like 40% in a day
Wachovia got busted for laundering 368 billion in drug cartel money. They got caught because they’d been using drug money on their balance sheet to fund NINJA loans to cut the cartel in on the game. The cartel got wind of an impending IRS audit and withdrew all of their money.
One brick. Just one brick.
I talk about this effect on my show sometimes.
With regard to what money you cycle from fiat to crypto. How for every dollar you evacuate/expatriate, there are thousands of dollars of worth of obligations that it cannot fulfil in the fiat market?
I digress.
Watching all of this take place, I kept asking myself… What is the common factor that is causing all of this? What is the thing that makes all of this shit happen? …and then listening to Ron Paul talk about the Fed, and Peter talking about the TBTF bailout… It came to me; the common factor was banks.
Not just the banks, but the types of things that banks were willing to fund. They are out to make money. They are private entities with the interests of private entities to serve. So they make it on shit like funding war, and funding oil exploration/exploitation, and various other frauds on the money.
I kept thinking… How do you get the value into a unit that doesn’t profit the banks, if they are creating the unit that profits them by its circulation? It was like a perpetual circlejerk. I thought, maybe physical metals, but that takes portability down a notch and they are valuated either by face or numismatic value in what? Federal Reserve Notes. By volume? Federal Reserve Notes. By certificate? Federal Reserve Notes.
So, I read this Slashdot.com article and I say to myself, “could this be a monetary unit that is outside of the creation/profit circlejerk?”
I mean there is a valuation exchange going on, but it is one that is only limited to when you actually bother to interface with fiat, or are valuating something in monetary terms. So, fuck it! I’ve got this old box, not doing anything terribly exciting with it otherwise and I became a miner on the first Bitcoin network. Long before rack servers, FPGA, GPU, ASICS… A single-core P4 humming away into the night.
Then one day I’m like, “Is this thing even working?”
Then I shut it down.
December 17, 2018 | Twitter: Lloyd SwizzleSticks (@3wizzlesticks)
Today is an important day, almost 3 months ago I was brought on board the Verge Core team. This happened as a result of a on a side project collaboration with CryptoRekt. For some of my peers, this was a very odd decision; as I am almost a 40 year old professional working as a CIO of a successful medium/large Managed Service provider that I founded. Most of my associations in real life are institutional investors, while my friend roster includes bankers, a wall street guy and a handful of accountant types.
Why would a successful business owner like myself, contribute my valuable time to help along a cryptocurrency project without pay?
Due to being an IT nerd, I have a completely different perspective; plus having seen how the internet changed the world. This has given me a great deal of hope that crypto will change the landscape of payments, investment, banking and the entire financial industry. I remember when Video rental stores weren’t concerned about on-demand videos; Or when AOL wasn’t concerned about Yahoo which in turn wasn’t concerned about Google. Another relevant example is dial-up internet providers who didn’t care about cable and DSL. In the beginning my peers had no use for the internet beyond looking at Geocity pages and downloading music from Napster; while i was an early adopter of using Google search and any other interesting new tech I could use or research. I remember watching a dial up internet provider for whom I worked for fail completely not even three years after a 12 million dollar buyout offer. Dial-up was a business model completely rendered useless by high speed internet.
I truly believe that we are currently at the front end of a movement that will completely change the world. I want my foot in the door! Actually, I want to be completely inside the building looking out of the penthouse this time around! I believe in the very nature and ideal of Verge, and I’m more than willing to contribute for free to see that goal through.
With all that said, let’s dig into what I’ve witnessed in my 3 months behind the curtain at Verge:
Behind the Curtain:
Growth of the team — We keep adding new team members, and the work ethic and drive of all the team members is quite impressive. More on this below.
Focus on communication — We all know that the Verge team wasn’t the best at communication in the past. And now we have grown by leaps and bounds! This applies to both the external and internal communications. When I first joined the team, they didn’t have conference calls. Since then, every Wednesday we get on a conference call; on many occasions we will be more than 15 team members! Which is highly impressive considering the fact that this diverse team is volunteers spread throughout different locations and time zones!
Strength of our partnership process — anyone can integrate or use Verge freely, sometimes with a little troubleshooting; but some partners including payment processors, exchanges and larger companies need to communicate with us before they implement Verge. That process has grown stronger and faster by magnitudes!! All this because of great team members who handle things from the front to back, organizing their hard work with better communication tools and project management software! Bringing on a new exchange or a payment processor can take weeks of heavy back and forth communication, contract negotiations, non-disclosure agreements. These amount to lots of paperwork in the front, and coordination of press releases and announcements in the back.
