![Dodge the bullets, never the fight](https://steemitimages.com/DQmRqWyQQQabhww7Zh2CmoRxgtDpWP8bNFbhfXB2q97q5xH/image.png) The following message comes from [Verge Currency official Twitter account](https://twitter.com/vergecurrency) as their response to my post **[Verge Currency review, an investors helper](https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@gartz/verge-currency-review-an-investors-helper)**. I will carefully read their answer and do my best to double check the information. I believe that if I misunderstood and misled anyone with my review, it would be fair to do a new review where I fix any of it or add support information to my conclusions. As a reminder, I'm not being paid to do those reviews, and it is a personal project that attempts to help people without technical knowledge. My answer will come when I do have enough free time to research it. The series of tweets can be found here at https://twitter.com/vergecurrency/status/880917466469236736 After the post, they [reforced the live radio discussion by tweet](https://twitter.com/vergecurrency/status/880917595360296964) at http://radiocrypto.com/ what [I declined the offer for personal reasons](https://twitter.com/Gartz/status/880931391759720448), I'm not available during week days (commercial time), dispite that I'm shy. For me and for now text format is the best format. As a disclaimer, I believe that any review that sounds bad will right away make the community hate the author and probably that's why most of the people that could write a review will avoid to do it. I think that great engineers can bring improvements to the cryptocurrency community and there is more than one way to do that. I believe that a currency is something serious and should be treated like that, programming mistakes can be a huge financial disaster (see Ethereum + DigiDAO that result in massive losses and an emergency controversial hard fork) and make lots of people lose their investments. Not only that. There are a lot of people joining this new movement without knowing it's real risks. No software project is perfect, the only way to balance things is to mitigating risk. I will do my best to show the good and bad in my reviews. I want to encourage engineers to do a better work and expose investors to the risks of any project they're willing to hold assets/shares. So I thanks the Verge Currency team to answer my review promptly. And I will not take it personally when you or your community members try to disqualify me as an author. I will focus on the discussion topics and technical arguments. Again, my reviews are not by any means the only truth, and people should do their research and to archives their conclusions. I'm exposing mine research for who see value in it. The original paste-bin link is: https://pastebin.com/MYVsSJ7j The highlighted paragraphs are responses by topic by Verge Currency authors/maintainers. # Verge Currency official response: ----- Verge Currency project started in January 22nd of 2016 by copying Bitcoin source code and tweaking the new currency and that is the first red flag about the project. > > it started in september of 2014, actually, from a fork of rootcoin. since then, we've updated the source code to a more current > codebase of bitcoin, and then added many features to it, such as i2p/tor support, and 5 algorithms for proof of work. > Disclaimer: This review is an abstract of information collected in the project, and by no means, it will define the success or failure of the project. My intent to with this article is to share my thoughts as a software engineer to not technical people. I’m not a financial advisor. White Paper first page It promises transaction to have privacy through anonymity and to be faster by using those additional layers. Well, if you ever used TOR or any other protocol like a simple VPN, you know that the many extra layers in the network will slow it down and not make it faster. And the privacy is not about to hide your IP but to secure your ledger to hold real, verifiable information without exposing the users. > > we dont make that promise, we've already done it. also, our transactions are nearly instant, ssl/onions/tunnels do not slow down our > transactions to where it has any noticeable lag. we dont use vpn's because vpn's keep a log of the user's ip address. > I will talk more about the IP Obfuscation feature in the next topic. The White Paper goes explaining how their wallet works, advantages of Multi-Algo support and end with their conclusion on why it’s so important to make your IP untraceable when sending a transaction to the network. There are no details about how financially the coin works, how fees and rewards will work or any other monetary aspects of the currency, it’s a White Paper only to show what they want to patch over Bitcoin and that’s all. > > again, we already have patched this over a bitcoin based codebase, it's not a future promise, it's been done already. > The IP Obfuscation features The advantage of hiding your IP behind a network layers obfuscation is to allow you to safely host your node in a country that might cease you if they find your server, it doesn’t represent any real improvement to users, there are many ways to hide your communication with the network. Nowadays the only way to track who started a transaction, so you could identify the owner