If you throw a glance on XVG communities across multiple platforms, you will see a depressing image of zombie towns with occasional delusional shill or failed joke by some bag holder. What used to be a ruthlessly modded sub dedicated to shilling its, at the time, only developer Justin Sunerok indisputable genius, is now mainly troll posts mocking whoever is left holding the Verge bags and a few pathetic celebrations of the odd racing car that somehow still benefits from Verge “sponsorship”.
Even though we always get a lot of heat after our XVG articles, I decided to write another one because this project is the epitome of the crypto craze we lived through back in December and January.
Verge is purported privacy coin that fails short on its main front – private transactions. Here is a nice recap of Verge’s terrible security breaches and poorly implemented privacy features:
“In April 2018, a bug in the retargeting of the algorithms got exploited using a 51% attack. Using spoofed timestamps, the need for a different algorithms each block was circumvented and the hackers were able to submit blocks to the chain at a high speed, mining 1 block per second (!) effectively ruling out 99% of the legit pools, which were losing money [5].
In May 2018 the same thing happened but with a different approach: hackers sent one block with Scrypt algorithm containing a spoofed timestamp followed by a block with Lyra2re algorithm containing a spoofed timestamp and by repeating that process and thus lowering the difficulty, the hackers were able to mine several blocks per minute [6].
XVG appears to be a cryptocurrency with questionable privacy and security aspects: balances can always be tracked on the public ledger, so differences in balances can easily be tracked and conclusions can be made.
People in XVG are only forced to use TOR and I2P and are free to use the private ledger or not. Even so, using the private ledger only temporarily shields the public keys during a transaction.
Furthermore, XVG has been proven to be vulnerable to 51% attacks on several occasions.”
Now what?
The amount of social media shilling of XVG is slipping, obscure Twitter and Reddit users who used to defend it to death are suddenly inactive. Excessive social media presence of a project with similar pattern of behaviour among allegedly different users is a good indicator that it is all engineered and orchestrated by someone.
These accounts usually put out vague and hyperbolic statements, spewing out “facts” that no one can verify and vitriolically attack anyone who dares to criticize the so wonderful project that “they are not affiliated with in any way”. They are just white knights fighting for world justice.
I expect a subset of those hazy users to crawl out and bash me and this publication (even though this reflects my views and not necessarily those of Captainaltcoin.com).
Hi, I wholeheartedly agree with the article, although please replace circumsizing (which makes no sense, also spelled correctly as circumcising, and meaning removing the foreskin) with circumventing.
Hi – thanks for the comment! It has been corrected – this part was not written by us, this is cited from other author and it slipped through.
The author of this article is a a typical clueless moron! Stick to your day job instead of spreading bullshit.
Yes and he actually predicted comments like yours ;). Sorry if you are stuck with bags of worthless coins, make it a learning lesson for the future – investing is not for everyone.
This is just generally bullshit… Cherry picking information to support a biased opinion.
Lets see how many other projects lost momentum on social media, which is a stupid evaluation technique btw, during the bear market of 2018… Hmm? Safe to say A LOT.
Forewarning of negative feedback does not mean the feedback is wrong or unmerited, its merely a weak attempt at defense.
Facts are facts. Errors, growing pains, losses and gains…. Par for the course for a burgoning decentralised community project.