Verge (XVG) Clownshow: Copying code from others and lying about it

June 8, 2018

2 comments

Verge (XVG) can’t keep out of the headlines. They either engineer some hype with positiv-ish news or the incompetence of the team behind the coin gets exposed and they end up in the headlines for the wrong reason.

After 2 mining exploits that happened on their blockchain in the span of 2 months, another scandal-worthy news surfaced yesterday: the main (and only) developer of XVG coin appears to have copy/pasted code from SHIELDcoin Github and then tried to spin the story and make it look it was vice-versa robbery.

Full article, covering and proving the whole story can be found here. Just a quick note, it’s not hard to see who copied who, git commits have a date associated to them.

No doubt, every programmer takes and reuses code form someone else. The fact that he took someone’s code is not too troublesome as it is open-source and if it is not protected by copyright, legally and morally it is acceptable. However, lying that the code was stolen from him, that is just ill-mannered and intellectually corrupt.

It is also worth noting that the XVG developer copied the initial fix as well – from Peercoin in 2015.

Compare the commits from my tweet…..identical…. Committed a month ago by Shield, commited 3 days ago by Justin. The drift code from 2 months ago you are referring to was copied/stolen from Peercoin (who made that commit in 2015): https://t.co/mdGa6wfupC pic.twitter.com/451ZbkFviD

— Ze Mike V ⚡ (@TradingWhaIe) May 27, 2018

And there is another similar case from January when they copied some code from OpalCoin for their WraithProtocol and forgot to change some references to the coin name. Here is a proof for that. They touted it as a new feature and then just copied code from another coin.

And still XVG is one of the best performing projects in the past 24 hours which shows you that crypto market is pure madness.

And the reason why is this so? Because XVG is so cheap, it’s not even a half a dollar yet! You can buy it for under 10cents mentality!

There is a lot of dumb money in crypto, it is unbelievable…

It seems that XVG fans just don’t care. They ignore all the red flags around the project, scammy individuals promoting it, incompetent developer leading the project – couple of bought partnerships and they forgive and forget everything.

To be a leading developer of a cryptocurrency, you not only must be a good programmer, but you must have a deep knowledge of cryptography, hardware, economics, and networks too.

None of this is trivial. Investing into a project that lacks proven expertise is like sticking your “best part” into a meat grinder and expecting a positive outcome.