Verge Currency core was published on January 22nd of 2016 by copying Bitcoin source code and tweaking the new currency and that is the first red flag about the project.
Disclaimer: This review is an abstract of information collected in the project, and by no means, it will define the success or failure of the project. My intent to with this article is to share my thoughts as a software engineer to not technical people. I’m not a financial advisor.
- The White Paper
- The IP Obfuscation features
- The projects commits
- The website
- The team
- The community
- The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
- Conclusion
- My Opinion
The White Paper
The Verge team call their White Paper “Black Paper” and give an overall view of the project, following up with how the TOR and I2P work to obfuscate the network communication between their nodes.
It promises transaction to have privacy through anonymity and to be faster by using those additional layers. Well, if you ever used TOR or any other protocol like a simple VPN, you know that the many extra layers in the network will slow it down and not make it faster. And the privacy is not about to hide your IP but to secure your ledger to hold real, verifiable information without exposing the users.
I will talk more about the IP Obfuscation feature in the next topic.
The White Paper goes explaining how their wallet works, advantages of Multi-Algo support and end with their conclusion on why it’s so important to make your IP untraceable when sending a transaction to the network.
There are no details about how financially the coin works, how fees and rewards will work or any other monetary aspects of the currency, it’s a White Paper only to show what they want to patch over Bitcoin and that’s all.
The IP Obfuscation features
The advantage of hiding your IP behind a network layers obfuscation is to allow you to safely host your node in a country that might cease you if they find your server, it doesn’t represent any real improvement to users, there are many ways to hide your communication with the network.
Nowadays the only way to track who started a transaction, so you could identify the owner of a public hash by matching it to the source IP. For that, we’re assuming that you started the transaction from a node that is in your personal network and there were no other layers of encryption in that communication, in such case the internet provider would be able to track your wallet public address and exposes you.
A simple service that uses an external node to start your transaction would be enough to obfuscate this transaction. Most of the wallets for bitcoins that don't start a local node will use a remote node and the communication with such will use most probably HTTPS, what makes almost impossible to trace wallets to the IP that started the transaction.
Not only that, if you’re using a full node at your home, you can proxy your node into the TOR network built-in Bitcoin to avoid such information trail to detect the origin IP of your transactions.
The projects commits
It's more than a year that their CI is warning about failures to build the Mac version of the project, after many code iterations nothing has done to fix it.
Most of the commits are rebranding Bitcoin, a few are copying other projects implementations, and there was some work to add TOR and I2P to the wallet user interface.
There are no unit tests to ensure that future changes won’t break the code. Anyway, there are not many contributions over time too.
By looking the overall project, it doesn't seem to have activity lately.
But going deeper we will see that mostly it is composed of updates to the website, more rebranding and few changes here and there.
The commits messages are a waste of time, and it’s super rare to find any meaningful explanation of their changes.
Website
It’s clear that the website has some dedication to it, a few logo changes, small improvements, and marketing. As cryptocurrencies are getting more traction, Verge focuses to improve its main selling point, that is the website.
Well, we can say that at least they have one, many other cryptocurrencies do not.
It’s very noticeable that they do not include any link to their source-code in the website. Weird.
The website contains a roadmap, where most of the pending tasks will be released in the next month (July 2017), they are promising way more that they can deliver there, it won’t be a surprise if they delay most of those features.
Verge is on edge, if a term is trending, they will add it to their roadmap. That's the way to attract investors, so we can expect RingCT, SmartContract or whatever is in the Bitcoin tomorrow.
There is a new Wallet UI is coming. There is no development of it, or it is in private and might be merged when it gets done.
Community
I’ve found many communication channels to their community from IRC, Reddit to Steam. There are not a lot of people or activity going on. It’s understandable for a relatively new coin.
Their time spent playing with the official currency steam account is interesting, are they doing some in games campaign?
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
As any project there are Pros and Cons, when we’re talking about a project that can store monetary values, always pay a lot of attention to the cons, because a small failure in the project design might allow your assets to be lost or stolen.
The Good
- No squished commits in the Github, it’s easy to track what the developers are doing;
- Available on big exchanges, what creates liquidity to the currency;
The Bad
- Started by copying a snapshot of Bitcoin instead of forking the project;
- Sloppy commits, it seems that the engineers are experimenting with the currency more than knowing what they’re doing;
- The developers are hidden behind a user shared account;
- There is no information about the authors on their official website;
- The White Paper is super simple and only give an overview of their marketing goal;
- There is no innovation in the coin, their IP obfuscation is available to Bitcoin and almost all other coins;
- Reusing code pieces of dead projects like Shadow Coin without any documented mentions;
- Most of the commits are only rebranding Bitcoin, not much work going on since Jan of 2016;
The Ugly
- No unit-tests for the implementations;
- No links to the source code on the official website;
- OS-X compilation is broken since 2016 after they introduce support to I2P
Conclusion
The idea of improving privacy by hiding IP is not bad all. It is a real concern of the cryptocurrency community. Built-in tools to avoid companies and government censorship are a good way to go. And despite that is easy to use TOR as the proxy with any cryptocurrency. Integration with the user UI is welcome.
