Voy a apartarme de la discusión genérica sobre las criptomonedas, y centrarme en una muy reciente controversia que ha llamado mi atención respecto a un altcoin en particular.

El enorme volumen comercial y más del 100% de los picos de precios en los últimos días atrajeron la atención del mundo a una criptomoneda de bajo costo que promete ser el próximo Bitcoin. La moneda de Verge o XVG ha superado a Bitcoin como el hashtag de tendencia de Twitter durante más de una semana.

Pero no es el comercio ni las tendencias lo que me interesa en este momento, sino más bien una controversia que se está desarrollando en torno a esta prometedora moneda digital.

Hice mi debida investigación y me eduqué sobre los aspectos técnicos de XVG, y lo que vi me pareció muy bueno. Trabajé como ingeniero de seguridad de desarrollo de software y poseo una amplia experiencia y conocimientos necesarios para comprender cosas que los inversionistas ordinarios no pueden entender, y me di cuenta de que XVG es realmente una muy buena moneda. Esto justificó las aparentes altas expectativas de la familia VERGE (vergefam). Sin embargo, tras varios días con enormes picos, algo extraño comenzó a suceder. Una campaña de FUD (miedo, incertidumbre y duda) comenzó a surgir ante mis ojos.

Pudo haber empezado antes, pero lo vi por primera vez cuando después de un gran aumento en el precio, una advertencia comenzó a correr por Internet. El rumor era que el desarrollador principal de Verge no se comunicó con el resto del equipo durante más de un mes y que el equipo de marketing abandonó.

El “denunciante bien intencionado” advirtió a las personas para que se deshicieran de la moneda, y en cuestión de horas, si no de minutos, otros comenzaron a compartir la despreciable advertencia. El rumor cobró fuerza cuando MarQuis Trill, twitteó el rumor como un hecho comprobado a más de 4 millones de sus seguidores.

Inmediatamente después, un montón de personas esencialmente anónimas comenzaron a propagar el rumor sin fundamento, y que más tarde se demostró que era falso, en todas las redes sociales como Twitter, Telegram, Facebook. El precio recibió un golpe de inmediato, pero MarQuis Trill posteriormente borró su tweet y afirmó que había sido pirateado.

Si todo terminara allí, la historia se acabaría, ¿verdad?

XVG se recuperó, pero tan pronto como lo hizo, otra persona apuntó sus armas hacia él. John McAfee, famoso experto en seguridad, que hace unas semanas alababa las monedas de privacidad, y que mencionó explícitamente a XVG en sus tweets y en entrevistas en Youtube, cambió repentinamente su tono. En uno de sus últimos tweets, en una respuesta a una pregunta de un inversionista sobre la posibilidad de que XVG subiera en los próximos 6 meses, respondió que posiblemente podría llegar a 15 $.

Ahora que cambió de opinión, afirmó que ese no era su tweet oficial, y que la captura de pantalla del tweet era falsa, sin embargo, mucha gente twitteó con las capturas de pantalla que tomaron ellos mismos, afirmando que efectivamente estaba en su Twitter oficial. Como lo haría el destino, un día negar que alguna vez dijo que Verge podría subir a 15 $ relativamente rápido, y luego negarlo, su cuenta oficial comenzó a emitir mensajes raros e incoherentes, recomendar ciertas monedas, luego retirarlas y cambiar la recomendación a otra moneda, luego hablando sobre la tercera moneda, luego hablando de estar drogado con algo y de poseer almas, y finalmente alegando que su cuenta de Twitter fue pirateada. Al igual que MarQuis Trill.

¿Eso es todo? No, en absoluto.

Hay mucho más en esta oscura saga de intriga.

VERGE ha sido criticada en los últimos dos días por todos y por cualquiera, o al menos alguien quiere que pienses así. Un conocido sitio web de criptomonedas comenzó una serie de artículos que hablaban acerca de que la privacidad de XVG no es tan fuerte como se alega, y transmitió la advertencia de sus colegas en otro sitio web conocido, para no confiar en Verge. También se refirió a las acusaciones de Internet de que el protocolo XVG Wraith (la parte responsable del anonimato) en realidad está filtrando las direcciones IP.

Ahora mis comentarios sobre estos artículos que denigran a XVG:

1. Todos los artículos están escritos de un modo que permite un repudio posterior del tipo “lo dijeron ellos, no nosotros”.