Camaraderie of the team — Everyone is getting familiar with one another, and the friendly banter both in closed channels as well as on public channels like Twitter, really builds the bonds of our team. This is an important thing for any team to have familiarity and feel comfortable with everyone else so that when they need help or have a question there is no holding back to seek out the right answer.
Diversity — The Verge Core Team has members from all over the world, of all different colors, who believe in different religions, and are from very different socioeconomic backgrounds coming together, aligned by one great project and goal. Expansion, adoption, and ease of use of Verge. Every time we have a conference call and I hear 15 different accents, it makes me smile.
The Development Team — going back to the growth of the team, I have to mention the additions to the Dev Team: Marvin, Swen & Manuel are great guys with a real passion for what they do. What I find impressive, is that none of them had blockchain based experience coming into the team, and it really makes me proud of those guys to stumble into the development channels and see them having deep conversations about back end blockchain development and code where it wasn’t something they talked about 3 months ago. These guys are all committed, do great work, build amazing user interfaces, and the community is just going to be blown away when all the new wallets come out. They’ve given me the privileged of running Alpha versions of the desktop and iOS wallets and it’s some of the best work I’ve seen in crypto, hands down. I can’t say more about how much value these guys bring to the project.
The Brain Trust — CryptoRekt, Dini, Mihael, Han & Kris are the rockstars right below our lead developer Justin, keeping everyone on track, tackling the tough issues, answering the hard questions, and pointing us all in the right direction, should we need guidance. We wouldn’t be where we are without this team of dedicated individuals. Which are not afraid to make the tough calls or having those difficult conversations.
Those are some of the main points that stick out in my mind, but there are hosts of smaller things like streamlining our proofreading and approval process (shout out to Alex & Birb here), many improvements to our support processes and documentation along with many other internal processes that we have changed or have been improved.
Final Thoughts:
We are improving daily; and we all strive for excellence. Sure there was a few rough patches along the way. But we are a few volunteers that have grown extraordinarily fast, on top of being new to this crypto space so we are all learning as we go. I like where we have been. But what excites me beyond my ability to express myself properly is where we are going! If I didn’t believe that, I would not be where I am today, on the Verge Core Team.
December 16, 2018 | Twitter: Tim Stevens ( @TR_Stevens)
Hi guys, Tim here.
I’m part of the Verge Currency business development team and today you’ll be reading about my journey.
My journey started several years ago, back when bitcoin was just a few dollars, I would click on website links to earn a small amount of BTC, I had an entire spreadsheet on which website to go to. Of course I did my calculations on how many times per day I had to go through everything to earn 1 BTC. And what I could get with this BTC. After a week (REAL LATE) I decided it was just not worth the effort and time and told myself to forget about the entire thing.
Same as most stories, I fomo’d back in some years later when BTC made its big prize pushes upwards, and downwards. Most people in the space, they pick a project and think about its potential. And yes also I ended up with Verge Currency.
For me it wasn’t about the people who were involved or anything like that.
I read about the fact that they were implementing the TOR project, which I already had been using since I was a kid. Was it achieveable? Hell yeah it was.
The privacy features combined with cryptocurrency and blockchain tech.
Just genius, and achievable.
After sometime I started educating the crowd, trying to join all platforms available. And later on ended up setting up my own Facebook group back in 2017 around august/september. Placing big lists of upcoming updates, long discussions, education etc. My own playground to help the noobs, and to enrich myself with the knowledge of others. As time went by also I got banned from our Telegram group, but i’m back, on probation, thankfully!
The FB group I setup grew tremenously, within weeksI had 1000s of people being busy with Verge in there, just because of the high quality content on it.
Later on I joined the bigger FB group Verge Coin (XVG) as moderator, back when we had Cees van Dam as Marketing manager. Oh boy, good times.
I did the same thing in there for a long time, but this group was rather different.
The motivation was lower, the crowd was difficult, the hate was intense.
But I think I can say with confidence that it’s looking a lot better now. ;-)
Being part of this group was so much fun, over 60.000 people in there.
Then we had another bunch on Telegram, amazing how much attention this project got.
