Vertcoin is a decentralized currency owned by its users, a P2P cryptocurrency in the same vein as Bitcoin and Litecoin. Like its two predecessors, Vertcoin exists solely as a currency, and it uses proof of work to reach distributed consensus. Unlike its two predecessors, however, Vertcoin is dedicated to keeping its mining functions decentralized, so contrary to most PoW coins, it’s ASIC resistant. Branding their project as “The people’s coin,” Vertcoin’s team believes that ASIC resistance invites a fairer, more democratized currency for both users and miners. Along these lines, Vertcoin sports its very own 1-click miner, a program meant to make mining more accessible to the general public. The motivation of Vertcoin was the fact that Scrypt-based ASIC mining chip that is used to mine Scrypt derivative coins such as Litecoin and Dogecoin is entering the mass market. That coupled with strong mining pool causes the strength of a cryptocoin to drop as it becomes easier for a specific party to pull a 51% attack and even monopolize the network. Scrypt-Adaptive-Nfactor was created to address that issue. Vertcoin is zero premined and as of the current design, only 84 million coins would ever be created. Vertcoin is said to be the next generation of coins due to its unique hashing algorithm. There may be more altcoins created based on this hashing algorithm in order to defend their network against ASIC miners. Like most all pre-2015 coins, Vertcoin took a deathblow after Mt. Gox was hacked, throwing the entire market into a crypto winter. As such, it was relatively inactive until the revival last spring/summer. Since then, it has had steady climb up the market cap ladder. A 2014 International Business Times article mentions Vertcoin as a potential Bitcoin successor. The article notes that it ''hopes to offer an alternative. By taking the foundations of Bitcoin and making some adjustments, Vertcoin punishes miners who use powerful machines and work together in 'pools' to monopolise the mining market.'' On July 1, 2014, Vertcoin released a wallet supporting Stealth Address transactions. On December 13, 2014 (block 208301), Vertcoin forked from Scrypt-Adaptive-N proof-of-work function to Lyra2RE as a proactive defense against emerging Scrypt-Adaptive-N capable ASICs. On August 10, 2015 (block 347000), Vertcoin forked from Lyra2RE to Lyra2REv2 because a botnet was controlling more than 50% of the hashing power of Vertcoin network. On May 7, 2017, Segregated Witness (SegWit) feature was activated in the main network. SegWit update includes the Lightning Network technology that was also demonstrated in action during the same day.'
Mithril is a decentralized ecosystem on the ethereum blockchain. It is a system that rewards users who engage in “social mining”. Mithril rewards users for the impact their content may have in viewers and the popularity it attracts, such as number of likes and views. In the blockchain network and cryptocurrency, Mithril is a very innovative idea that aims to change the way we think about social media entirely. This particular innovation will decentralize and reward social media content creators in a fair and open way.The process of building a social media platform from the scratch is a long, rigorous and exhausting one. Even though blockchain based social media platforms are not new innovations, they usually cannot interact with existing platforms. The Mithril integration protocol permits MITH mining on all social media networks. Therefore, Mithril can also leverage existing sites for their own purposes. In addition, it permits content influencers to make use of their pre-existing followers network to mine Mithril. This acts as a big plus to the Mithril ecosystem. It requires less stress and work than establishing followers on an entirely new platform. It also helps Mithril to have an edge and a bigger pool of users. This means that, content providers only need to start making use of the Mithril integration protocol in order to make more money. Instead of an ICO, Mithril held a private crowdsale where 400,000,000 MITH was distributed and 50,000,000 was retained by the Mithril team for development and marketing. Mithril MITH tokens are mined by participating on partner applications and this social mining is a gamechanger. Creating and sharing content earns Mithril MITH, which can then be spent with partner applications. Because mythril is a crafting ingredient in the Final Fantasy video game series, online searches for how to spend MITH have these pages mixed in, which will likely continue for several years until the platform gains enough big-name retail spending partners to rise up SEO rankings. MITH is currently available on Bithumb and OKEx, but more exchanges will likely list the token soon. Although exchanges are never the best place to store your cryptocurrencies due to security concerns, this is one possibility. Better would be to store them using an ERC-20 wallet that allows you to add custom tokens, such as MyEtherWallet, MyCrypto, or Coinfy. Although the Mithril platform and its flagship social network Lit are still in fairly early development, as an early mover, they are poised to be a leader in the decentralized social networking space. If Mithril gets its way, centralized social networking companies may soon have worthy competitors that offer users more control of their data while rewarding people for creating the content that is ultimately the life-blood of all social networks.