My negative zpool verge balance
The 'Newness' is awesome
Being a 'new' miner a few months back I pretty much was downloading a lot of wallets and joining a lot of pools. Verge begain to appear often on whattomine.com so decided to give it a go.
Verge prided itself on being a 'privacy' token sort of based on dogecoin. After a simple google search I just performed, it was not forked from dogecoin (but shared its name) and was actually forked from DASH.
Having dealt with dash, back when it was around $4.20, I figured what the heck and the payouts looked great.
But What about the Pools
I picked several pools to mine while I was researching which one actually paid the best. I believe I tried all of them but ended up using zpool.
Being new to zpool, I was kind of in the dark. At the time zpool was sort of messing with peoples' payouts, so it caused me to go flip back and forth between zpool and miningpoolhub. It only took me one week to realize that miningpoolhub was not paying out even half of the figure quoted on whattomine, but not just for XVG but for several other coins. The 'auto-exchange' 'feature' was poorly implemented and tricky to understand.
Oh the wallets
Eventually zpool 'fixed' its issues and I returned. It was around this time that the wallet I came to rely on begin 'acting up' constantly asking me for my password (that I did not provide in the first place). I fixed it by re-entering my public seed phrase nearly each time I wanted to make a transaction. Everyones' response? Known issue; use the other wallet (Verge-qt).
So I did. I mined 20 XVG via zpool, it was transfered, but the wallet itself does not sync. Having seen the profitability rise quickly I ended up dealing with the regeneration of the wallet each time I needed to make a transfer.
Just seems odd....
So it is kind of handy that verge is available on several exchanges, but as a small-trader/miner it became rather difficult cashing it out, HitBTC has a minimum 1000 size order, so changing it there was out of the question. Bittrex was a poor-second... sort of letting you sell 50 or 100 verge at a time to USD, or 50,000 satoshi's. At that time (and still today) its rather difficult to know what you can sell until it tells you you cannot. Minimum order errors are the norm at Bittrex if you are dealing with values less than $10, but I can still remember on several occasions where I was able to place orders below the 'minimum' in the USD market.
The Coverup?
And as of late I've stopped mining XVG completely... it just seems like they do not have an active development team that can handle the issues caused by permitting several different algorithms to be used during mining. Like the coin itself, it seems as if they are very private about their intentions with the coin, they are unable to really provide a timeframe for fixing the broken wallets, and exchanges are quick to 'hold' tokens as they are transfered to other exchanges.
And what gives zpool?
My Verge balance on zpool went into the negative. I'm not super pissed, but I'm super annoyed. Sure it might be heavily traded, but its probably the people (you know who you are) who exploited the 'bug' that let people mine the same block on different algo's - to put it simply. Also the payouts/maturing of coins were occurring much more slowly, and usually as the coin crashed.
Where from here?
I'm positive the exchanges supporting verge will quietly disable the wallets for maintenance that will persist until the end of summer while they find a new supportive/marketing and development team to rinse and repeat this same ordeal. As for the price? Yes perhaps wild swings that will resolve in lower lows and lower highs. Its fairly clear the uptrend is somewhat broken, as the high volume buying has some-what settled.