The first verge meetup was in my favourite city, Amsterdam. I had to go there.
( I’m from the netherlands aswell and it was a 20 minute drive )
Meeting a lot of people there was a pleasure, I’ve talked to so many.
What a great atmosphere in the air, all like minded individuals talking about the project they have contributed towards to.
Drinks were good, people were good, place were good, amazing day.
I even decided to meetup with some of them after this day.
Later..
Cees left the coreteam a few months ago, and he was my partner in crime.
We could discuss things together and he would share his thoughts with me.
A great loss, and my motivation also went down through personal dissapointment to see my friend go. Eventhough Cees left ,the project would still be going on, so I had to aswell.
The main thing that bothered me was the lack of good conversation, when I asked a community manager how I could help out better. They offered me to also be an admin on the Telegram, which I did for a couple of months.
After time went by, I felt there was a need for action, a need for progression.
In order to do this, I had to get more involved.
The only way to get more involved was to join the Verge core team.
So on my birthday, I send my resume to the main e-mail adress of Verge, and applied for a position in the team. ( instead of just asking directly lol )
The story ends about there, I got accepted into the team, and everything thereafter is confidential. ;-) Enjoy the winter, or summer, VergeFam !
December 15, 2018 | Twitter: Gil Linster (@GilLinster)
December 14, 2018 | Twitter: Nichola Davidson (@knicky74)
Hey Guys,
Merry Christmas to everyone around the world. I’m Nichola or @knickers74 on telegram.
Verge has played a huge part in my crypto story this year, I joined their telegram chat after a little research back in March. From the start I was addicted to their outlook and what they had achieved all working as volunteers (all with day jobs too) with no capital/no ICO to fall back on.
Not one for staying quiet! it wasn’t long before I was invited into Verge Special Forces where I immediately upset Verge Jaguar by criticising his promotional Verge video, Sorry Jag :) haha. Thankfully we got past that rather quickly and have been good friends since, still doing what we can to help Verge.
While in main Verge chat I noticed a link to the unofficial Verge Trade group where you can learn TA, within a day of joining I was banned (my outspoken nature got me in trouble again) …thankfully that didn’t last long and I became an admin and “mum” of the group.. Thanks EZCA! Being part of the Verge community has taught me a lot about crypto, the technology and the people behind it. The community is family, their belief in the technology is justified but above all they are genuinely good people who share a vision. At one point I was making Verge personalised key rings to help spread the word.
Recently with a group of friends; mainly from Verge, I have been working on a charity crypto project called Cleo, inspired by their vision and integrity. It still amaze’s me today how like minded individuals have come together to change the world and I do believe that Verge is a light to follow. With a special shout out to XVGNinja, Mihael and Crypto Trump! Mihael, I think Crypto Trump is in more chats than I am!
Cheers guys for changing my life, roll on 2019 and the road to mass adoption.
December 13, 2018 | Twitter: Verge Jaguar (@VergeJaguar)
December 12, 2018 | Twitter: Ezca (@Ezca3)
Hi,
I’m Ezca. You may know me as Ezca from the Telegram main room or as @Ezca3 on Twitter or if you just don’t know me…I am here, anyways.
I don’t want any of you guys to miss out on my story with Verge.
Back in 2008 my brother told me there was a way to make money with your GPU, i sure as hell wanted to make some money. So i started mining BTC. After a while I got tired of it and stopped because the money I got out of it was a joke.
I forgot about it and at one point I even threw the old HDD out so there’s an old HDD with some BTC on it somewhere out there.
In 2017 (the mad end of the year days) a friend of mine told me that his BTC bought for 600€ is worth 10k€ now and that everyone who’s got some money left should put it into crypto. So I FOMO’ed into the EOY pump, like an idiot. On a side note, we are still friends.
After I made some gains with a centralized shittoken,which I’m not naming at this point, i started looking for some other projects of interest that I would like. So I found Verge.
I looked into it and thought to myself “damn that sounds more like Satoshi’s dream than Bitcoin” and I bought and joined the community on Telegram at the same day. I started to like some people in there really quick and I felt like this could be some kind of a weird family. I liked most of the Admins and they loved me (they did not really).
But to quote one of them “Sometimes you annoy the fuck out of me but most of the time i like reading your salty comments :D”
(Mihael: It was me who said that. LOL ^)
I traded and lost and traded and won and traded and lost again. So i wanted to get better and found an unofficial channel of XVG Traders and became a part of that family as well. The other part of the community, salty but very lovely people.