of a public hash by matching it to the source IP. For that, we’re assuming that you started the transaction from a node that is in your personal network and there were no other layers of encryption in that communication, in such case the internet provider would be able to track your wallet public address and exposes you. > > most users start transactions from their coin's wallet, which IS a network node, and that ip address IS broadcast over the network. > zcash does this, dogecoin does this, etc. even dash. when you send a transaction from a dash wallet, the ip address is logged > in the masternodes debug log. > A simple service that uses an external node to start your transaction would be enough to obfuscate this transaction. Most of the wallets for bitcoins that don't start a local node will use a remote node and the communication with such will use most probably HTTPS, what makes almost impossible to trace wallets to the IP that started the transaction. > > any bitcoin client, like a bitcoin electrum wallet, will broadcast the user's ip address to the electrum server. the users ip address > then becomes exposed to the electrum server owner, who can then easily tie the user ip to the transaction that was made. (the > electrum server also keeps a log of transactions that are pushed through it, so it's even easier to track an electrum client > transaction than it is a core wallet transaction.) Not only that, if you’re using a full node at your home, you can proxy your node into the TOR network built-in Bitcoin to avoid such information trail to detect the origin IP of your transactions. > > this is accurate. however there are no other resources that bitcoin provides for ip obfuscation. no i2p support either. > The projects commits It's more than a year that their CI is warning about failures to build the Mac version of the project, after many code iterations nothing has done to fix it. > > we already have a mac binary version available, and our new core release is schedule for july, which is being worked on in a private > repository, before it is to be pushed to the main repository. problem? > Travis CI status Most of the commits are rebranding Bitcoin, a few are copying other projects implementations, and there was some work to add TOR and I2P to the wallet user interface. > > where do we have any commits to rebrand from bitcoin? i cant seem to find any. please correct me if im wrong. and what other projects > have we implemented, since no one has any of the features/resources we've created. > There are no unit tests to ensure that future changes won’t break the code. Anyway, there are not many contributions over time too. > > we have travis-ci, and a testnet. why would we risk breaking code when we can use our testnet first? > Main node development chart By looking the overall project, it doesn't seem to have activity lately. But going deeper we will see that mostly it is composed of updates to the website, more rebranding and few changes here and there. Overall github activity The commits messages are a waste of time, and it’s super rare to find any meaningful explanation of their changes. > > if you're a developer, you can just click the commit n see what was changed, and understand it. also, im guessing you didnt look at > any of the other resources, like our electrum tor client, electrum i2p client, raspi source code, > etc. > Website It’s clear that the website has some dedication to it, a few logo changes, small improvements, and marketing. As cryptocurrencies are getting more traction, Verge focus* to improve its main selling point, that is the website. Well, we can say that at least they have one, many other cryptocurrencies doesn’t*. > > focuses* / do not* (doesn't is not proper here, grammatically speaking) > It’s very noticeable that they do not include any link to their source-code in the website. Weird. > > accurate! we should update that. (since our site is on github and that can be changed effortlessly) > The website contains a roadmap, where most of the pending tasks will be released in the next month (July 2017), they are promising way more that they can deliver there, it won’t be a surprise if they delay most of those features. > > actually most of july is already complete, with exception to the rsk contracts, because rsk still has them in testnet. > our android tor/i2p wallets are near completion already, and are already going into beta testing with our beta group. > and things like "wallet UI overhaul" are trivial and pretty simple. > Verge is on edge, if a term is trending, they will add it to their roadmap. That's the way to attract investors, so we can expect RingCT, SmartContract or whatever is in the Bitcoin tomorrow. > > we're only adding ringct (which i believe was first implemented in vertcoin about 4 years ago) because our community asked for it. > when our community asks for something, they shall get it. also, ringct is not in bitcoin. > There is a new Wallet UI is coming. There is no development of it, or it is in private and might be merged when it gets done. > > there is development of it, but you made an incorrect/inaccurate assumption. it's in development and will be merged when it's done. > Community I’ve found many communication channels to their community from IRC, Reddit to Steam. There are not a lot of people or activity going on. It’s