I already made some posts about Verge and tons of comments about it, but I think a summarized post again pointing out why you should stay far away from this coin out of a users point of view seems like a good idea before years end.Let me say before: as a trader you can get a lot of money out of these projects, join the pump and dump. But if success of cryptocurrencies is what youw ant Verge is one of those project hurting the whole space more, than a paid partnership will bring in the end. But lets do the chronological look back:Post-WraithBefore NYE 2017/2018 Verge had an enromous run, because McAfee jumped onto the hypetrain Verge started. The Wraith-Protocol, something the cryptospace has never seen before (White... sorry, blackpaper said: "for the first time in history..."), will come till the end of they year. Who followed this show remembers the night of new years of eve, when out of a sudden sunerok (lead/only dev of Verge at this time) started to implement it on github. People freaked out, Wraith is coming! Of course it didn't work out of the box, but code came to github and so it was auditable.After-WraithI looked at the code, wanted to see how his magic works, and came to the conclusion: "Stealth addresses?! That's it?!" Yes, what was advertised as the revolution, public and private ledger on one ledger, privacy with a switch was nothing more than technology from 2014/2015. They claimed Verge is untraceable, although in 2015 this was also questioned in regards to stealth addresses. Some resources:What is a stealth address?Whoops, copy pasted 50% of Wraith Protocol from OpalCoinSo not only their revolution was old technology, it even was copied from another coin. Without giving credit of course, so basically they still break their copyright. Luckily the OpalCoin devs do not seem to care. The Verge github could be taken down because of this. Lets move on.Is technology from 2015 really private in 2018?Short after the wraith release at least a few people digged deeper: Why Verge fails to offer real privacy and is indistinguishable from a scamOf course, Vergins always claimed this is only FUD, but nope, no FUD. Research, and provable facts. There was an answer from an ex team member, basically saying: "Nah, no scam, only misunderstood". Lol, yeah.But in the end some Vergins asked for external audits, they even wanted to fund them. Lets show the world how private Verge really is! F*** those FUDsters! Yeah, I said it when the idea popped up, I also said it when sunerok claimed the audits are in the making, and I always said whenever people asked for it: there are and will be no audits. The outcome is clear before, and if the only thing he says is "yeah, we are doing audits" without saying anything more there simply is no one doing audits. Or its one of his weed bros, who knows. Keep the audits in mind, I will talk later about them again.The PronHub HypetrainI will keep this short: Vergins (and TokenPay, another one of those scam-friends currently active) donated 3,5mil$ for a mysterious partnership Verge wanted to announce, if they reach their goal, changing the cryptospace, making Verge easily a top 3 currency. Hype the shit out of it again, people believed it, and right after the announcement Verge dropped like a hot potatoe. Buy the rumour, sell the news. The next time the Vergins have lost a lot of money.Although I have to admit this partnership was good, the crypto buying into this partnership simply was the wrong one.The twist here is: promised exclusivity and a month later Tron and I think ZCash joined the PronHub family. No one knows what happened with the funds donated, and no one really asks. This leads to the next issue:Ledger Nano anyone?It was promised part of the donated funds will be used to add XVG to the Ledger Nano. How it turned out there were no recent contacts to the Ledger team and to top it: addition to Ledger doesn't cost anything! Open a pull request on github with the code necessary, get added.It might be possible sunerok mailed Ledger in 2017 and there was a fee for addition, but as of now these funds were not necessary. Ok, lets see what sunerok did:Pull request at LedgerHe wrote the 7 lines of code he thought which will be necessary to add XVG to the Ledger on his own. Wow. But unfortunately the Ledger guys already knew, that you should handle Verge with care. Does this PR add full compatibility with Verge, including stealth addresses? Sunerok: no need. So the only feature separating XVG from all the other hundreds bitcoin clones does not need to be supported. The only(!) blockchain privacy feature. Yeah, this looks like the future of privacy. Latest discussion leads to the new devs claiming this is just too much work. Yep, thought so. No way to copy it, then it is too much work. As of today no addition, and I personally do not see it in the immediate future.Exploits for everyoneVerge got exploited twice this year, generating millions of XVG out of thin air. I will keep it short again. sunerok was pointed at the exploit. At first he denied it, then he was angry it was published, then he tried to fix it and accidentally hardforked. He reverted this and then added a future block height to fix it. Unfortunately this fix was no fix, and he was told by the guy who pointed out the exploit the first time.And it happened again, Verge got exploited with a slightly modified exploit again. But luckily for sunerok he could copy the fix from SHIELD, although he claimed afterwards he developed it. Bad for him github commits have a timestamp and the SHIELD fix came a month before he committed it.Recent developmentIt was pretty quiet int he meantime, the code of the Verge core is not developed anymore. As an example start the Winows Qt wallet, do the full sync, close it. And open it again. Stop the time it needs to start up ;) every startup of the Qt wallet currently needs almost an hour. Something is really broken there, since april I think. A fix? Nah, beastmode on the core upgrade, ringCT, RSK contracts bla bla...So lets take a look at "beastmode": Github commitsThere are weeks, where nothing happened, even whole months. This is beastmode? These commits are done in a private repository. I am pretty sure these are copies of the Particl RingCT integration (developing and testing it by himself is way out of his league) or maybe even stuff for TokenPay and he doesn't want people to know. Can't tell.Development updatesAnd now they are doing development updates, done by the guy doing the iOS wallet I think. Always promising beastmode, but as github shows this isn't true. Most of the time there are small steps forward to a working iOS wallet, but there is no real progress on all other fronts that are publicly available.Lets get back to one of the latest updates, because the audits are mentioned...:When are audits going to happen/be published?Audits will be re-conducted after we release the code base revision. We felt the first round of audits were not suitable for release given the fact that we had already scheduled to overhaul our core code base this year. Additional information about audits will be released in the future.Didn't I say it? Did he proof Verge currently is not safe to use as a privacy coin?You should ask yourself: did those audits happen? If they happened shouldn't they tell you if there are flaws? Who did those audits?I think I will come now to an end but for everyone wondering why no one outside of Verges social channels likes Verge this is a good starter. The same applies to TokenPay, Verges other partnership. Be very careful with those coins. They are promising a lot, and do a lot with their users money, but usually heavily underdeliver or hype stuff way more than is healthy for their users.Even if there will be releases this or next year be sure these are copies, not revolutionary, may be exploitable again because amateurish developers, and especially don't trust them with your privacy. If you are in for privacy look at Monero, ZCash and yes, even DASH mixing done right is better than what Verge promises you. There may be others, but these are at least reliable.Have a nice day :)
Submitted October 25, 2018 at 02:14PM
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