2. Los sitios web y el origen de los rumores no dieron ninguna prueba verificable real.

3. Todos parecen ser publicados tras varios días consecutivos de picos de precios del 100%, dentro de los últimos 4 o 5 días y, al menos para mí, parecen estar cuidadosamente sincronizados y coordinados.

4. Las afirmaciones sobre el protocolo Wraith relativas a la filtración de información parecen haberse realizado incluso antes de que el protocolo se publicara y se activara en la red. De hecho, mientras escribo estas líneas el protocolo todavía no está activo completamente. Dicho de otro modo, esto equivale a afirmar que en el iPhone 5s no funciona el escaneo de huellas dactilares supuestamente probándolo en el iPhone 4.

De hecho, parece existir una campaña bien coordinada y financiada, podría decirse, para destruir a Verge antes de que llegue a ser peligroso para alguien.

¿O tal vez ya lo es?

En realidad, para ser justos, uno de los sitios web ya se ha retractado.

Curiosamente, ciertas carteras XVG grandes están aumentando constantemente en tamaño, aparentemente sin inmutarse por la avalancha de noticias supuestamente malas sobre la moneda.

Ahora piénsalo…

Las personas que tienen mucho más dinero, influencia y experiencia en este juego están acaparando XVG como si no hubiera un mañana. Eso debería decirte algo, a menos que hayas vivido bajo una roca con respecto al mundo de los poderes.

Finalmente, parece que muchos inversores inocentes pero confundidos están contribuyendo involuntariamente a esta campaña FUD. El equipo de Verge hizo ciertas promesas de entrega que no se cumplieron, lo que contribuyó al pánico. Tampoco tomaron el control de la situación una vez que se desarrolló. Puedo entender su pensamiento, aunque no puedo justificarlo. Como desarrollador de software, entiendo muy bien que los programadores de núcleo duro generalmente se centran en el producto final, no en los clientes, o en este caso los inversores, y parecen seguir la máxima “Si lo construyes, vendrán” .

Los inversores ordinarios de criptomonedas no necesariamente entienden el proceso de desarrollo y están tratando de interpretar los signos reveladores lo mejor que pueden, y a menudo los malinterpretan.

Por ejemplo, me he dado cuenta de que mucha gente twittea y retwittea el estado de la versión más reciente del código Travis Verge como el signo del éxito o fracaso del esfuerzo de desarrollo.

Tienden a entrar en pánico cuando ven que la última versión falló en las tres plataformas (Windows, MacOS y Linux) y piensan que los desarrolladores han topado con una barricada, y respiran aliviados si ven luz verde confirmando una construcción exitosa.

El color rojo o verde de la construcción de Travis es completamente poco confiable para estimar cualquier cosa. Travis es una plataforma en línea para ejecutar compilaciones automáticas basadas en las últimas actualizaciones de GitHub (repositorio en línea de código fuente). Si bien puede ser muy útil, el entorno de compilación de Travis debe configurarse cuidadosamente para tener éxito. Los desarrolladores pueden haberlo configurado para la versión anterior, pero cuando se desarrolla una nueva versión, la configuración probablemente necesita ser actualizada para incluir nuevas bibliotecas, dependencias y directivas de compilación. Obviamente, el equipo de Verge no hizo eso, y si bien constantemente tenían construcciones exitosas en sus propias máquinas de desarrollo, la versión de Travis arrojaba inconsistentemente colores rojo y verde, dependiendo de qué código se actualizaba y compilaba. El equipo de desarrollo, que ha estado bajo una gran cantidad de estrés que puedo imaginar, probablemente esperaba que los inversores prefirieran ver el producto final pulido, probado y lanzado tan pronto como fuese posible, que perder un tiempo precioso en la reconfiguración del entorno de Travis. Probablemente una decisión equivocada. Podrían haberlo hecho, y deberían haberlo manejado mejor, ya que obviamente están siendo atacados y toda la desinformación podría haber sido muy eficazmente rechazada. Y no es que no hicieran nada. Intentaron comunicarse con los inversores, pero de forma desorganizada y muy dispersa. Tuve que examinar muchas plataformas de redes sociales como Discord, Reddit, Telegram, Twitter e incluso GutHub para obtener una imagen real y recopilar información de miembros legítimos del equipo, entre miles de tweets y retweets mal informados y engañosos.

Así que aquí estamos. Espero poder despejar la niebla un poco. El punto principal es que si vas a invertir en criptomonedas necesitas educarte y no seguir el oído.

