What is Vertcoin?

Vertcoin is a digital currency that’s actually staying true to the original vision of cryptocurrency.

It’s designed with one main goal in mind: to resist centralization and ensure power remains in the users’ hands. Vertcoin is completely owned by its users, fairly distributed, and developed by community members working as volunteers. This is why Vertcoin is known as “the people’s coin.”

What Does Vertcoin Do?

The core focus of Vertcoin is decentralized mining. The development team is wholly committed to keeping ASICs out of their network — which means miners aren’t allowed to use big expensive hardware whose sole purpose is to mine as many coins as possible. This is a very good thing because it ensures one entity doesn’t control a large amount of the network, thus keeping fair distribution of the currency.

Vertcoin uses the proof-of-work method of validating transactions, the same as Bitcoin and Ethereum. This means you can use your system’s computing power as a way to validate the network transactions. As a reward for helping generate additional Vertcoins, you receive some Vertcoins yourself. Currently the blocktime is 2.5 minutes with 50 coins rewarded per block.

Since Vertcoin is truly decentralized, anyone can easily mine it for a profit. They’re currently developing a “1-Click” Vertcoin miner, to make mining the cryptocurrency as simple as possible. As long as you have a computer, you can mine Vertcoin yourself.

Vertcoin uses the Lightning Network for scalable, instant blockchain transactions. This technology allows for a massive increase in the network capacity by moving the bulk of transactions off of the blockchain for faster processing.

A feature of the Lightning Network is something called “atomic cross-chain trading,” also known as “atomic swaps.” This allows users to seamlessly exchange their Vertcoins in a decentralized way. You can turn your Vertcoins into Bitcoins or Litecoins (and vice versa), directly in your Vertcoin wallet.

History of Vertcoin

Vertcoin was released via a client on GitHub on January 8, 2014. It’s been around for quite a while, as far as cryptocurrencies go.

About a year later, Vertcoin forked from Scrypt-Adaptive-N proof-of-work function to Lyra2RE. They did this as a proactive defense against emerging ASICs that were using the former algorithm.

Then, on August 10, 2015, Vertcoin forked again, this time from Lyra2RE to Lyra2RE(v2) because a botnet was controlling 50% of the hashing power of the Vertcoin network.

Clearly the Vertcoin team isn’t kidding around when they say their main goal is making sure Vertcoin is truly decentralized. As their website states: “Our developers have pledged to take whatever steps are necessary to protect this coin from specialized mining equipment and make sure that it will always be possible to mine with consumer grade hardware.”

The Vertcoin Team

James Lovejoy started Vertcoin when he was still in high school. He’s been programming since the tender age of 10. Now, he’s an undergraduate researcher at MIT DCI, working on enacting decentralized monetary policy.

The entire team behind Vertcoin is made up of volunteers, and the project is funded solely on donations. The team currently has 9 members from all over the globe, each passionately dedicated enough to spend countless hours on improving and expanding Vertcoin’s vision.

Anyone with an interest in the project is encouraged to donate or volunteer their time helping improve Vertcoin. The team works around the clock to ensure an open-source environment.

Challenges

The main challenge for Vertcoin has been keeping the platform ASIC resistant. They’ve had to fork twice to defend themselves against ASICs and ensure Vertcoin stays decentralized. This will surely continue to be Vertcoin’s biggest and most important challenge, since it’s the main reason they exist in the first place.

Another challenge has been marketing. Some have criticized the team for not being more aggressive in getting the word out there about Vertcoin. In the eyes of the Vertcoin team, however, they focus on growing the community organically instead of using “gimmicky marketing tactics.”

How to Purchase and Store Vertcoin

First, download the Vertcoin wallet from their website. There are versions available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Once you’ve done that, you can now send and receive Vertcoins ($VTC). Just obtain an address, which can be easily generated from any Vertcoin wallet. Vertcoin addresses always begin with a V and contain 26-36 alphanumeric characters.

After a transaction is made, funds should clear within 5 minutes. There is a small fee to help with the upkeep of the network.

The easiest way to purchase Vertcoin is with Bitcoin. Just trade Bitcoin for Vertcoin on one of these cryptocurrency exchanges:

English Markets: POLONIEX / BITTREX / BLEUTRADE / YOBIT

Chinese Markets: JUBI / 19800

Euro Markets: LITEBIT

Person-To-Person Trading: LOCAL VERTCOINS

Last Thoughts

It’s quite refreshing to see Vertcoin sticking to the original vision of why cryptocurrencies exist in the first place. Not to raise millions of dollars in ICO sales, not to create crazy hype for products that don’t even exist — but simply to put power in the users’ hands instead of intermediaries.

With Vertcoin, you can truly be your own bank.

And people are clearly taking interest: Vertcoin has increased in value a staggering 20,000% over the past year. The fact that it can be used by pretty much anyone is a huge appeal to the masses.

To get involved with Vertcoin and join the community, you can follow them on Twitter, check out their subreddit, and join the Discord channel.

Since the whole project is open source and anyone is allowed to join in on working on improvements, you can take a direct role in shaping the future of Vertcoin.