understandable for a relatively new coin. > > there are almost 1600 people in our telegram channel, 800+ in our slack, and several hundred in our discord. we are not a relatively > new coin. we've been around since 2014. > Their time spent playing with the official currency steam account is interesting, are they doing some in games campaign? > > we have a steam chat and verge coin transfer bot in our steam group and often community members link up and play together. we dont > have an official steam account, we have an official steam group. that account you are looking at is my steam account. i've been > playing dota2 since the alpha, and im currently beta testing quake (although i haven't had much time as of late) > Verge Currency Official Steam account The Good, The Bad and The Ugly As any project there are Pros and Cons, when we’re talking about a project that can store monetary values, always pay a lot of attention to the cons, because a small failure in the project design might allow your assets to be lost or stolen. The Good No squished commits in the Github, it’s easy to track what the developers are doing; Available on big exchanges, what creates liquidity to the currency; The Bad Started by copying a snapshot of Bitcoin instead of forking the project; > not accurate, as explained previously Sloppy commits, it seems that the engineers are experimenting with the currency more than knowing what they’re doing; > also not accurate, just looking for the best way to do things. The developers are hidden behind a user shared account; > also not accurate there are 14 people who contribute to the main core code, and several others depending on which resource. There is no information about the authors on their official website; > I (sunerok) did a proof of developer with cryptoasian. not sure what you'd like to know. we didn't do an ico or premine, and we try > to give the other devs as much privacy as possible, although their identities are no secret also. The White Paper is super simple and only give an overview of their marketing goal; There is no innovation in the coin, their IP obfuscation is available to Bitcoin and almost all other coins; Reusing code pieces of dead projects like Shadow Coin without any documented mentions; > > where did that happen? i think shadowcoin actually used bits of our electrum server before we rebranded in early 2016. > it's open source though, so we dont mind. > Most of the commits are only rebranding Bitcoin, not much work going on since Jan of 2016; > > where have we rebranded bitcoin in our code? you've said this twice and i looked after the first time, and i just dont see it. > The Ugly No unit-tests for the implementations; No links to the source code on the official website; OS-X compilation is broken since 2016 after they introduce support to I2P Conclusion The idea of improving privacy by hiding IP is not bad all. It is a real concern of the cryptocurrency community. Built-in tools to avoid companies and government censorship are a good way to go. And despite that is easy to use TOR as the proxy with any cryptocurrency. Integration with the user UI is welcome. > > our focus is to have ALL of our resources on i2p and tor. > Verge Currency does a poor implementation by mostly changing existing code and copying existing code from other projects on their own, their documentation is almost meaningless and highlights concerns that attract non-technical people to invest and support the project. > > where have we copied code? others have copied us, but we're open source, so there's really no such thing. > Their roadmap shows that their focus is on marketing and other shiny, attractive features that have no real value besides attract people's attention and pump their market cap. > > so a tor based and i2p based android wallet has no real value? now you've just lost your mind. > My Opinion Verge Currency is a Frankenstein's currency that uses a real concern and rely on people's lack of knowledge and fear to sell itself. The documentation is abysmal, and the same level of professionalism is applied to their source-code, mostly made of rebranding and the copying pieces from other projects. > > our documentation is more complete than most other coins, we have full instructions for compiling on most platforms, as well as > specifications. i'd love to invite you to a live discussion on radiocrypto.com, where we can talk about your opinion on air. > I’m not a financial advisor, but so far I don’t see any why I would invest in this project with so many others that are attempting to create disruptive innovation. > > you're definitely not a financial advisor, i get that. also the keyword in your last sentence was "attempting". we have already > brought privacy innovation to the table. find me another i2p electrum client/server, or i2p/tor android wallet for a coin. i'll wait. > Sources Bitcoin forum announcement Recent article about Verge and it past Github Website White Paper It took a long time to do this research. If you think it’s valuable, please upvote, resteemit or send some donation. > > if this took a long time.... > ---- Here ends their official answer to the review. If you think this discussion is healthy to the cryptocurrency community or to you as investor, please upvote, resteemit or send some donation.
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