Vertcoin (VTC)

Basics

“Bitcoin Upgraded. Feature rich with special attention to privacy and permanent decentralization.“
“ASICs, highly specialized computers, have put the power to mine cryptocurrencies in fewer peoples’ hands. This centralization of power weakens the security of the coin and may impact the long term value. Vertcoin is wholly dedicated to decentralization through meaningful innovation.”
Not particularly innovative or interesting. But always relevant because of one reason: more so than any other currency, its asic proof. There is theoretically no such thing. But VTC has a social promise, whenever asic’s are developed they will fork and change the algorithm. It has happened, and they were four months late with forking but in the end they did.

Tech

Block time: 2.5 minutes
Block Rewards: 50 coins per block
Subsidy halves every 840,000 blocks (~4 years)
Difficulty Re-Target Time: Re Targets every block (Kimoto’s Gravity Well)
No premined
Mineable (has one mystery miner who controls 30% of the hashrate)

51% attacks

Had quite a lot of problems with 51% attacks in late 2018. "According to recently published data, the vertcoin chain has experienced over 22 reorgs and has lost more than $100,000 due to the attacks, with the last reorg clocking in at over 300 blocks deep."
"After that attack, Vertcoin switched its proof-of-work algorithm to one called Lyra2REv3."
Suffered (2-12-2019) its second 51-percent attack in a year:

"The incident saw 603 genuine blocks on the Vertcoin main blockchain replaced with 553 blocks written by the attacker, according to the project's lead maintainer, James Lovejoy, in a GitHub notice. Occurring on Sunday, Dec. 1, the blockchain reorganization caused five "double spends" to the value of 125 vertcoin (VTC) worth approximately $29.

"Each of the double-spent outputs are coinbase outputs owned by the attacker and it is unknown to whom the coins were originally sent before being swept to an attacker address after the reorg," Lovejoy said. "On Nov 30th 2019, a Vertcoin miner noticed a large upswing in hashrate rental prices for Lyra2REv3 on Nicehash. This was combined with workers connected to Nicehash's stratum server being sent work for unknown (non-public) Vertcoin blocks. I contacted Bittrex, Vertcoin's most prominent exchange, to recommend they disable the Vertcoin wallet on their platform once it became clear an attack was in progress, which they subsequently did." Why Vertcoin was attacked again is unclear. Lovejoy said it would not have been profitable based on miners' block rewards alone. He suggested Bittrex may have been target, but the exchange disabling its Vertcoin wallet may have prevented more double spends."

Team, etc.

The dev are part timers. Some former dev are now on zcash team.
Bushido; founder, worked for Accenture and Microsoft as developer
“Etang600”, developer and project manager
Jk_14; created the Vertcoin Android wallet and he authored the GNU/Linux distribution for mining called KopiemTu. He has been involved in cryptocurrency since 2013 and started MobileCash, a coin that is merge-mineable with Vertcoin.
James Lovejoy, Jamesl22; James is the lead developer of Vertcoin and has been programming in one form or another since age 10. He currently is an undergraduate researcher at the MIT DCI, working on enacting decentralized monetary policy.