Se puede ganar mucho dinero en criptomonedas, pero también se puede perder mucho. El dinero, sin embargo, no desaparecerá en el aire. Terminará en la billetera de otra persona. Alguien que sepa leer a través de FUD.

En cuanto a Verge (XVG). Es un caso de David luchando contra el Goliat. Puedo ver que los desarrolladores están de todo corazón en esto, trabajando día y noche.

Incluso las personas atraídas por el ruido están ayudando, como Eric Kryski, por ejemplo. Con un poco de suerte, prevalecerán y Verge podría ser el próximo Bitcoin, haciendo felices a muchos seguidores fieles (y ricos también).

 

I am going to depart from the generic discussion on the cryptocurrencies, and focus on the very recent controversy that caught my attention, regarding a particular altcoin.

The sheer trade volume and over 100% price spikes in the last several days brought attention of the world to an inexpensive cryptocurrency that promises to be the next Bitcoin. The Verge currency, or XVG has overtaken Bitcoin as the Twitter trending hashtag for over a week now.

But it is not the trading, nor the trending that is interesting to me at this point, but rather a controversy that is developing around this promising digital currency.

I have done my due diligence and got educated about the technical aspects of XVG, and what I saw was good. I worked as software development security engineer and have extensive experience and knowledge required to understand things that ordinary investors do not, and I realized that XVG is actually a very very good coin. It justified high expectations of the seemingly devout vergefam (or Verge family). But after a number of days with huge spikes, something strange started happening. A campaign of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) started to emerge before my eyes.

It may have started earlier, but I first saw it when after a huge spike in price, a stark warning started running circles on the Internet. The rumor was that the main developer for Verge did not communicate with the rest of the team for over a month and that the marketing team walked away. The “well intended whistleblower” warned people to dump the coin, and within hours, if not minutes, others started sharing the ominous warning. The rumor picked up steam when MarQuis Trill, twitted the rumor as a proven fact to over 4 million of his followers. Immediately after that, a whole bunch of essentially anonymous people started propagating the unsubstantiated, and later proven false, claim, on all social media like Twitter, Telegram, Facebook, as on the cue. The price took a hit immediately but MarQuis later deleted his tweet and claimed that he was hacked.

If it all ended there, the story would be over, right?

XVG recovered, but as soon as it did, another person aimed his guns at it. John McAfee, famous security expert, who just weeks ago was praising privacy coins, and who explicitly mentioned XVG in his tweets as well as in interviews on Youtube, suddenly changed his tune. In one of his earlier tweets, in an answer to a question by an investor, on the possibility of XVG going higher within the next 6 months, he replied that it could possibly go up to $15. Now that he had a change of heart, he claims that that was not his official tweet, and that the screenshot of the tweet was fake, yet many people have twitted back with the screenshots they took themselves, claiming that it was indeed on his official Twitter handle. As fate would have it, within a day of denying that he ever said that Verge could go to $15 relatively quickly, and then denying it, his official account started spewing weird and incoherent messages, recommending certain coins, then withdrawing it and changing the recommendation to another coin, then talking about the third coin, then talking about being high on something and about owning souls or something, and finally claiming that his Twitter account was hacked. Just like MarQuis Trill.

Is that all? No, not at all.
There is much more to this dark intrigue saga.

The Verge has been blasted in the past two days by everyone and anyone, or at least someone wants you to think so. A well known cryptocurrency web site started series of articles that allege that the XVG privacy is not as strong as claimed, and it relayed the warning from their colleagues at another well know web site, not to trust Verge with your life. It also referred to Internet allegations that XVG Wraith protocol (the part responsible for anonymity) is actually leaking IP addresses.

 

Now, here is the problem I have with these articles denigrating XVG.

1. All articles are written in a manner that allow later repudiation of the sort of “they said it, not us”.
2. No actual verifiable proof was given neither by those web sites nor by the source of the claims.
3. They all seem to be published after several succeeding days of 100% price spikes, within last 4 or 5 days and, to me at least, they seem to be carefully timed and coordinated.
4. The claims of Wraith protocol leaking information seem to have been made even before the protocol was actually released and activated on the network. As of this writing, the protocol has not been completely released and active. That amounts to claiming that iPhone 5s (the first model to introduce the feature) fingerprint scanning feature was not working by allegedly testing it on iPhone 4

There seems indeed to exist a well coordinated and funded I might say as well, campaign to destroy Verge before it becomes to dangerous to someone.
Or perhaps it already is?

