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
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