What is Vertcoin and what is the Vertcoin price?

Vertcoin (VTC) is a cryptocurrency that was created to make mining cryptocurrency accessible to everyone. Vertcoin is similar to litecoin and bitcoin, however, Vertcoin’s consensus algorithm makes mining VTC ASIC-resistant.

Mining on the Bitcoin network started as something that everyone could do; if a person wanted to mine cryptocurrency, all they had to do was turn on their CPU and run a mining client.

However, as more and more people began mining cryptocurrency, the mining difficulty on the Bitcoin network increased, requiring miners to continually upgrade or purchase new mining hardware to keep pace with the network and its mining-meta.

Unfortunately, as mining became more difficult and required modern hardware to stand a chance at solving blocks, many individuals could no longer compete with deep pockets who were able to upgrade, purchase, and build expensive mining rigs, or in some cases, create mining farms consisting of tens of thousands of mining rigs.

As the complexity and competition in cryptocurrency mining increases, there is a concern that mining power (which is critical in keeping distributed, permissionless networks open) will become consolidated and be under the control of only the largest mining operations.

The result would be the kind of centralization and monopolistic network control that cryptocurrencies set out to disrupt in the first place.

That’s where Vertcoin comes in. The Vertcoin blockchain is designed to resist the consolidation of mining power in an effort to stay decentralized and easily minable by pretty standard consumer hardware.

In order to help support the effort to keep mining open and accessible, the vertcoin development community created something called the “one-click miner.” Essentially, the “one-click miner” is downloadable software that works with the graphics card found on a Windows computer.

The price of Vertcoin, like many other cryptocurrencies, has varied widely in its lifetime. The coin first launched in January of 2014 and reached an all-time high in December of 2017 when the price of one vertcoin reached $9.80.

The Vertcoin Network

Other than the features relating to mining, Vertcoin is structurally similar to Bitcoin and Litecoin. Regarding use-cases, vertcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

Unlike many of the other altcoins that exist, Vertcoin did not have an ICO, airdrop, or pre-mine. The reason for this is because the team at vertcoin did not want to give any group of individuals an advantage by giving them access to VTC before the general public received access to the coin.

The average block time on the Vertcoin network is 2.5 minutes, and the current block reward is 25 Vertcoin per block (it was initially 50 VTC per block, but the network experienced it’s first halving on December 11, 2017 — the VTC reward halves every 840,000 blocks).

Why Vertcoin?

Mining cryptocurrency has become expensive for many. Even if you own the best mining rig on the market, only running one mining rig is typically is not enough for you to make a profit due to the cost of electricity, the low probability that you have of solving the block, and the fraction of the reward you would receive if you were part of a cryptocurrency mining pool.

The cost of electricity and the mining difficulty only make it possible to profitably mine cryptocurrency if you own a high powered mining rig, are part of a cryptocurrency mining pool, or have a stake in a mining farm — or a combination of all three. For that reason, mining has become an activity that only those with the necessary physical and financial resources can participate in. And since those with more wealth have a better chance at accumulating hash power and solving a block, in some cases, mining has become a somewhat centralized activity where a majority of the hash power dedicated to a network is divided among a handful of entities.

So in an attempt to solve these problems, Vertcoin has a protocol in place that makes it difficult for ASIC miners and mining pools to reap rewards, which gives more people a chance to profitably mine cryptocurrency with GPUs and CPUs.