What initially brought me to the world of cryptocurrencies was a love of privacy and a distaste for censorship. Naturally, when I discovered Verge, formally known as DogecoinDark, I was extremely excited about the concept. The coin featured the benefits of Bitcoin's public ledger combined with the anonymizing protections of Tor and i2p. It was an exciting idea: a currency specifically for and native to the Dark Web.
Unfortunately, there's a rotten core when you peel back this onion. Visiting the Verge website, vergecurrency.com, you will find that their big promotional video is nothing more than a poorly conceived conference call that is frequently interrupted by a toddler. Of the so-called "developers" being interviewed, only one seemed to understand what was being done with the currency and why. The collaborators were the furthest thing from professional, and their willingness to showcase this embarrassing video as marketing material gave me significant pause. Still, I held on to my Verge as it recently rose from 44 satoshis to a high of 197 satoshis on Bittrex.
All stories must come to an end, and we are reaching that point now. Considering long term cold storage of my investment, I installed the most highly recommended wallet on the Verge site and withdrew a test amount of less than 100 Verge from the exchange. I do not expect to ever see those tokens again. The Electrum Verge server is not responding, and Firefox flashes warnings when I visit its landing page, which has no valid SSL certificate. The wallet crashes constantly and refuses to query. A lot of people are about to find out that their money is gone. Forever.
My advice: if the developers get the wallets working again, for even a moment, sell your Verge on an exchange now, while it is still worth something. This will be the SECOND time the currency has lost an entire wallet system, wiping out the investments of countless Verge supporters. If you are holding Verge, reconsider. This currency does not deserve your loyalty. It tries to do too many things at once (multiple forms of proof of work, anyone?) and fails at all of them.