Hello Steemians
In this series of articles I want to put a spotlight on a specific cryptocurrency and write about the details in all these aspects:
Aim of the currency
Technical details
Market position
Forecast
The cryptocurrency in focus currently will be one of the so-called "private" coins. Coins that create the possibility to be more or less in private while doing transactions. How private you are is one of the main questions to be answered in this articles.
In this 4rd article of the series, the spotlight will be on Verge
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Aim of the Currency
What is this currency about? What does it do differently than the rest?
Where is the unique selling point and at what audience is this coin targeted.
All that questions and more will be answered in the following paragraph.
Verge is basing on the original Bitcoin Code but has improved this significantly in regards to being able to keep your privacy. The coin was created already in 2014 under the name DogeCoinDark and has been rebranded in 2016 to Verge Currency. Verge is not run by a private company, not funded through ICO or premine, but is 100% an open source project, developed and supported by the Verge community.
The maximum supply of coins is capped at a high 16.5 billion XVG.
This coin's primary focus is on keeping sender and receiver anonymous, including obfuscating the IP and location.
Technical Details
Verge incorporates into his standard wallet already the support for both TOR and I2P, there is nothing else to be setup to be able to obfuscate the IP address. The complete Network Traffic with TOR or I2P is encrypted and therefore the data is not accessible for any third party.
Transaction times are fast (~5 Seconds) while using the Simple Payment Verification (SPC), this works only with the Electrum wallet that has been forked and customized for the use with Verge.
Transaction capacity, on the other hand, is with 100 transactions per second quite low, a new development called RSK (projected go live in December) should raise this up to 2000 transactions per second.
Mining XVG is possible, it uses a multi-algorithm mining support. The following algorithms are supported: Scrypt, X17, Lyra2rev, myr-groestl and blake2s. Current calculations show that mining XVG can not be run in a profitable way, taking into account normal PC hardware and Central European electricity prices.
The main improvement over Bitcoin is basically the possibility to send or receive money in a private way and being able to obfuscate IP and therefore location as well using TOR or I2P.
The Smart Contract module called RSK is set to be launched in December.
Market Position
At the time of writing this article (12/08/2017), Verge is placed 75th in market capitalization, with the total value of 121.026.793 $. The 24h Volume was $7.826.470 which is a rather high number compared to the last month.
Marketing team around verge is quite active and posting regularly on Twitter and other social media, the coin is also available on quite a few exchanges with Bittrex being the biggest one.
Looking back 1 month we see that verge has had quite a low in the middle of November only to recover nicely, being today quite close to the ATH.
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If we are taking a look at the 1 year graph it is clear that the ATH has been met in the beginning of November and that the price is nicely regaining from this.
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Forecast
Just like all the other private coins Verge for sure has a valid point in trying to keep the privacy of the sender and receiver. This alone is for sure not getting Verge a significant rise in price, what could maybe help in this is the planned release of the smart contracts module on the Verge Blockchain. If the developers can hold their deadline and implement this in December we might see a nice rise in price.
Conclusion
With Verge, you are enabled to keep sender and receiver data private, including the IP. This is achieved by having support for both TOR and I2P built into the standard Wallet. This is a huge advantage compared to Bitcoin, where all transaction details are stored readable on the blockchain.
Verge is backed by the community and has no company that runs it, so no founders fee, ICO, or premine was necessary.
Last but not least there are also some drawbacks and they should not be unmentioned:
PoW Coin, mining can be seen as a waste of energy.
Development relying on the community, entries in the ANN on bitcointalk are recent, the dev is reacting directly.
Privacy of transaction has been also viewed with criticism.
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