I’m friends now with a lot of people in the VergeFam, some guys from the Verge core and as of recent I’m working on another project with a couple of people from the VergeFam. A charity project named CLEO.
I can’t believe that i started with the dumbest FOMO and now I’m here with some really lovely people brought together by this one project — Verge.
Just want to say thank you to all the new friends i made.
Rock on!
(Alex here: Awww boo, who doesn’t like you? Its cause they never had the joy to pick ramen out of your beard.)
December 11, 2018 | Twitter: Wolfie (@XVG_HypeMan)
Hey guys its Wolfie aka @XVG_HypeMan! Happy Holidays around the world, and if you’re bored please strap in to hear the story about me and Verge!
I started mining Bitcoin in 2011, I forgot how I heard about it, maybe on WoW which I played every day since vanilla.
I’ve been a geek since around 1981 when I first got an Apple IIe and played Wizardry in the basement (lol).
Therefore it was easy to hack through building a 4 GPU mining rig and running phoenix miner on it which yielded around 1 $BTC every 5 days. Then all of a sudden, difficulty went up and I was only getting half a bitcoin a week! That was $3.50 worth of bitcoin for $5 in electric! That seemed stupid like a failed experiment, so I shut it and sold the GPUs and power supply lol. (This taught me to never underestimate the value of what I mine today!)
I forgot about my $BTC for a few years, then found my 41 bitcoins and panic sold them when it flash crashed from $120 to $93 . . maybe around 2013, it was a miracle to find them at all, since an antivirus program had eaten the wallet.dat on an old hard drive and renamed it . .
Anyway, I was over crypto after that for several years but I always had a link on my browser to a bitcoin price site, and over the years I would click it every so often and see how much it was . . $200, $700, $500 . .
Then in early spring 2017 I checked and it was over $1000, then I checked a week later etc, and it kept going up! Once it hit $2000 I said “I gotta get back in this shit NOWWWWWWWWWWW!”
I somehow intuitively realized that Bitcoin was like a tree that had already grown up and for how much I could spend, wouldn’t get me too far . . I needed a handful of seeds that hadn’t even popped yet, not a piece of a branch of some big tree that was (maybe) done growing already!
I geeked out googling about mining and found whattomine which luckily had Verge in the top few of the list that day and it caught my attention. As an experiment I bought a little hash on nicehash and got a Verge wallet and blasted some coins out in around half an hour.
Then I headed on over to bitcointalk which was the old center of the crypto universe and found the Verge thread and quickly noticed how much VergeDev participated in the chats! I msgd him and after he didn’t write back in 5 mins I discovered Telegram and joined and saw him active every day!
I asked questions and learned a lot . . there was a lot of catchup to do since 2011, plus I never really understood the tech back then, just that “run this program and coins show up” . . I never caught on at that time there were no coins and nothing lived on your hard drive besides your private keys 😉
Anyway, the Verge ship felt safe when Justin was in Telegram steering us to victory . . kind of like Captain Kirk! And CryptoRekt was a solid 2nd in command, a veritable Spock!
And what did my role become? Flava Flav! The XVG Hypeman! The Verge Telegram was only 2000 members when I joined but it was never a dull moment. Either I was echoing and magnifying statements by Sunerok and Cryptorekt or other amazing members, OR I was ridiculing trolls and fudsters to make their wild insults sound absurd! Growing up on the streets of NYC gave me quick wit . . then AOL chat, to Yahoo chat, to WoW online gaming for 13 years refined my online interaction skills so by the time I became @XVG_HypeMan I was ready for the job!
In Spring of 2017 I sold some guitars and amps and other junk that was sitting around rusting from the ocean air. Quickly it became Bitcoin then into Verge . . mining would never get me how much I thought was enough . . I still have it to this day.
Selling the top in DEC2017 in retrospect most people would say was the move, they are probably right.
However for me it would have been short term capital gains, plus I had no idea about the finance side of crypto. To me it just seemed like “only 1% of people are into crypto”, and now all of a sudden its up to 2 or 3% is what I thought.
My stance is this .. Im “on the train”, and if I’m on the train, I cant miss the train . . if the train someday goes to the promised land, then so will I! If crypto makes it, Verge makes it and by extension I will be rewarded for believing and participating for multiple years — of course I have already been paid in entertainment, new knowledge, and friendship!