Actually, to be fair, one of the web sites released a retraction

Interestingly enough, certain big XVG wallets are steadily increasing in size, seemingly unfazed by the onslaught of allegedly bad news about the coin. Now think about it. People who have much more money, clout, and experience in this game, then you or I can ever dream of, are hoarding XVG like there is no tomorrow. That should tell you something, unless you have been living under a rock with regards to the world of powers that be.

Finally, it seems that many innocent but confused investors are unwittingly contributing to this FUD campaign. The Verge team made certain delivery promises that were not kept, which contributed to the panic. They also failed to take control of the situation once it developed. I can understand their thinking, although cannot justify it. As a software developer myself, I understand full well that hard core coders are usually focused on the end product, not on the customers, or in this case investors, and they seem to follow the maxim “If you build it, they will come”. Ordinary cryptocurrency investors do not necessarily understand the development process and are trying to interpret the telltale signs the best they can, and often they misinterpret them. For example, I have noticed that many people tweet and retweet the status of the latest Travis build of the Verge code as the sign of the success or failure of the development effort. They tend to panic when they see that the latest build failed on all three platforms (Windows, MacOS and Linux) and think that the developers have hit a roadblock, and they breath a sigh of relief if they see green light confirming a successful build. The red or green color of the Travis build is completely unreliable to estimate anything. Travis is an online platform for running automated builds based on the latest updates from GitHub (online repository of source code). While it may be very useful, the Travis build environment has to be carefully configured in order to succeed. The developers might have configured it for the previous version, but when new version is developed, the configuration most likely needs to be updated to include new libraries, dependencies, compiler directives. The Verge team obviously did not do that, and while they were consistently having successful builds on their own development machines, the Travis build was inconsistently spewing red and green color, depending on what code was updated and compiled. The development team, who has been under huge amount of stress i can imagine, probably hoped that investors would rather see the end product polished, tested and released as soon as possible, than for them to waste precious time on reconfiguring Travis environment. Probably a wrong decision. They could have, and should have handled it better as obviously they are under attack and all the misinformation could have been very effectively repudiated. And it is not as if they did nothing. They did try to communicate to the investors, but in a disorganized, and highly scattered way. I had to sift through many different social media platforms like Discord, Reddit, Telegram, Twitter, and even GitHub to get the real picture and collect the information from legitimate members of the team, among literally thousands of misinformed and misleading tweets and retweets..

So, here we are. Hopefully I managed to clear up the fog a little bit. The main point is, if you are going to invest in cryptocurrency you need to get educated and not follow the heard. Lots of money can be made in cryptocurrency, but lots can be lost too. The money, however, will not disappear in thin air. It will end up in somebody else’s wallet. Somebody who knows how to read through FUD.

As for the Verge (XVG). It is a case of David fighting back against the Goliath. I can see that the developers are whole heartedly in this, working day and night to deliver. Even  people attracted by the noise are pitching in to help, as Eric Kryski for example. With a little luck, they will prevail and the Verge could just be the next Bitcoin, making many faithful followers happy (and rich too).

 

 

No, they are not.

Even though they are all based on the blockchain technology and use public key cryptography, there are certain technical aspects that differentiate one from another which add intrinsic value to the blockchain implementation and enables individual investors to make choice based on their personal needs and goals. I am not going to explain some technical aspects of individual cryptocurrencies, like encryption algorithms used, that do not necessarily make any valuable differentiation between the coins.

