Verge (XVG) has met its fair share of controversy in the past. It was clear from the developers choosing Doge coin as the basis for their own blockchain and basically forking off a meme currency that much wow’s will be had with this project. And much wow’s were indeed had, but not a lot of them were of the positive kind.
It’s actually hard to think of many good things that happened to this coin ever since McAfee tweeted that Verge and similar privacy projects “have the greatest future” before them. Most of these good things were related to a platform accepting Verge as a payment option, which the platform does have going for it. Some people have questioned the means with which these partnerships were acquired, hinting that there may have been some pay to play action behind the scenes. Still, Verge did secure some quality platforms to accept it as a means of payment, including coinpayments, TorGuard, MingGeek and as of most lately, Pornhub.
That last partnership came along in a very delicate moment for Verge, as the project was struggling to shake off the aftereffects of a massive 51% attack which allowed a hacker to exploit a loophole in the Verge codebase and run off with 1.7 million dollars worth of coins. This resulted in a very strong case of “buy the rumor, sell the news” hitting the coin once the partnership was officially confirmed. The coin embarked on a small bull run, rising to almost 1400 satoshis before plummeting onto the abyss all the way down to 750 satoshis. People who invested at the top basically lost half of what they put into Verge in a matter of hours.
Since that day, Verge has moved in unison with the market, sometimes doing slightly better than most coins but still remaining pretty average. It’s currently sitting on the 33rd spot of the coinmarketcap’s list of cryptocurrencies but is in danger of losing this spot, with the resurgent Siacoin being just a few million dollars away from Verges current market cap of 586 million dollars.
The Pornhub “partnership” was touted as THE partnership to launch Verge into mass adoption and into this year’s bull run. It hasn’t really turned out that way and many people had doubts about it from the start, with the most often asked one being: “Who the hell pays for porn?!” Some adoption did come as a result of it, as coinpayments.net offers us an insight into the full scope of it.
A twitter user @SilvesterHQ tweeted out the image above, saying:
Almost 3500 rated transactions with @Pornhub using #xvg since March! And only 10-20% are generally rated! #Verge is smashing those numbers! https://www.coinpayments.net/feedback-68fa7cdfc9d007cf3fe5e3d3b49a67d6
The number has since gone up slightly, reaching a total of over 3500 transactions. The number is… not encouraging, to say the least. Most of those transactions look somewhat fishy, with no comments on them and with countries of payment being hidden. While it’s reasonable to assume that most people don’t have much to say when buying porn or want to show off the exact location from which they are doing so, one can also assume that some of those secretive accounts are bots artificially inflating the transaction numbers and scores.
One also needs to understand that these transactions measure the volume of rated transactions that went through MG Billing Limited, the company which handles payments not just for Pornhub but for other porn related websites. It is therefore possible that the number suggested above isn’t entirely comprised of transactions made solely with Verge.
As of now, the coin looks unfit for commercial adoption. While the development team keeps claiming that updates to the code are coming, they seemingly can’t do anything to prevent further attacks. The code is still vulnerable and was just recently exposed again in a new 51% attack. A similar vulnerability has been noticed with Bitcoin Gold, as the code has been adjusted to enable users to mine these coins without having to join mining pools. Naturally, malicious players will take advantage of this and gather enough computing power to perform a 51% attack. Currencies like Bitcoin are much better protected from this, with Nicehash, one of the main mining pools for Bitcoin, owning around 3% of the total mining power of the Bitcoin network.
It is clear that either the Verge developers don’t know what they are doing or they don’t want to know what they are doing. Much of the “vergefam” behaves in a similar way, arrogantly defending their coin with “It’s a conspiracy theory!!11! FUD!!!1” screams in the face of obvious issues. Simply put, Verge doesn’t seem like it has much going for it right now and not even Jesus himself descending down from heavens and purchasing “MILFs and Milkers 3 – Melons strike back” with his XVG tokens would change much. The coin simply too inherently flawed to have long term potential so our recommendation is to steer your investment elsewhere.
Why the hateful article? Which competitor are you?
Hi
Not hateful and no competitor. It is just author’s own opinion he formed by doing his own research on the coin.
Awful article . You never want to see a coin fail. Bringing nothing but fear to the crypto community as a whole. Especially when a company as big as mind geek is using it… other companies will not when they see coins fail.
Great article, finally someone telling the truth about this shitcoin