This Holiday season VergeFam lets be grateful that we participate in a project which is TRUE crypto — no ICO, no nonsense . . it is still improving and a completely innovative and viable technology.
When I focus on whats good, I have a good day — when I focus on whats bad, I have a bad day!
Best of wishes and good luck for a fantastic 2019!!
Your Pal Wolfie
December 9, 2018 | Twitter: Brunobux (@Brvnbvx)
Most of you know me as Brunobux, an admin in Verge Germany Telegram group and a mod in the International Telegram channel..
At the moment I’m less online than usual due to my new job and a new born daughter.
My Verge story started in December, 2017 with the #whenwraithlotto, a betting game that I started to have some fun. It was an opportunity to bet 100 XVG and win the complete pot if you guessed the right date. All the participants tipped 3000 XVG and somebody anonymous tipped 3400 XVG on top of it to support the idea. At that time 6400 XVG was worth 64$ and at the date of the payout 6400 XVG was worth 1800$.
I love this project because it’s decentralised and driven by the community. It’s not perfect, nothing is, but we’re all here to help and support something we believe in.
I am proud to be a part of this project and help whenever I can with promotion on Twitter and in the area where I live. I visited shops like Mercedes, and many others, personally to promote XVG as the best payment solution and I’m often reaching out on Twitter to get ahold of the online shops.
VergeFam, thank you all for your time and energy!! Let’s reach our goal of mass adoption and let’s do it together!
December 8, 2018 | Twitter: Deep blue box (@@Me05229258)
This story can be found translated to English down below. For everyone, this is French Canadian French.
Vergefam is international.
pourquoi j’ai choisi verge comme crypto:
Depuis le visionnement du film la matrice 1 je me suis lancé à la recherche de logiciel en source ouverte et libre.
sans être programmeur je suis devenu fan de tout ces développeurs qui partage du contenue sur internet en faisant office de super héros virtuelles.
Que ca soit du jailbreak de mes appareils apple à l’acces root de mes appareils android via xda en passant par le logiciel Kodi et tout ces petits miracles de programmes qui facilite notre vie quotidienne.
Il y a un an environ j’ai décidé d’entrer dans le monde des monnaies virtuelles et je suis tomber sur un petit bijou qu’est Verge Currency.
Totalement en source ouverte où tout le monde est le bienvenu à offrir ces idées ce melting pot de ressources humaine mondiale me fascine.
Avec une équipe de développeur hors pair qui place les notes en vue de changer le monde complexe de la finance comme on la connais.
L’accès à une vie privée pour un usage quotidien devient une réalité qui pointe le bout de son nez.
English translation
Why I chose Verge, as a crypto project, which I support.
Since I first saw the original Matrix film, I began my quest of supporting and using free use & open source projects. I became a huge fan of these developers, these online heros, that were contributing to advance the world freely, giving away their work for free on the internet.
From the jailbreaking of my apple IOS products to root access of my android devices, from XDA to Kodi software, all these time consuming projects, that amount to a little bit more freedom, and customisation; making our lives better.
Well with this concept in mind, about a year ago, I discovered a diamond in the rough, named Verge Currency. Totally opened source, this project welcomes everyone and creates a huge melting pot of global human potential. This fascinated me.
With developers driven not by financial incentives, but with a goal to change the way currency works in the world, I was hooked.
Finally, with the Verge Project, we see that there is emphasis once again to bring back privacy for everyday use.
December 7, 2018 | Twitter: Manuel Cabras (@cabrasmanuel)
December 6, 2018 | Twitter: XvgHypeMan (@Xvgonlytruth)
I chose XVG shortly after the swell by Ripple last year. Not proud to admit it, but I pulled out about 80% of my investment over Christmas period in 2017.
Late March I decided to check in on the project after hearing about delays and Wraith Protocol, right about that time Sunerok went on saying the new partnership will change how people see cryptocurrencies and might even change the top 10 on the market. I think it’s more important to say why I stayed with the project and the community.
