Disclaimer: I have been in crypto space since 2016, I HODL and mine Vertcoin among other cryptos.
Now that's out of the way, I would like to take this opportunity to educate everyone here both newcomers and veterans of cryptocurrency about Vertcoin and the unique opportunity it presents for all of us.
What is Vertcoin?
Vertcoin (VTC) is an ASIC-resistant P2P Litecoin fork that uses Proof Of Work (POW) to reach consensus. Billed as the 'The People's Coin', the Vertcoin ascribes primacy to keeping its mining functions decentralized, and seeks to allow anyone with a personal computer to join the Vertcoin network.
This video describes what Vertcoin is perfectly, if you have some time please go watch it.
As you might have noticed the key focus of Vertcoin is decentralization and it tries to achieve it by making mining fair and available to everyone with a graphics card that has at least 2 Gb vRAM. It is also ASICS resistant and will remain that way. Every time an ASIC was detected on the network it has forked to a new algorithm to boot them off the network and make it mineable via a GPU. As of this writing that has happen 3 times, last one being on Jan 2021 to Verthash.
What is ASIC and why is Vertcoin against it?
An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use like GPUs. It is designed to be very efficient at doing one thing and one thing only. In case of mining it will enable a miner to mine a specific coin/token faster and efficiently which translates to better profit.
But, wait that doesn't sound so bad at all does it?
Well, it's complicated and here is why. Even though ASIC in paper is efficient and more profitable, it is very expensive and even if you can afford to buy one the chances are you not getting the best one available. Let me elaborate, ASIC costs a lot of money to develop and produce, somewhere between hundreds of thousands to multi millions and the companies producing these ASICs use them to mine a coin/token first before selling them to others. This means you are either getting a used ASIC miner or an older version of it. If you can shell out tens of millions of dollars then you might be able to get unused and latest ASIC miner which means only rich can profitably use these ASICs to mine leaving the little guy out of the picture.
Now the only way for us average user to buy these coins/tokens are from those ASICs producers or big mining farms. We the consumer do not have any say on what happens to the coin as Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned when he said one CPU one vote. The prime example of this is Bitcoin fork to Bitcoin Cash. You can read more about it here.
Because of the reasons above Vertcoin was created in 2014 form a fork of Litecoin's code base. It kept all the parameters of Litecoin such as max block size (1MB), average block time (2.5 mins) and max supply (84 million). However the algorithm for mining was changed so that it's profitable to mine via a consumer grade GPU and is till this day.
Relation between Vertcoin and Bitcoin:
Vertcoin was forked off of Litecoin's code which was intern a fork of Bitcoin's code therefore, they are closely related. You can think of Vertcoin as a first cousin of Bitcoin. Since, the code is very similar any updates/upgrades that is done to Bitcoin can also be ported to Vertcoin for example SegWit (Fun fact Vertcoin activated SegWit before Bitcoin on it's network). Developers constantly port the changes to Bitcoin's code over to Vertcoin regularly. This makes Vertcoin the closest thing to a GPU mineable Bitcoin. So close that they are Atomic Swap, submarine swap and Lightning network compatible.
Atomic Swap:
An atomic swap is a smart contract technology that enables the exchange of one cryptocurrency for another without using centralized intermediaries, such as exchanges. This means no KYC no exchanges as Cryptocurrencies were supposed to be. You can more about atomic swap here.
Submarine Swap:
Submarine Swaps are atomic on-chain to off-chain swaps (and vice versa, often called Reverse Submarine Swaps) of cryptocurrencies. Again, no KYC and exchanges here either. Read more about Submarine Swap here. Vertcoin is the only coin that has demonstrated to work with Submarine swap AFAIK. Here is a video proof of Submarine Swap between on chain Vertcoin and off chain Lightning Network Bitcoin.
Lightning Network:
The lightning network is a second layer technology applied to bitcoin that uses micropayment channels to scale its blockchain’s capability to conduct transactions more efficiently. You can learn more about lightning network here.
Mining Vertcoin:
Decentralized mining is the key goal of Vertcoin and will always be it's top priority above anything else. Since, the recent fork to Verthash anyone can mine Vertcoin at home using their PC profitably. Even though it's not as profitable as Ethereum to mine at this moment, once ETH moves to Proof of Stake (POS) consensus I expect Vertcoin to be more profitable to mine in the coming days.
Recently released One Click Miner 2.0 makes it ridiculously easy to mine Vertcoin. It is truly one click and all the overhead of mining like creating a wallet, connecting to the best pool are taken care of automatically. A new iteration of OCM is being worked on which lets you swap your mined Vertcoin's to LN BTC from within the miner itself. Although it's still in beta it's been proven to work without any issues.
