Development Update #6
By: Marvin Piekarek
Tags: Development, Verge, Update, Architecture, Bitcoin

Rebased Codebase to v.0.17

Q: When can we expect Ledger support and possibly Exodus support for Verge?

A: We’re definitely working to support both in the near future.

Q: What is the current status on the Verge Debit card?

A: We are waiting on TokenPay’s team to fully implement support of debit cards to facilitate the use of Verge.

Q: Has the new codebase rebasing addressed the recent bitcoin core bug?

A: We already took our time to investigate this issue within our latest codebase and we came to the conclusion that we aren’t vulnerable to this kind of attack. As added security, we are going to include the bitcoin fix into our new codebase as well.

[Source: https://github.com/vergecurrency/VERGE/issues/811]

Q: How will Verge work with instant confirmations?

A: Blocks are being created every 30 seconds. The first confirmation is going to happen within about 5–15 seconds. With that being said we have an overall meantime of 15–30 seconds for a transaction to be verified. Sure there will be cases where you have to wait longer, but such “pains” from the industry/consumer market could also be addressed by using RSK. By having an intact contract being built between the “company” and the “customer”. We are continuously investigating this with RSK.

Q: What will happen when the last XVG is mined and how will Verge prepare for it?

A: So to clear this up real quick, let’s calculate when the last reward block will be produced:

Current block count: 2,525,849

Max rewards block: 4,248,000

Difference in blocks: 1,722,151

Difference for those block to be created:

1,722,151 delta-blocks * 30 secs/block

= 51,664,530 seconds

≈ 14,351 hours

≈ 597 days

≈ 1.6 year

As of now (23.09.18 / 8am CEST) the time amounts to one and a half years, which is needed to mine all reward bringing blocks, so there’s still a big time frame for us to find some valid solutions for Verge. We will investigate solutions for this in the future.

Q: What are the reasons for not implementing SegWit?

A: We simply don’t see the need for out-sourcing several parts of the block into a new one right now. You don’t have the expected block-time of 10 minutes per block like you have on bitcoin’s blockchain. We are currently creating one block each 30 seconds which solves a lot of problems in this area. Sure there’s also a limit for us, but I won’t bring up this entire “max-transaction-per-second”-calculation here. To conclude, there aren’t simply that many transaction being made within 30 seconds. And that’s why we don’t have to integrate “SegWit”.

[Source for more details: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0141.mediawiki]

Q: Do we follow defence in depth model on verge blockchain with security controls?

A: Well we now have a pretty stable defence in depth model, as every layer of our system is constantly checking most parts of requests/calls. we have made systems that are at times redundant to ensure security.

Q: Does anyone monitor the Verge blockchain for security issues?

A: It’s quite difficult to have a centralized monitoring tools, but we have one over at https://vergecurrency.network/ with the most important values directly fetched from a running blockchain node.

Q: How do we stop unauthorized access to Verge blockchain ?

A: Since Verge is a decentralized system, attackers will have a hard time trying to breach into accounts or master nodes, as these do not exist. If vulnerabilities are discovered, we fix them on the fly, as we are volunteers we don’t see everything, if you want to help, check out our github.

For reporting such vulnerabilities, please contact us: contact[at]vergecurrency.com

Once the codebase is released we will proactively schedule a security audit. Furthermore, core and volunteers are testing everything on an application level, but also on lower-level components.

Q: Will stealth addressing be available for Ledger Nano?

A: From a technical point it’s definitely possible for us to integrate stealth addressing into the Ledger core, but from a current standpoint we aren’t supporting this idea as the use-cases would be very restricted and most of the applications like the Ledger Live Wallet wouldn’t be able to support stealth addressing anyway. So you would have to type the stealth address directly from the Ledger wallet itself, which would require typing the stealth address in by hand allowing room for user errors in addresses.

TL;DR: From a current perspective no. Feel free to comment on that.