Verge Currency does a poor implementation by mostly changing existing code and copying existing code from other projects on their own, their documentation is almost meaningless and highlights concerns that attract non-technical people to invest and support the project.
Their roadmap shows that their focus is on marketing and other shiny, attractive features that have no real value besides attract people's attention and pump their market cap.
My Opinion
Verge Currency is a Frankenstein's currency that uses a real concern and rely on people's lack of knowledge and fear to sell itself. The documentation is abysmal, and the same level of professionalism is applied to their source-code, mostly made of rebranding and the copying pieces from other projects.
I’m not a financial advisor, but so far I don’t see any why I would invest in this project with so many others that are attempting to create disruptive innovation.
Sources
It took a long time to do this research. If you think it’s valuable, please upvote, resteemit or send some donation.
Bicoin
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Ethereum
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Grwat article, qaulity info. Followed
Thank you @runicar I'm trying my best :)
Indeed good article with lots of info...could be getting big in the near future for sure...
Totally a dickhead with lack of research. Guys like you bring same to the crypto space. Hope you realise soon what Verge possess that your small mind can't process. Peace
You can point where my technical review misses in the research, and I will definitely revisit the subject in a future review. Also, I see no problem in change my personal opinion if there are proves that I'm wrong on my review.
Verge Currency project started in January 22nd of 2016? lol Its started back in Sept.2014 and Verge is with multi algorithm proof of work plus offering many tor and i2p resources.. I'll suggest you review carefully because still there is so much inaccurate information!
Thanks indeed that date is the date of their core open source publishing and not the date that the project started. The other informations are in the review.
I was wrong :( It is actually a scam coin. Look at this >
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
I disagree with u dude! u need to redo ur research and well too! because I picked a lot of holes in ur review, I am certain that you are writing out of naivety, as verge is a work in progress with improvements you no nothing o!
You have the right to disagree with me or anyone, please go ahead and expose the holes in my review. I will do a second review fixing any aspect that is proved to be wrong in this article.
This is misleading and lacks research. Dont hate, Verge is undervalued tech.
I do not hate Verge, this is a technical review, there is nothing about love or hate here.
You can point where my technical review misses in the research, and I will definitely revisit the subject in a future review. Also, I see no problem in change my personal opinion if there are proves that I'm wrong on my review.
I am one of those who is not technical and I have read so many forums that I thought it was a good idea to buy verge. I am grateful to have read your article and would have hoped that somebody knowledgeable could argue sensibly for verge.
Hey gartz..i admire your genuine responses even to the people that disagree with you...i've invested in Verge and I use their Android Tor wallet..it's extremely fast so I don't understand the criticism of this platform..Jared Tate was also on Twitter praising them for using multi alg and on their win for the Twitter poll to be listed on HitBtc...it's also got a strong community on Twitter and Reddit so for me I like the potential..thanks for reading our comments...cheers
I believe it is, any coin with not much transactions a quite fast, as it get distributed and more transactions happens that problems on the development flourish.
"by copying Bitcoin source code and tweaking the new currency and that is the first red flag about the project". You just called out almost every Bitcoin based altcoin and indirectly most other coins that were derived from a parent coin like Cryptonote etc. That statement just makes me think you aren't qualified to review cryptocurrencies.
Most of those are indeed scams, very rare code forks are transparent and introducing real changes that will impact users. Not the case of Verge that mostly use marketing and cosmetic changes, once in a while copy code of other currencies to bump version and try to pump their value. Their clients could be used on most of other bitcoin forks with a few changes and would have the same performance on similar performance, what doesn’t make Verge any special. But you can qualify anyone as you please.
Very good article. Good to see I'm not the only one that is thinking about this. The crypto space brings the biggest group of uneducated investors with it. This group will only grow. We really need more insights in the market and previous investment results (even though they don't deliver any guarantee for the future). I really advice people to take a look at: https://www.coincheckup.com Every single coin can be analysed here based on: the team, the product, advisors, community, the business and the business model and much more. See: https://www.coincheckup.com/coins/Verge#analysis To watch Verge Report.