In no particular order, the differences pertain to

1. Maximum Supply – Unlike fiat money which can be printed at will in unlimited quantities virtually at no cost, the maximum supply of most coins is limited. That means that it is known in advance how many coins can ever be in existence. Common logic suggests that the lower number of coins there can be, the higher the value per individual coin it can possibly reach, but this is not necessarily directly correlated.
2.  Network Hashrate – In simple terms, the amount of time and computing power required for the network to mine a new coin and add it to the supply. Due to designed restrictions baked into the technology, as the time progresses it takes more and more time and computing power to mine new coins. Obviously, it costs money to produce digital coins, unlike fiat money. For example, at the time of writing of this blog, the cost of electricity, computing power and manpower to support it, to produce a single Bitcoin is about $1,000. The network hashrate is estimated in number of tera hashes per second (trillions of hashes per second) the network is performing.  See hashrate charts here
3. Speed – Each blockchain transaction requires multiple confirmations from different distributed nodes in the network, before the transaction record is considered valid. Each coin technology has different requirements for the number of confirmations, and the time needed for a single node to confirm the transaction differs as well. That means that from the moment you initiate the transaction, it may take from a couple of minutes to many hours for the transaction to be confirmed. obviously, this makes some coins to slow to be efficiently used in certain scenarios, like point of sale cases for example. Larger number of confirmations on the other hand increases the integrity of the transaction making certain coins more valuable as the store of value, rather than a daily use coin.
4. Transaction cost – Each blockchain transaction costs something, and the cost is usually calculated as a fraction of a coin. This cost also differs hugely between the coins. Some coins will charge you pennies for high value transactions, others will charge you considerably more.
5. Privacy – Even though many people will assume that the use of cryptographic technology automatically makes cryptocurrency transactions private, it is not so. Transaction records store information, like IP addresses, that can be used to trace the transaction to the parties involved. Actually, at this moment only a few altcoins provide privacy and untraceability.
6. Availablity – You cannot buy any altcoin directly for dollars or euros, unless of course you are dealing directly with a person who possess the digital coin. Most purchases are actually done on some of the exchanges. Some of them allow you to use dollars or euros to buy a only certain coins, and once you acquire them, you can use them as the means to purchase other altcoins. Not all exchanges list all coins either, so you may need to transfer your initial coins to an exchange that lists the altcoin you desire. Once you purchase the desired digital coin, you can keep it in your coin wallet on the exchange, or transfer it to a local wallet running on your desktop or laptop, your smartphone, or even to a hardware wallet, a device specifically designed to securely store your digital coins.
7. Acceptance – Once you posses the digital coins, you can choose to keep them in expectance of the increase in value, or you may need to use them to purchase things other than digital coins. You cannot just walk into any grocery store (at least not yet, but that is the goal) and use just any digital coin to purchase some items. Even the most accepted and well know coins are still not widely accepted in regular stores and businesses. However, that is changing literally on a daily bases. Just few days ago I have seen a real estate listing for a multi million dollar apartment in Trump building in South Florida.

 

 

In short, cryptocurrency is the future and if you chose to ignore it pretty soon you will become extinct like dinosaurs. Not to mention that you will fail to maintain and possibly increase your net value.

And I am serious about it.

Cryptocurrency is sometimes called digital money because it was invented to replace fiat money (currency without intrinsic value established as money by government regulation). It is is designed to use digital cryptography and Internet in order to be secure, easy to use and, in ideal case, anonymous.

The first cryptocurrency was Bitcoin, created in 2009 and considered by many to be digital gold, but many alternative digital coins (called altcoins) are giving it a good run for it’s money now.

How it all works, what differentiates different digital coins, can cryptocurrencies be trusted and and many other questions you might have, will be explained on this blog in simple terms.

Let the future begin.

The blockchain is an ingenious technological invention behind cryptocurrency based on public key cryptography, invented by an anonymous person or a group of people going by pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.

Essentially it is an incorruptible distributed digital ledger of economic transactions, hosted by numerous Internet nodes, located globally. The block chain (now called blockchain) is a series of linked and timestamped data records, forming the “chain”.

The technology requires both, the sending and the receiving party to poses a pair of cryptographic keys. An unpredictable (typically large and random) number is used to begin generation of an acceptable pair of keys suitable for use by an asymmetric key algorithm. In an asymmetric key encryption scheme, anyone can encrypt messages using the public key, but only the holder of the paired private key can decrypt. As its name suggests, the public key is disclosed to everyone. Needles to say, the private key must not be disclosed to the public.

To create a transaction, the initiating party creates a hash of the previous transaction which is recorded in the ledger and the public key of the receiving party is used by the signer, along with the private key of the signer to encrypt the record. This mechanism, along with the distributed nature of the chain and the requirement that the record be confirmed by multiple nodes, brings everyone to the highest degree of accountability.

Interestingly, the blockchain technology is not actually limited to cryptocurrencies only, but is so versatile that it can be used to record anything of value. It literally opened the pandora’s box of all kinds of new industries based on it. It opened up a new future that was unimaginable just a decade ago.

Some of the characteristics of blockchain that make it so valuable are:

1. It is not controlled by any single entity.
2. It has no single point of failure.
3. Transactions recorded are transparent and verified by multiple nodes (though the transaction information may be opaque, thanks to additional advancements in technology)
4. The ledger is virtually incorruptible as the attacker would essentially have to use incredible amount of computing power in order to take control of the whole network and be able to change any data.