I chose XVG because of the core team. There’s plenty of privacy options and everyone should ask themselves what separates the projects, what are their differences… The easy answer is fortitude; the core team honestly has faced some huge obstacles, they have been ridiculed, discredited and under constant attack. When I found out the core team isn’t paid and that it’s a community effort based on a volunteer basis; I knew it was the right move to join the Verge community. Can you imagine dedicating time, money, sweat, days and weeks, months and years into something to have not 1 or 2 but thousands of people try to discredit you!? Instead of giving up the core team worked harder, and harder to get this project right.
When MindGeek deal was announced I found ridiculous the amount of hate XVG took. It’s like people failed to see that it was the first step in the process of this project; not the last! Since then the core team has been killing it behind the scenes; once the tech is upgraded, only sky is the limit.
I know that’s probably off topic but to summarise my thoughts — investing in Verge Currency isn’t just about investing in a privacy coin; it’s about investing in a community, its core and the people that drive it towards mass adoption. I chose XVG because the people that do the most work on it refuse to let this coin be anything less than the best option for privacy and they do it for free.
December 5, 2018 | Tonydatstick
December 4, 2018 | Ard — Verge Currency Telegram Admin
Hey Fam, I could tell you that you are about to read one of the most interesting stories ever and this will change your entire world, make you a new person, or even fulfill your life. Some might say that this story will be passed down through the generations, for the future to remember…but it’s not. It’s a pretty simple story.
Only a few people know what I do for a living and I plan to keep it that way — stealth transaction, on an open ledger. All I want to say is that I am from the Netherlands; my wife and I are the proud parents of three little kids. Are you as surprised as me that I’m married? :)
In June 2017 I started looking into crypto and during that same month I discovered rough, unpolished diamond called Verge. I’ll just assume everyone knows what Verge is and skip the technical explanation.
My first memory of Verge is the negative talking about it and I mean really negative. It was as if some in the crypto community had tunnel vision when it came to this project. This was my cue to go in — a new kid on the block and aggravating people means that it must be good.
When I first bought the coin, I had those wet dreams of Lambo’s and becoming an overnight millionaire. Imagine, turning 1k euro into something greater?! The more I learned about Verge and the community behind it, the more I felt this coin had more than just a profit to give me.
By the time September 2017 came around, I had started using Telegram and became a part of what was than known as the Verge Army. Back then, we were less than a thousand members. Over the coming months, I got to learn more about the project and the individuals behind it. During this time I also kept buying more and more Verge.
Then December 2017 happened. That’s when the sh*t got real! Does everyone here remembers it?! Well that’s when Luck Light made me a mod and under his guidance, we tried to tackle the mess. There was so much spam, hate — it was a mess. That’s where I stepped in like a knight in a shining armor to save you from the horde of darkness. I was the light guiding the ship in distress. ARD, the hero you all needed, not the one you deserved :). And what did I do? I cleaned that link, /verge_prediction_january2018 😂😂
Then came the darkness called January 2018. The crypto market started to collapse, like a house of cards, Verge was among the first to see the price drop. We didn’t deliver the Wraith Protocol “on time” and people panicked. Wraith Protocol was delivered the day after.
Then the bear market grinned it’s teeth and the rest of the cryptocurrencies started dropping in price. We are still in the bear market but now I’m an admin so fear not! Being an admin means the year wasn’t wasted :)
Back to December though, I didn’t sell a dime. I kept all my stacks of XVG and in the last few months I started buying again. Why? Because the price is a steal. I know you might say it’s crazy, but call me maybe :)
Let’s get serious now, I will hold my XVG until I’m able to use it in my everyday life. I will use Verge the way Verge was meant to be used, as a currency in our everyday lives.
December 3, 2018 | Meet The Team Behind Verge Currency
December 2, 2018 | Twitter: Hum (@HUMXVG)
The Beginnings
So where do I begin?…
I had the opportunity to buy Bitcoin in 2012 and I disregarded it as something that had no use whatsoever, like many of you out there I completely forgot about it until July 2017.
After a long day at work, I for some reason got intrigued by crypto, I remember spending 4 hours reading up about Bitcoin, its white paper and why it came to exist, Over the next couple of weeks I became drawn to Verge, as many people do I googled Verge to see what the worldwide web thought and I saw a lot of HATE, the funny thing was I was drawn to it more and I purchased even more.
After reading on Reddit I realised Verge had a telegram group, my first thought was WTF IS TELEGRAM?! After finally getting the app I joined Verge Chat, at this point Justin was pretty active still in the room, CryptoRekt was a bad ass hammer. At the time there was a few more of the team active in the chat: Phanti, Lucklight, Emanuel, Erik, to name a few.
