It's become very obvious that Verge has been forced to cheat in order to keep up their vote rate. I hope the irony isn't lost on the Steem community. Not only is Verge known as a scam-coin that's been hacked multiple times, it's also a privacy coin.
A PRIVACY COIN
Do you guys realize how funny that is? Yeah, I bet this rando privacy coin has a really strong community. Users concerned with masking their transactions love to communicate and work together. That's why they have so many Netcoins votes. LOL. It's going to be hilarious if we beat them without cheating.
This is, of course, impossible. I'm guessing we'll get back into the lead today only to lose at the last second. Hopefully Netcoins realizes the error of their ways and gives us the win anyway. I think we should all complain regardless of who wins.
Even when we were in the lead yesterday I was accusing Verge of cheating. There is absolutely no way that community should be able to keep up. There are already multiple programmers here at Steem demanding that Netcoins share the IP addresses so we can speculate more about Verge buying their votes and/or spoofing IP addresses.
How are they even talking to each other?
https://vergefora.com/forums/
Some Podunk forum? Neat.
https://vergefora.com/threads/verge-netcoins-vote.206/
There's one thread asking people to vote... from the forum moderator cloakfox. No one else is talking about it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vergecurrency/comments/9phi3p/help_verge_win_netcoins_voting_contest_to_get_a/
5 comments on Reddit.
Compare to Steem.
We've had hundreds of posts and resteems on this topic. I'm not saying we aren't cheaters. We are great at cheating. Just look at the Byteball airdrop. There's just no way Verge should be able to keep up with us.
What did we learn?
Netcoins did this all wrong. It's kind of sad that a service dedicated to cryptocurrency wouldn't use the blockchain to keep people honest. That's the whole damn point of decentralization in the first place.
Netcoins should have set up crypto wallets to confirm identities. So, not only should we be required to show a unique Email and a unique IP address, we should also be required to send the minimum amount of crypto to Netcoins. Do you realize how much harder it would be to cheat a contest like this if every account had to be confirmed by a crypto wallet that existed before the contest started?
Something like this could still be set up as a tie-breaker between Verge and Steem. This would be hilarious because we'd get to see just how badly they cheated. It would cost both Steemians and Verge-heads like a tenth of a penny to send the minimum amount of crypto to a wallet.
Conclusion
If you're not willing to spend a tenth of a penny to help your platform, your vote shouldn't count. It's obvious that there are thousands of votes supporting Verge that belong to either the same user or many users that don't even have a Verge wallet.