In epochs long gone, people bartered and traded services for goods, religious classes giving value to non-necessities in order to appease the gods and make themselves comfortable. This gave way to monarchs and kings, descendants of the gods, controlling the source of wealth by creating coins with their image and ensuring people used it, through force and laws. Through the ensuring time, Monarchies and theocracy gave way to democracy and despotic rule. The one constant variable being that currency was still being controlled by an entity, political, personal, ideological.
The predecessor to Bitcoin
Enter the 1980’s when David Chaum created the predecessor to Bitcoin, the first use cryptography to sign a transaction. 10 years later, Digicash emerged, the first digital version of cash, before bitcoin. Digicash promised anonymity but partially failed because it was not convenient. The lesson learned: Customers prefer convenience over privacy.
Move over to the mid-1990s to the early 2000s where E-gold at its popular height was used by over 1 million people. Its platform was built over micropayments which were worth tiny fractions of gold. One of its use was to send bloggers rewards, similar to how Brave Browser tipping works today. After reaching a market capitalization of over 2 billion USD, hackers started attacking users through Internet explorer and the centralized exchanges e-gold was being stored on. Eventually ending the project. Another lesson to learn from this: don’t leave your coins on exchanges. Or in modern crypto speech, not your keys, not your coins.
Enter Bitcoin. Learning from the previous attempts at creating the digital currency, the person (or collective) (not Craig Wright) behind Bitcoin allowed people using a peer to peer network, to validate transactions on a ledger. Bitcoin functions as the above projects, but uses a distributed ledger to validate all transactions, in order to keep it decentralized.
The open-source and anonymous nature of this system made it the first real currency for the internet age. Being built, by people worldwide, and changes voted on by peers, bitcoin is the first truly international currency not controlled by governments. Bitcoin spawned many offshoots, many of which forgets the lesson of the earlier projects. The major importance of Bitcoin, it is not owned and controlled by for-profit companies.
What is Verge?
Enter Verge Currency, a completely distributed fork of Bitcoin, Verge is being built as a digital currency, functioning on the cryptographic principles of Bitcoin, Verge provides location privacy through Tor and I2P, protecting users identity by allowing for anonymous wallet ownership. Improving on many blockchains, projects, Verge’s next-generation wallets hold user-friendliness as a primary function.
You can verify the iOS wallet here, or help out the Android version on GitHub here.
What makes Verge a great addition to the future of the cryptocurrency space, is that like bitcoin, it is open-source, the team are volunteers from around the world, and harness a global community of individuals, projects, and companies, helping them along the way.
The goal of the people contributing to the team, is as varied as their country of origins, of their background and goals. We all agree and disagree on various things, but we all agree on the fact that Verge is a Currency. We develop it for the purpose of a private self-own currency, where we encourage people to use the currency, as a replacement of fiat.
As many of Verge’s employees are internationals, living outside of our home countries, expats and immigrants, we understand that changing currencies for another is always costly, time-consuming and confusing. Having something like Verge with built-in privacy allows us to use one currency in many countries. And with hundreds of companies accepting Verge, from flights to entertainment, there is no reason why in the near future, people can live with Verge as a source of currency.
Because in the end, the goal is to remove power from one group/entity and to give back power to the people. Let the people decide what they want to spend on, whom they want to share it with. Why should your bank know that you go to McDonalds every Monday, after going to the gym? They shouldn’t. Verge is there for this, but also for the people trying to earn a living while their government makes terribly repressive decisions. Verge is a Currency, it is fast, it is publicly developed, the transactions are private.
For all of these described reasons, NOWPayments is happy to be supporting Verge and offering it for our clients to accept cryptocurrency in. Join us now, for a smooth and safe crypto experience!