What excited me about Verge was everyone involved was completely volunteering and got no pay whatsoever, Everyone in the project was here to make Verge great and to create an alternative currency that was more fair than the FIAT we panic sell into today.
There was one thing that Justin said that sold me to Verge, during the 2008 crisis A LOT of people lost their jobs, homes, families and some even more.. The governments did their best to save the banks and the greed that caused the problem, instead of helping its citizens it actively took the step to help the institutions that created the problem. When I heard this from Justin I was 100% on board.
The Horror and beginning of the legend of Verge Chat Moderators
During one evening a gentle soul named AUTISTICDOG ( SCATPORN MAN) blessed Verge into creating more admins Lucklight, Phanti and eventually yours truly were created admins.
The McAfee saga
I was one of the lucky users to see McAfee’s interview with Larry and Joe, and the subsequent crazy bullrun, followed by the insane FUD over Christmas and the subsequent dip in January alongside Bitcoin. I HODLED when a lot of people were selling.
The future?
Well, there’s plenty more in development for Verge’s timeline, RSK development and release excites me, as we will see the FIRST ICO’s being built on the VERGE platform, the same ICO’s will have the capability of optional privacy baked into them. At the same time, as development is happening, the rest of the team is making that Verge is gaining more and more traction and adoption; remember adoption is key for any future price movements.
Final words
Verge is a community currency, no one in the team is paid. We all have day jobs, go to school and have families yet we always find time to help develop Verge into the currency of the future. Remember guys.
ADOPTION IS KEY.
December 1, 2018 | Twitter: XVG Camel (@TheCryptoCamel)
My first interest in Verge Currency occurred during the Bitcoin fever or the cryptocurrency Gold Rush era of 2017. At this time, MacAfee was the number one talking head on news and finance shows. In this moment, I like many others was blinded by the chance of fast money, and thus ignored the backend side of coin development. At one point, I even got rid of a large amount of my $XVG to take a chance over other Alt coin(s). Somewhere in there I started doing my own research and listened less to ‘crypto influencers’
Forward a few months, and bam!!! The big announcement happened, and there was something about Justin’s demeanour in the video that made me believe him. On top of that, TokenPay funded almost half of the partnership drive. I believed that Derek wasn’t just going to throw money down the drain (Get sh3t done East Coast vibe kind of guy). I told all of my friends that were into crypto to check it out, and I jumped back in to Verge. The peak and fall of all the various cryptos happened soon after, but in the mean time I realized how unique Verge really is.
Here is what I found. There was no ICO!!! That is right one of the biggest coins got its placement by crawling and scratching its way to the top. Other coins are heavily funded and can’t even make a working product, and some get a top spot just to come falling back to earth like Mr. Newtons apple. Also, Verge is a community coin, you know kind of like Satoshi’s vision, but someone messed that praise up, Wright?
Everyone that works for Verge does it on their own time, out of their own pocket. If you don’t realize how major that is, you can judge how important time is to you by trying to connect to the internet with a dial up modem. It has one of the largest social media communes, plus the Verge Zoo boast load of creatures involved, kind of an Ark of sorts, and the coin has a privacy option. Privacy is one of the most fundamental human instincts. Add that to the low buy in Value and it’s a no-brainer, right?
But I am not done. The final key to the coin is Justin, and I am not some fan boy f%cktard. I got to meet Justin and many other core members in Amsterdam, kick a$$ place to go. What was amazing is how humble he is. People were circling around him like a school of sharks just waiting to get a picture with him. Justin took the time to give everyone the attention they needed, ALL NIGHT LONG. Trust me it is easy to get a big head when your followers/fans are also your paparazzi.
The last thing, when he is not coding, he takes the time to respond to people on social media (Twitter, Telegram, etc.) When you love something, you get lost in it, hours pass by and it feels like seconds. I found out from Justin’s girlfriend that she has to stop him from coding to remind him to eat. You can tell that this is happening because his glasses are THICK. Sunerok is literally burring out his retinas so we as a community can have the best, safest and don’t forget most private coin.
Alex (@xvgninja) here: This was a touching story, I had a chance to meet the Camel at the end of the meetup, he’s a great guy! Definitely appreciate his energy! Stay tuned for the next story!