The biggest problem with mining using your PC is that you cannot use it while mining let alone play games. However, the new mining algorithm Verthash solves this problem in a spectacular fashion. Not only can you use your PC while mining (I am currently typing this post from my PC while also mining Vertcoin) you can also play non graphics intensive games like Minecraft, League of Legends, Dota, etc. without any significant performance impact. Check out this post for an example.
Another benefit of Verthash is that you can underclock your GPU's core and reduce power limit, doing so will not affect mining at all and will keep your GPU running cooler and you will be able to use it for longer. My GPU never sees more than 65c while mining fans are quiet and even on a hot day the temperature of the GPU never goes significantly higher.
Verthash is memory intensive which means developing an ASIC is rather hard and if one is ever developed it will not have a significant performance improvement as compared to a GPU.
If you are interested in mining Vertcoin head over to vertcoin.org and download their One click miner. Here is what you need to do after you have downloaded OCM.
- Extract the zip file
- Add the exe file to windows defender/AV exclude list. (If you don't do this it might get flagged as a malware, rest assure it is not. Every mining software is flagged as such and it's a false positive. However, if you don't trust me and want to find out for yourself, the code is open source and you can have a look at it for yourself. Also try to compile it yourself if you know how.)
- Launch the OCM buy clicking on the exe file
- Enter the password for the wallet and remember to note it down somewhere. You will need it to send funds to other wallets. If you forget it there is no way to retrieve it later.
That's it, you are now mining Vertcoin. Next time you want to start mining just click on the exe file and you are all set.
51% attack:
sadly, Vertcoin has had two 51% attack in the past. Even though they weren't profitable for the attackers it is still a big deal. Unfortunately there is nothing developers can do to remedy that and the only way to prevent the next attack is to get enough miners on the network so that it is impossible or unprofitable. However, there is some good news, last two attacks were conducted by renting hashpower from Nicehash but it is no longer possible since Nicehash has publicaly stated that they will not be supporting Verthash on their platform. Here is the proof.
Fairness:
- No pre-mine: Vertcoin has been fairly mined since it's inception and developers do not hold a large amount of coins, each and every coin was distributed among miners for supporting the network.
- No airdrop: Being a minable coin this is not possible, unless there was a large pre-mine which is not the case with Vertcoin.
- No ICO: No pre-mine means this is not possible either.
Marketing and Exchange listing:
Since, Vertcoin is a community funded project and maintained my volunteers with no pre-mine there isn't enough money for a wide scale marketing. That is why you don't see tons of bots awarding and upvoting every single posts in reddit forums and other social media platforms. Because of the lack of funding marketing team cannot run digitals ads or pay influencers to promote Vertcoin that is why it is over shadowed by other crypto projects both genuine and scams.
Vertcoin is only listed in two bigger exchanges as of this writing, Bittrex and Bitvavo (Only for Europe). Every single exchanges contacted by the marketing team or the volunteers are asking huge sums of money for listing, which they don't have. There is a campaign going on to raise funds for Changelly listing, so far community has donated about 6500 Vertcoins. If you find this project genuine and would like to contribute please take a look at this post.
Future:
I cannot tell you what the future holds for Vertcoin but I can tell you this much, developers will keep working on it to make sure it is up to date with Bitcoin and ASIC resistant, community will always support and mine it.
I also have some predictions based on current events and they are as follows:
- More miners will start mining Vertcoin after ETH move to POS
- If lightning network takes off or another layer 2 solution is developed for Bitcoin, Vertcoin will always be compatible with it and might fill in some gaps where Bitcoin is lacking.
- There will be solutions developed which will make it easier to convert Vertcoin to Bitcoin and vice versa without a centralized entity like exchanges and KYC.
- When Bitcoin goes main stream and everyone is using it in their daily lives, we will still be able to mine Vertcoin with our PC and convert it to on chain Bitcoin or off chain Bitcoin and have a reliable source of income.
I hope this post helped you understand what Vertcoin is and what makes it special. In these times where scams are rampant and it's hard for us to find out which crypto is genuine, I wanted to shine some light on the crypto that brought me to mining and taught me a lot about cryptocurrency and the future of finance.
Peace
Edit:
- As pointed out by u/HyperGamers Vertcoin has forked 4 times so far.
- Scrypt-Adaptive-N to Lyra2RE
Lyra2RE to Lyra2REv2 ( CPU botnets )
Lyra2REv2 to Lyra2REv3
Lyra2REv3 to Verthash
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